MemberGypsy_Boy

Real Name

Dave

About My Library

I have always enjoyed reading fiction, especially fiction by authors outside the USA. I read American fiction too, occasionally, but much prefer non-U.S. authors because I learn more that way--probably also why I love traveling so much.

This little map covers the homes (sometimes the birthplaces) of the authors represented in my library. I do hope to expand it a bit more.

In some cases, I've read (or sadly, only found) one or two authors from the countries represented are available in English. It's a pity because reading authors whose time, place, and situation are different from mine is one way to learn about the world--and myself.

I also enjoy a wide variety of non-fiction and drama as well and have a passion for poetry. When we moved (about a dozen years ago now), it was to a smaller place and I have found that in addition to the limitations of space, I am beginning to run up against Time as well. It's simply not possible to read it all in the amount of time the actuaries tell me I probably have left (though I hasten to point out we are still talking a couple decades if I'm lucky). So I've starting donating whole portions of my collections. Thus, my large Holocaust and religion collection was given away as was my world history collection and so on; the current dilemma is figuring out worthy "destinations" for the art books, the cookbooks, the poetry, etc. etc. There just isn't enough time!

Favorite books: (in no particular order)
Naiyer Masud, Collected Stories
JMG Le Clezio, The Prospector
Homer, The Iliad
Ivan Turgenev, A Hunter's Sketches
Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
Siegfried Lenz, The Heritage
Elsa Morante, History
Johannes Jensen, The Fall of the King
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Pather Panchali
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Karel Schoeman, This Life
Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge
Jean Giono, Harvest
James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific
Stijn Streuvels, The Long Road
Shusaku Endo, Silence
Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelaawi
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

Currently reading:
Yeshar Kemal, To Crush the Serpent
Abdelilah Hamdouchi, The Final Bet

Finished (in reverse order, most recent on top):
Yousef al-Mohaimeed, Wolves of the Crescent Moon
Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger, Homage to the Eighth District
Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Bessie Head, Maru
Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even The Dead
Nuruddin Farah, Sweet & Sour Milk
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Emilia Pardo Bazan, Torn Lace and other stories
Philippe Claudel, The Tree of the Toraja
David Davidar, The House of Blue Mangoes
Eca de Queiroz, The City and the Mountains
Boris Pilnyak, The Naked Year
Magda Szabo, Abigail
Tanizaki Junichiro, The Gourmet Club: A Sextet [of short stories]
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero Of Our Time
Ibuse Masuji, Lieutenant Lookeast
Philippe Claudel, German Fantasia
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants
Enchi Fumiko, Masks
Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance
Mulk Raj Anand, Coolie
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
Alan Paton, Too Late the Phalarope
E. Breton de Nijs, Faded Portraits
Sembene Ousmane, Xala
Damon Galgut, The Impostor
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave
Sembene Ousmane, Niiwam and Taaw
Mochtar Lubis, Twilight in Djakarta
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion
Andrzej Szczypiorski, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
Nuruddin Farah, Hiding In Plain Sight
Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific
Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels
Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands
David Diop, At Night All Blood Is Black
Joseph Roth, Flight Without End
Amin Maalouf, The First Century after Beatrice
Tiyambe Zeleza, Smouldering Charcoal
J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob [unfinished]
Nuruddin Farah, Links
Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road
Ahmed Abodehman, The Belt
Gustav Freytag, Debit and Credit
Sony Labou Tansi, The Antipeople
Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy (plus Fallmerayer the Stationmaster and The Bust of the Emperor)
Eca da Queiroz, The Mandarin and other stories
Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage
Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World
Christoph Ransmayr, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tales From Djakarta
Lydia Chukovskaya, Sofia Petrovna
Naguib Mahfouz, The Beginning and the End
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart
Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid
Anatoly Rybakov, Heavy Sand
Albena Stambolova, Everything Happens As It Does
Gyula Krudy, The Adventures of Sindbad
Vangelis Hatziyannidis, Four Walls
Stanlake Samkange, On Trial for My Country
Ahmed Ali, Twilight in Delhi
Giovanni Verga, Life In The Country
Githa Hariharan, The Thousand Faces of Night
Ludwig Tieck, Tales from the Phantasus
Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore [unfinished]
Stefan Zweig, Journey Into the Past
Andrzej Szczypiorski, A Mass for Arras
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat
Larry Heinemann, Paco's Story
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley
Dalene Matthee, Fiela's Child
Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
Juan Jose Arreola, The Fair
Paul Willems, The Cathedral of Mist
Bogdan Suceava, Miruna, A Tale
Juan Rulfo, The Golden Cockerel
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Nirmal Verma, Maya Darpan and other stories
David Malouf, Every Move You Make [Stories]
Ebou Dibba, Chaff on the Wind

