Vacation books

Intersemestrial vacation. Reading time ahead!

 Well, not really as I have scheduled every activity from my vacation according to my list obsessive pattern, but also according to the needs of really meeting every deadline that's winking at me arrogantly.

Nevertheless, I managed to read two books so far and I enjoyed both of them immensely.

The first one, Last Comes the Raven  belongs to my beloved Italo Calvino. It was originally published in 1949 and comprises a series of 30 short stories, each 3-7 pages long. What it amazing about these short stories is their ability to transcend the mundane and to keep you emotionally captive in the narration itself. You feel for the main characters, you smile happily or you are on the verge of dropping a tear or two. The stories work as a magnifying glass directed towards aspects of life that would, otherwise, go unnoticed: some kids swim in the sea, a man finds his kaki trees emptied of fruits, a soldier is shot by a sort of autistic kid, animals wander in the forest, a man survives a  villagers trial and escapes from a dark pit. When one tries to sum up the collection, words seem meaningless and devoided of the magic that inhabits them in the stories. There's a girl who wrote it better than me on this blog (for all the Romanian readers).

The second one which you can read entirely here in pdf.format is written by Oliver Sacks and it is not a fiction book, but rather a series of published neurological studies. What I liked about this book, in particular, was the fact that it is comprehensible to the large audience without being deployed by scientific value. The cases are presented in a warm, deeply sensitive tone and here and there one could find real wisdom gems that spring from a deep meditation of the human condition. We aren't merely reduced to our brain functions and if those functions are unbalanced there is still a deep ocean of emotions within.