My Favourite Posts of 2022

Each published post is followed by another, and then another, and another, until the earlier ones are forgotten, and I am not really a fan of this. It is a reflection of the fast-paced modern world that we live in, and our constant craving for everything fresh and new, but I like to revisit things and enjoy them even if they’re not fresh-out-of-the-oven.

It is interesting for me to look back upon my year of writing and see which themes have posessed me and which new artists or artworks I have discovered. There are definitely some themes that have fascinated me continually throughout the 2022; Indian themes with poetry of Tagore, and fairy tale illustrations by Warwick Goble and Edmund Dulac, and also a work by a contemporary Indian artist as you will see bellow, festival and lanterns such as Prendergast’s watercolour bellow, watercolours by Georgia O’Keeffe, and not to forget my summer obsession with the Rust Belt which I’ve explored musically through Bruce Springsteen, and also artistically and literally through a collection of essays on the theme, and to crown the year a revisit to one of my favourites; Marc Chagall. So, bellow are twelve posts which I have chosen as my favourites in the last year, it’s either for the beauty of the painting, the whole concept and/or they hold personal significance for me in one way or another.

Maurice Prendergast – Feast of the Redeemer

“Spring lanterns –

colourful reincarnations

of the moon”

(haiku by Isabel Caves, found here.)

Film Saawariya (2007) and Art: Carl Krenek, Maurice Prendergast, Edmund Dulac

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help reliving such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experiened.

I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.

I feel I know you so well that I couldn’t have known you better if we’d been friends for twenty years. You won’t fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you’ve made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you’ve reconciled with me, resolved all my doubts.

(…) If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don’t need to wish her anything, for she’ll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be forever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness that you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?“

Eugène Grasset – La Morphinomane (The Morphine Addict)

“Well it just goes to show
Things are not what they seem
Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams
Oh, can’t you see I’m fading fast?
And that this shot will be my last…”

(The Rolling Stones, Sister Morphine)

Voyage of Delights: Fragonard – Alcine Finds Ruggiero in His Chamber

“….now that nothing restrains
his ardor he gathers her into his arms to begin
their voyage of delights.”

Charles Burchfield – In a Deserted House and Bruce Springsteen’s Downbound Train

“In the moonlight, our wedding house shone
I rushed through the yard
I burst through the front door, my head pounding hard
Up the stairs, I climbed
The room was dark, our bed was empty
Then I heard that long whistle whine
And I dropped to my knees, hung my head, and cried…”

Bruce Springsteen’s Blue-Collar Heroes, the Rust Belt and “My Hometown”

“Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows
And vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody
Wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill
Across the railroad tracks
Foreman says, “these jobs are going, boys
And they ain’t coming back
To your hometown
To your hometown
To your hometown
To your hometown…”

(Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown)

Winslow Homer – Sunset Fires

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

(Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds)

John Constable – Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (Rainstorm over the Sea)

 

Depeche Mode and Caspar David Friedrich: Pleasures Remain So Does the Pain, Words are Meaningless and Forgettable

Vows are spoken
To be broken
Feelings are intense
Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable

Arjun Shivaji Jain: Solitude, If I Must Thee Accept

“There’s a club if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry
And you want to die…“

(The Smiths, How Soon is Now)

Georgia O’Keeffe: Canyon with Crows and Other Watercolours

 

“Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me”

Marc Chagall: Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover

Hope you enjoyed this little trip down the 2022 posts memory lane!

My Favourite Books of 2020

I start every year by thinking “oh no, there are no more fun books for me to discover” and at the end of every year I am proven wrong haha. Let’s hope it will be the same this year. So here is a list of books I enjoyed the most in 2020 and I can recommend them to you!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Reading (La Lecture), c. 1892

1 Morrissey – Autobiography: I LOVE The Smiths and I really love Morrissey as well so I was very happy to have read his autobiography at last. It was very witty and amusing, and even the moments when he is being melodramatic and self-pitying are coloured with his Oscar Wilde style wit. Morrissey’s teenage years and early twenties were spent in his bedroom writing furiously and feeling that he doesn’t belong and that chimed with me a lot.

2 Lovely Bones by Alice Seebold: I first saw the film “Lovely Bones” (2009) which I instantly fell in love with because it was very poignant and imaginative at the same time, so the natural thing to do was to read Alice Seebold’s novel of the same name and it was equally amazing. It’s a tale about a murder of a fourteen year old girl that happened in December 1974 and is told from her ghostly point of view.

3 Peyton Place by Grace Metalious; what I like about this book, and the film, is that it points out the hypocricies in society and life in small town, it reveals all the lies and gossips and prejudices of such a small area and it’s a really interesting study of small minds and small towns. The main character clearly has a bit of Metalious in her is the opposite of that small town, she wants to experience life and be a writer and I enjoyed reading about an aspiring writer.