About Me

My passions are traveling, food, photography, foreign films, used-book shopping, music (especially classical and gypsy music from Hungary and Romania) and, of course, reading. For those who are interested, I also take active part along with a core of folks from all around the world at World Literature Forum constantly discussing fiction; if you're at all interested (or think you might be), by all means, please come and visit; we'd love to welcome you! If I’m not actively engaged in one of the above, I’m probably sleeping.

I started a commonplace book years ago but neglected to maintain it...one of my great regrets. There's no way to go back in time, so I use this site to keep a few very meaningful sentences in front of me at all times....

from THE HOME AND THE WORLD
(রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর [Rabindranath Tagore], 1861-1941)
"'I am willing,' he said, 'to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it."

from BY THE PEN
(جلالآلاحمد [Jalâl âl-e Ahmad], 1923-1969)
"...All the letters in the world number thirty-two, from alef to yeh, from beginning to end.... From the words of God...to all that has been said by the philosophers, to the words with which the poets have filled their texts, even to that which you students read and I have have written in my lifetime...all the sayings and speeches of the world are made up of these thirty-two letters.... Whatever curses or profanity there are, or sacred utterings, even the grand secret name of God...are all written with these thirty-two letters.... Do not be blinded by this little bit of knowledge and deny the truth. Remember, too, that these thirty-two letters are also tools for the devil's work. The death sentences of the innocent and guilty alike are written with these very letters. Since this is the way things are, heaven forbid that your pen ever write unjustly or that these letters in your hands or on paper ever become a tool for the devil's work."

from TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC
(James Michener, 1907-1997)
"They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge."

from NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND
(Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962)
“I believe that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more, than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I’ll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer’s sea and the water on which Saint Peter wandered; or it becomes a bird; flaps its tail, shakes out its feathers, puffs itself up, laughs, flies away. You probably don’t appreciate letters like that very much, do you...? But I say: with them God wrote the world.”

from "ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH"
(Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013)
“The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards—each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? Now, when I was younger, if you had asked me the same question I would have replied without a pause: the battle. But age gives to a man some things with the right hand even as it takes away others with the left. The torrent of an old man’s water may no longer smash into the bole of the roadside tree a full stride away as it once did but fall around his feet like a woman’s; but in return the eye of his mind is given wing to fly away beyond the familiar sights of the homestead…
So why do I say that the story is chief among his fellows? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters—Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors."

Location

Evanston, Illinois [a/k/a Chicago]

Favorite Authors

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Lawrence Durrell, Shūsaku Endō, Jean Giono, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Hermann Hesse, Ismaîl Kadaré, Nikos Kazantzakis, Pär Lagerkvist, Siegfried Lenz, Naiyer Masud, Natsume Sōseki, Wallace Stegner, Stijn Streuvels, Ivan Turgenev

Local Favorites

Bookstores: Amaranth Books, City Lights Books, Dom Knigi (House of Books/ Дом Книги at 62 Nevsky), Librairie Gourmande, Myopic Books, Seminary Co-op Bookstore

Member Connections

Friends

anjeliki, aznstarlette, JoeGermuska, southernbooklady