by Italo Calvino (1972)

2025 reads, 5/25:

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

A reread of one of my favorites. My wife gifted me the beautiful Folio Society edition of this book for Christmas, and only having read it on Kindle, I immediately wanted to experience all its literary and descriptive glory on the physical page. My appreciation for Invisible Cities has grown since I first read it a couple years ago, as I find myself thinking about it now and again, rereading certain passages just for the sheer brilliance of the descriptions. But this being my second full time around, I not only gain a deeper appreciation of Calvino’s prose, but how Invisible Cities fits into the world we live in today.

For the uninitiated, Invisible Cities is a novel that contains fifty-five poetic descriptions of different cities, interspersed throughout a conversation between world-class explorer Marco Polo and the great emperor Kublai Khan, who wishes to know more about his empire. And although it is outright said in one of their conversations, I'm not sure I subscribe to the notion that Marco Polo is describing Venice in different ways.

“No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other, there is a connection.”

I could see Calvino using different viewpoints of Venice as an inspiration for some of these cities (a subtle but important difference). But who’s to say that these descriptions can’t describe other cities? I could see Despina (Cities and Desire 3) as a physical representation of San Francisco. Valdrada (Cities and Eyes 1) could represent Cleveland, or any city on a lake, or even any city that makes you feel like you’re being watched. And Zaira (Cities and Memories 3) reminds me of visiting my hometown years after moving away. But these are just my interpretations, based on memories and experiences of cities I’ve been to.

And many of these descriptions are not even about cities themselves, but how people see cities, how people see themselves, even how people see each other. By 2050, the United Nations estimates that over two-thirds of the world's population will live in a city, and since the best cities are a collection of diverse citizens, I could see an interpretation where a person who desires sees a city differently than a person with memory, or a person towards the beginning or end of their life – we all perceive in different ways. Yes, one could say all of these cities describe Venice. But I’ll extrapolate that a bit – why just Venice? Why not take thirty different people from New York, Tokyo, São Paulo, or Beirut? Ask them to describe where they live, and even within the same city you’ll find incredibly different views. A city, a home, is what you make of it.

“So the garden remained a shapeless waste, until the benevolent tsar, passing by one day, glanced at it by chance, and ordered them to tell him what kind of garden it was.”

In M83’s “Midnight City” he sings

“the city is my church it wraps me in its blinding twilight”

– and who, at times, hasn’t felt the religious allure to skyscrapers, sidewalks, alleyways, lights, walkability, and community. Invisible Cities explores this, through memories, through trade, through love and fear, through death. This is within my top five books of all time – it’s that good. If you decide to read it and succumb to the imagination of Calvino and all these fantastical cities, I hope you share my love for it.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

#readingyear2025 #fantasy #favorites #italian

by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (1972)

2024 reads, 23/22:

“Over the pile of ancient trash, over the colorful rags and broken glass, drifts a tremor, a vibration, just like the hot air above a tin roof at noon; it floats over the mound and continues, cuts across our path right beside a marker, lingers over the road, waits for half a second—or am I just imagining that? —and slithers into the field, over the bushes, over the rotten fences, toward the old car graveyard.”

I acknowledge that recency bias may be talking here, but – did I just read one of my favorite science fiction books so far?

Science fiction is and has always been about humans in the face of progress, whether forward or backward. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? muses on what it means to be a human. Neuromancer toys with the concept of losing our humanity, and our world, to technology. The Three-Body Problem and its trilogy has humanity rallying together (and splitting apart) in the face of adversity. Even the Hitchhiker’s Guide series has humanity face the ultimate absurdity: itself.

Roadside Picnic continues this pattern of humanity facing itself, and does so extremely well. Short summary: in the wake of an alien visit, multiple “zones” are left around the surface of the earth. These zones are subject to unexplainable physics, rare artifacts, and dangers beyond our comprehension. Furthermore, these zones are illegal to enter. A subclass of criminals called “stalkers” sneak into these zones to retrieve precious objects that can be sold on the black market (and yes, this is the book that inspired Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker).

The premise seems simple, but remember, science fiction is about us. The novel starts ten years or so after “the Visit,” and humanity is no step closer to knowing anything about it – it’s just humans and the Zone. Instead of an alien invasion story, the Strugatskys weave together a novella with philosophical deliberations, fairy tales, and horrific alien technology.

“I lock myself in the stall, take out the flask, unscrew it, and attach myself to it like a leech. I’m sitting on the bench, my heart is empty, my head is empty, my soul is empty, gulping down the hard stuff like water. Alive. I got out. The Zone let me out. The damned hag. My lifeblood. Traitorous bitch. Alive. The novices can’t understand this. No one but a stalker can understand.”

The main character, stalker Red Schuhart, is in my opinion one of the greatest characters ever written. Outside of the Zone, with absolutely no care in the world, he is aloof and hot-headed, careless and an alcoholic. But his skills and concentration in the Zone are unmatched: you feel his focus narrow, his conniving nature, and know that he will stop at nothing to get through this mysterious area. As I write this, I can see how this book may have inspired Annihilation by VanderMeer.

