There’s a quote by Alice Walker that I love: “When I was a child, I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.” 2020 was a year when I reached for the lifeboats more often than usual, and they didn’t fail me. Sometimes I went searching for context on pressing issues like pandemics, racial oppression… Read More
This is a useful overview of the history of Serbia, starting in neolithic times and going right through to the present (it was published in 2018). The book starts by describing the early inhabitants of the territory now known as Serbia, including the surprising fact that it produced 15 Roman emperors, more than the city of Rome itself. Then we… Read More
Here’s a quick roundup of some good books I read this month, featuring Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Tyler and more.
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After my quick trip to the UK last month, I’m back in Belgrade again. We made a few stops on our drive back across Europe, but it’s really not a good time to be travelling. It was, nevertheless, a great time to spend a couple of hours strolling around Venice with no crowds. Here’s the Piazza San Marco as you’ve… Read More
In Children of the Cave, Finnish writer Virve Sammalkorpi imagines an encounter between a group of explorers and some strange creatures living in a cave in the remote forests of northern Russia that look like animals but also have some very human characteristics.
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The COVID-19 lockdown here in Belgrade was very strict in March and April, but this month it ended, and things are more or less back to normal now. The cafes, shops and restaurants are all open again, and there’s rarely a mask to be seen. Everyone seems to have decided the pandemic is over, and so far the numbers are… Read More
In a short time, I’ve gone from travelling full-time to being under strict lockdown in a Belgrade apartment. Perhaps that’s why I’ve spent the month travelling through the world of books, from the Russian wilderness to a still-divided Germany and from the Balkans to the UK’s “hostile environment”—with a couple of side trips to Jamaica thrown in.
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In the Name of Truth by Swedish writer Viveca Sten is a well-plotted, intriguing crime novel whose central event is the disappearance of an eleven-year-old boy from a sailing camp on a sandy island in the Stockholm Archipelago.
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Overall, it was a very good month of reading for me. Books, as usual, were the lifeboats I ran for when things got tough outside.
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