4 Stepford Wives by Ira Levin; Levin’s writing style isn’t that beautiful per se, it isn’t rich and filled with vivid descriptions, but the story itself – about a family who moves to an idyllic neighbourhood where everything is perfect and the wives are submissive and do nothing but their household chores and have no personality – is really interesting, but near the end I felt quite unsettled with the ways things unfolded. You always hope for the best when you read a novel, but the good doesn’t always win and things don’t always turn out the best for the main character.

5 Carrie by Stephen King; I could definitely relate with Carrie being an outsider at school and not fitting in with the crowd so that was definitely a push to read this book. Maybe this book isn’t as scary as some of other King’s novels, but the mere thought of Carrie being trapped in a house with her madly pious, deranged and overprotective mother freaks me out. I like the mix of teenage silliness and shallowness with the reveal of Carrie’s mystical powers, and I like the way the novel was told, from many perspectives.

6 The Collector by John Fowles; this is perhaps my top favourite book for 2020! I enjoyed it beyond words and even wrote a book review already. It’s a novel about a shy young man who stalks and falls in love with a pretty art student in 1960s London and instead of just taking the usual road and asking her out on a date, he kidnaps her and keeps her in his basement until she, at least he hopes, falls in love with him. But the main character isn’t an awful, cruel villain, it’s the girl who is a bit bitchy in fact, so things are not black and white in terms of moral judgement and that makes it all the more interesting because, as you read the book, you don’t just judge the man for his actions but a deeper understanding and sadness develop along the way.

7 The Secret History by Donna Tart; I heard a lot of good things about the book and that is why I didn’t want to read it earlier but then I read an article about Bret Easton Ellis’ time spent at the College and guess who his fellow student was, Donna Tart. The novel is about a small and isolate group of students studying Greek at a New England college who have a festival one night and something goes terribly wrong… It’s a long book, but Tart keeps you alert for sure and the characters are so developed and so believable and she based them on her own classmates from college.

8 Torn Apart: Life of Ian Curtis by Mick Meddles and Lindsey Read: well if you love Joy Division there is no reason not to read this book! And it offers a better, a broader and less subjective, view on Ian Curtis and his life, his poetry, his relationship with his wife and with Annik, his struggles and health, it’s really a poignant and lovely portrayal of a person behind the legend. I enjoyed it much more than Deborah Curtis’ book.

9 Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: this book was as beautiful and interesting as it was educational because I learned so many details about the geisha lifestyle and tradition. If you are interested in Japanese culture and history, then certainly this book will interest you. I don’t know why it took me so long to read this book! Aside from the richness of Japanese culture and beautiful descriptions of kimono and nature, there is a lot of sadness about this book as well.

10 Post-Office by Charles Bukowski; I really enjoy Bukowski’s writing style and his attitude towards life and so I knew this book would be a fun read. I read it one sleepless night in September and I just kept turning the pages and laughing, and I can really recommend it.

11 Hunger by Knut Hamsun; interestingly I started reading this book years ago and didn’t enjoy it, and then in 2020 I picked it up again and I was smitten. The main character’s obsession with his hunger and his ways of transcending it are mind-blowing and I really liked being in the mind of this frail-nerved yet strong character.

12 Agony and Ecstasy by Irving Stone; this is a romanticised biography about the Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo. I am not that interested in Renaissance period usually, but the way Stone writes is just so beautiful and captivating and it feels so real; he not only conveys the spirit of the time so well but also the thoughts and feelings of the character, in this case Michelangelo and in his other novel “Lust for Life” Vincent van Gogh.

My Favourite Books Ever

One of the most asked questions I get here on the blog is about my reading tastes and books that I can recommend, so I decided to make a list of my favourite books to satisfy your curiosity once and for all. My reading tastes are somewhat eclectic, I am aware of that, and even though I don’t read that many books I tend to enjoy most of them so it was quite hard to chose the most beloved ones. If I don’t like a book, I will just stop reading it and it’s that simple. So when I do proceed with reading the book, that is already a sure sign I enjoy it. Also, I’ve put links to the posts which are either book reviews or something similar connected with the book. If you’ve enjoyed any of these books, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Ivan Kramskoy, Books Got Her, 1872

1. Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

3. Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

4. No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai

5. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

6. Of Love and Other Demons, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

7. Tristessa, by Jack Kerouac

8. Journal of Love: Henry and June, also the second part called Journal of Love: Incest, by Anais Nin

9. Before Night Falls, by Reinaldo Arenas

10. Prozac Nation, by Elizabeth Wurtzel

11. Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

12. Girl, Interrupted, by Susana Kaysen

13. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

14. Novel with Cocaine, by Mihail Ageyev

15. Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky

16. Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki

17. The Three-Cornered World, by Natsume Soseki

18. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

19. Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

20. Love in the Times of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

21. Norwegian Woods, by Haruki Murakami

22. Mathilda, by Mary Shelley

23. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

24. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

25. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

26. Letters to Milena, by Franz Kafka

27. The Fall of the House of Usher, and other stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe

28. Short story “Broken Blossoms” by Thomas Burke