What better way to show how insignificant we are than to have an entire story revolve around the aftermath of a short-lived alien visit. The ending is one of the most bittersweet, and I’ve been thinking about it since I’ve read it. This is a sci-fi classic, and it’s short enough such that I recommend it to anyone even remotely interested.

“Aren’t humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. The way children like ice cream. It’s an inferiority complex, that’s what it is. Praise assuages our insecurities. And ridiculously so. How could I rise in my own opinion?”

#readingyear2024 #scifi #dystopia #book2screen #favorites

by Clarice Lispector (1973)

2024 reads, 5/22

“This text that I give you is not to be seen close up: it gains its secret previously invisible roundness when seen from a high-flying plane. Then you can divine the play of islands and see the channels and seas. Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language. I’m not transmitting to you a story but just words that live from sound.”

Água Viva seems to delicately straddle the line between novella, poetry, meditation, conversation, and monologue. It’s pretty short, but don’t let the page count fool you – I had to reread multiple passages to even attempt an understanding of her words. But if you break through her prose, you are treated with a linguistic tour de force of a novel.

“Every once in a while I’ll give you a light story— melodic and cantabile area to break up this string quartet of mine: a figurative interval to open a clearing in my nourishing jungle.”

As far as I’m aware, Água Viva is the only title of Lispector’s that isn’t translated from Portuguese. There seems to be no good translation; it can literally translate to “jellyfish,” but “stream of life,” “running water,” or even “where all flows” are better approximations. My favorite of these is “running water,” since the narrator seems to bubble up this stream-of-consciousness of never-ending thoughts. It’s filled with metaphors, fourth wall breaks, and beautiful imagery of the human condition – sometimes it’s even a bit discomforting.

Is there a plot? Not really. The most I could surmise about the narrator was that they were an artist, maybe a painter or musician, now attempting writing: the experience of writing itself, its relation to other arts, and life. This writing can be distant and seemingly cryptic. But imagery revolving around the natural world is explored as well, such as the passage where the narrator personifies different types of flowers. It’s these passages that feel like the narrator is Lispector herself – and I believe it’s her way of grounding her cosmic language with us.

“I’m going to make an adagio. Read slowly and with peace. It’s a wide fresco.”

How cool was that? The musical metaphor almost immediately morphed into an artistic metaphor – this type of contorting language is used often. It displaced me at first. But the moments where she seems disconnected from us, where she reaches the depths of the human condition (recalling de profundis, if you’ve read Near to the Wild Heart), are equally balanced by moments of direct language: we are reprieved, for the time being. The oscillation between her shallow and intense prose is yet another representation of this running water, this breathing of language, this água viva.

“For now there’s dialogue with you. Then it will be monologue. Then the silence. I know that there will be an order.”

Lispector has slowly but surely climbed her way among my favorite authors with this one. Infinitely returnable and emotionally unfiltered, there’s always something new to discover in each reread. If you’re looking for something different, give Água Viva a chance. Analyze it in depth, or let the words wash over you: you’ll be rewarded either way.

“Today I finished the canvas I told you about: curves that intersect in fine black lines, and you, with your habit of wanting to know why— I’m not interested in that, the cause is past matter—will ask me why the fine black lines? because of the same secret that now makes me write as if to you, writing something round and rolled up and warm, but sometimes cold as the fresh instants, the water of an ever-trembling stream. Can what I painted on this canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical sound.”

Addendum: A similar experience to reading this would be listening to Tim Hecker’s ambient album Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again in full; it’s a perfect pairing. Both are meditative and thought-provoking, seasoned with a slight lingering discomfort throughout.

#readingyear2024 #favorites #philosophy #wtf #physicallyowned #lispector

by Italo Calvino (1972)

2023 reads, 1/12:

“I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains: a glass tank high as a cathedral so people can follow the swimming and flying of the swallow fish and draw auguries from them; a palm tree which plays the harp with its fronds in the wind; a square with a horseshoe marble table around it, a marble tablecloth, set with foods and beverages also of marble.”

Magical realism abounds in this 1972 novel (collection?) from Italo Calvino, an author that has been on my radar for a long time. These are not short stories, but rather a collection of descriptions of imaginary cities that explorer Marco Polo is describing to the emperor Kublai Khan. Although they do not speak the same language, this is a nonissue, because Marco Polo uses dances, objects, and visualizations to describe the cities to Khan. Their relationship (which we learn more about during the interludes) is one based off of understanding one another with unspoken words.

