The last days of Socrates - Plato

All we know about Socrates was handed down to us by his pupil Plato - one of the most important western philosophers - as we have already seen when talking about the Symposium.
In this book Plato tells us about the end of Socrates' life: his trial, his imprisonment and his death by poisoning (not really a suicide, as this was actually the court sentence).
Socrates typical argumentative method is exemplified in four different sections.

De profundis and other writings - Oscar Wilde

De profundis is a letter that Wilde wrote to his former friend Bosie while serving his sentence at Reading jail.
It's a long, beautiful and very sorrowful text where the author tries to explain the sequence of events that lead to his imprisonment, what his friend's responsibilities were and what mistakes he himself made (mostly out of weakness and kindness, in his opinion).

The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma - Thant Myint-U

The author of this book is an American writer of Burmese descent. His grandfather was a colleague and close friend of the heroes of Burmese independence and the Secretary-general of the UN from 1962 to 1971. Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was a frequent guest at his family's house in New York, before the 1988 uprising.

Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer - Friedrich Nietzsche

Another book against traditional morals by F.W. Nietzsche. This means a book against traditional religions and philosophy, as they have put forward a supposedly "real" world, accessible through reason or faith, as opposed to the "false" world offered by the senses.
This is a mystification. Morals tend to inhibit passion in order to avoid all possible negative consequences. The mistake lies in trying to extirpate passions rather then spiritualize them. Morals should help human life by removing any obstacles to happiness and free expression of natural instincts. Yet, they do exactly the opposite: they oppose life, instincts and the senses.

The Antichrist - Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Let's start by stating that this is not a book against Jesus Christ, meaning the historical person, the religious prophet or the revolutionary philosopher. This is definitely a very harsh criticism of Christianity, the Christian church and its founding fathers (the Apostles, Paul of Tarsus, the Popes, the priests), of its roots planted in a corrupt version of Judaism (corrupt when compared with the original form of it) and of the German Lutheran reformation.
One might not agree with Nietzsche's conclusions, judgments, opinions and some creative historical interpretations, which I do find extremely fascinating and often very convincing, at least much more convincing than most of the orthodox ones - the idea that the Greco-Roman tradition was bled by Christianity from inside (as opposed to destroyed by a natural catastrophe or a military invasion), that the middle age crusades did contribute to obliterate the advanced Moorish civilization in Spain and that the German Lutheran reformation did a similar thing to the Italian Renaissance cultural-revolutionary movement, is a brilliant historical intuition.

The wild iris - Louise Glück

What might at first seem a sequence
of conversations of a mad voice
with singular, plural, material
and imagined listeners,
suddenly becomes clear
and beautiful as well,
when you finally understand
the underlining pattern.
The book starts when spring begins
and ends when summer finishes.

In praise of sincerity - Montesquieu

In this little book, as the title suggests, Montesquieu praises sincerity as a virtue. This is done at two different levels.
In private life sincerity is advised as opposed to indulgence. A real and useful friendship should always be based on absolute honesty, even when this leads to conflicts with personal pride, or especially when that happens.

On the passion of love - Blaise Pascal

In this short treaty, Blaise Pascal - who for the most part of his life worked as a scientist - expounds his views about love and passion. He tries to point out the relation of these feelings with all the other aspects of life.

Nobel prize for literature awarded to Han Kang

Han Kang, a female Korean writer, was just awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. This is what I wrote down after reading some of her works a couple of years ago.

Convalescence, Human acts, The vegetarian - Han Kang

The spice-box of the earth - Leonard Cohen

As in Let us compare mythologies, in this collection Cohen also alternates Garcia Lorca's style inspired poems - assemblies of images, sounds and loosely connected symbols - and other compositions that can be more clearly paraphrased and literally interpreted, with an explicit message. Those of the second type might be slightly more numerous, while the style of the first batch is even more mature and inspiring than in the previous book.

Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of smoke, Flood of fire) - Amitav Gosh

I first read a book by Amitav Gosh more than twenty years ago, during my first trip to Myanmar, when two Italian ladies on a boat ride along the Irrawaddy river gave me a copy of a short story collection by this Indian master. A few years later I got to admire his talent after reading "The glass palace" and since then I've read anything by him I've happened to come across.

Haiku - Various authors

Haiku used to be the name of the first stanza of the Japanese ancient poems. It finally became itself a literary category. The shortest form of poetry, a haiku is always composed of three verses: five, seven and five syllables each.

I'm calling the police - Irvin D. Yalom

This is a very short autobiographical story about a Jewish friend of the author who managed to escape the Nazis and flee from Budapest to the USA when he was only 17 years old, by himself, with basically no money, no contacts and no knowledge of the English language. And who then went on to become a top-skilled, world-famous heart surgeon.

Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters

This is one of the most famous books of 20th century American poetry.
Unlike the previously reviewed Poet in New York by Garcia Lorca and Let us compare mythologies by Leonard Cohen, most of Masters' poems can be easily paraphrased. The text always tends to "mean" something easily understandable by the reader.

Cinema speculation - Quentin Tarantino

We all like to watch movies. And most of us, those I know at least, love Quentin Tarantino. Quentin Tarantino the film director, I mean. We've also had plenty of opportunities to enjoy his skills as a screenplay author, as basically all the movies he directed are based on his own scripts.
Few of us might actually know him as a full-fledged writer though. I mean fiction and non-fiction writer. However, he has already published at least two books. One is a novelization of his big hit "Once upon a time in Hollywood", which I haven't read yet. And the other is the subject of this post: a collection of "free-style" movie reviews, which might be better termed as essays.

Let us compare mythologies - Leonard Cohen

Most people, including myself until recently, know Leonard Cohen as the deep&warm-voiced singer and songwriter of beautiful folk songs, the most famous one being "Hallelujah".
Before switching to music, though, he began his artistic career as a novel writer and poet (even after he started singing he remained horrified of performing in public for a long time).

Poet in New York - Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca died young, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, probably killed by the falangists, either for being homosexual or socialist or both, or else for more private reasons. Nobody knows for sure.
A few years earlier, between 1929 and 1930, he traveled to the American continent, spending time in New York, Vermont and finally in Cuba, before returning to Europe. He managed to witness the '29 Wall Street crisis, therefore experiencing both the excesses that predated it and the desperate times that followed it. He wrote this collection of poems during those months.

The flowers of evil (Les fleurs du mal) - Charles Baudelaire

This collection of poems by the epitome of the Poètes Maudits has inspired generations. Baudelaire was the first great poet to make an extensive, almost morbid use of sex, alcohol, drugs and death as the main themes of his work.

Fervor de Buenos Aires - Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is an outstanding South American author. This is a collection of poems in praise of his hometown, the capital city of Argentina, Buenos Aires.
Unlike other works about the city, this doesn't deal with the usual (stereotypical) topics such as the port districts, tango, Italian and Spanish heritage.

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future - Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche's work, unlike Plato's Symposium, does not read like a story, with a plot, characters, action and dialog. It's a collection of anectodes, philosofical thoughts, not necessarily easy to grasp and sometimes quite contradictory.