But to us readers, however, Calvino utilizes the perfect mix of vivid imagery (to describe the physical features of cities) and storytelling of the people, spirits, and culture that make up these cities. To me, this is a master craft on visualization, and I cannot recommend it enough – 2023 is starting off strong.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

BONUS: some of my favorite cities include (and this list does not give any justice to the descriptions in the book):

• Zaira (Cities and Memory 3), a city that does not measure physical space, but “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”
• Despina (Cities and Desire 3), a city which can be reached by either ocean or desert, and depending on where you enter, you always desire the other side (a perfect metaphor for ‘the grass is always greener’)
• Euphemia (Trading Cities 1), a city which sets up a trading bazaar to not only trade wares, but memories of each other’s lives
• Adelma (Cities and The Dead 2), a city where everyone you meet resembles someone that you knew before they died

#readingyear2023 #fantasy #favorites #italian

by William Gibson (1984)

2022 reads, 15/20:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Everyone quotes that opening line, and for good reason – it’s extremely well-written, it evokes this constant mood of despair, and it sets the tone perfectly for the whole rest of the novel. Henry Case, a data thief, gets called upon to do a job for an unknown boss, undergoing surgery to get his ability to upload into cyberspace back after a previous employer crippled him.

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . .”

Many criticize Gibson’s writing style, though I quite enjoyed it, and don’t think it’s as jarring as others make it out to be. Gibson works in short bursts, quickly switching from one scene to another (which makes sense sometimes, as this is how Case experiences things). But it’s not action-packed all of the time, as there are many atmospheric passages that describe both the real and virtual world that Case finds himself in.

That mood of despair I mentioned is an integral part of the cyberpunk genre. I find that many love to explore the ‘cyber,’ but the ‘punk’ usually gets left behind. Not in this novel – images of the grimy underworld and streets, contrasted with the uncomfortable endlessness of ‘the matrix,’ perfectly capture this dichotomy in cyberpunk.

“Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine. Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name pain is given.”

If The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the sci-fi book I wanted, then Neuromancer was the sci-fi book I needed, as it was probably one of my favorites this year. This seminal novel paved the way for other cyberpunk works – highly recommended.

#readingyear2022 #dystopia #favorites #physicallyowned #scifi

by Thomas Pynchon (1966)

2022 reads, 7/20:

I can honestly say I’ve never read anything like this in my life, definitely one of the best pieces of American literature I’ve read in a long time. The style of writing, and imagery that is conjured up by said style, is spectacular. That said, I also understand that this book’s writing style is not for everybody. If you prefer coherent storylines with plot and subplot resolutions, this book does not offer that. However, I still recommend it just to get a feel for its unique style of writing.

“At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did.”

The story itself is actually fairly simple: our main character, Oedipa Maas, becomes executrix of her former rich boyfriend’s estate, and in the process of settling these affairs, seems to uncover a conspiracy against her. But the real treat of this book, as mentioned before, is the writing and imagery of a 1950s southern California town (aptly named San Narciso). This writing style was one of the first things I noticed (and ended up really enjoying).

To me, he writes how we think. Now I can’t speak for everybody, but I feel that humans think in fragments of time, cutting from one scene in our minds immediately to the next, no transition, just pure thoughts. Similarly, in this book, we the reader are taken to one place, and then when you least expect it, we are suddenly ripped away and placed in a new location, possibly days later, in the next sentence. At first, seeing this type of writing on paper is daunting and off-putting, but I ended up really enjoying it (some have described it as beat-poetry like, which I also agree with).

“San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence.”

#readingyear2022 #favorites #physicallyowned #postmodern #pynchon

by Albert Camus (1942)

It seems odd to review The Stranger only now, since I finished this book months ago. But this review has been sitting in a word document on my desktop this whole time, and all this time has helped me compile and organize my thoughts. In my review of Kafka’s The Trial, I mentioned how the absurdity lies mainly within the relationship between the main character and the elusive governing body that is accusing him. In The Stranger, it seems like the absurdity now exists between the main character, Meursault, and a plethora of social norms, all portrayed by different characters. Death (his mother), marriage (Marie), friendships (Raymond, Salamano, Masson), and religion (the pastor) are all life experiences that Meursault is confronted with. And what I saw a lot of in The Stranger was Meursault’s conflict with a society who viewed him as someone who did not abide by these norms.

But I even hesitate to call this a conflict, because Meursault seems at peace with himself throughout the book. Maybe it’s one sided? He may be scared or upset sometimes, but he never doubts what he believes. And this (to me) is the main theme of the book and Camus’s philosophy – Meursault is ‘free’ in this sense, and by accepting that these different experiences are meaningless to him, he is not bound to any sort of ground truth (by religion or other means) and is free to create his own meaning in his life.

This sounds great, but this line of thinking doesn’t come without conflict. The other characters do not share his views, and the conversations between Meursault and the pastor (one of the best dialogues I’ve read) perfectly exemplifies this. The pastor seems to be saying what everyone around him was thinking when presented with Meursault’s odd way of life.

This was one of my favorite books this year, and I would recommend to anyone wanting to either step more into the philosophical side of fiction or just read a modern(ish?) classic without being intimidated by a large page count.

#readingyear2021 #absurdism #favorites