E o que é para deitar fora?

O meu eu que adora limpar roupeiros do chão ao tecto, que adora renovar a casa, que adora encher sacos com coisas que já não usa para dar a quem mais precisa; e o meu que adora listas; encontraram-se em mais este trabalho do NY Times. Como escolher quais são os livros que ficam connosco?
Tenho aqui tantos de que gostava de me separar... Não é que sejam lixo mas, de facto, não vou voltar a lê-los ainda que chegue aos cem anos - sugestão de Francine Prose. Também gosto do sujeito - presume-se intelectual - que assume sem rodeios que não quer saber do Wittgenstein. Eu, que ainda me lembro das horas que passei a ouvir um professor qualquer da faculdade a falar sobre Wittgenstein - o génio, o iluminado - sem perceber patavina do que ouvia, rejubilo com a ideia. Se tiver cá algum livro dele, deito-o fora. Out with the bad books, that is my manifesto.

... ao mesmo tempo, também não posso deixar de concordar com o Joshua Ferris, que diz que a par das toalhas mal penduradas das pessoas normais, que vivem em casas com crianças e que não são fanáticas da arrumação, os livros são um must e não são para deitar fora. Eu não quero deitar fora, mas dá-los-ei de bom grado a quem provar tratá-los bem.

Porque os livros são como as relações: de certeza que há um leitor alma gémea espalhado pelo mundo para cada um deles.

Ao meu estilo

Esta lista do NY Times é o estilo de informação de que eu gosto - visual, informativa e bonita. Se tiver de pensar nos livros dos quais nunca me separaria teria de dizer os meus livros de cozinha todos e mais uns quantos romances.

E se for para o Natal

O NY Times diz que há dez livros que são os melhores de 2009 - apostas quanto aos que cá chegarão em português?
Quanto a mim, sei que quero dois livros este Natal: "Annie Leibovitz at work" (17,09 euros via amazon e 29,40 em Portugal, na wook.pt) e "Bolos de encantar da Debbie Brown" (este é por ser de cozinha, duvido sempre da minha capacidade para montar os bolos na realidade e só gosto de os fazer com a minha irmã). Não têm nada a ver um com o outro e gosto mais do primeiro do que do segundo, mas um livro sobre bolos é sempre delicioso. Estes são quase monumentos.

Natal livreiro

Já viram que chegou a época natalícia?


(esta é a segunda versão que aqui ponho, a primeira foi retirada, não percebi porquê)

Aqui segue a lista dos melhores livros para oferecer, do New York Times, o melhor jornal do mundo (que tem hoje diariamente mais informação do que aquela que um homem de 70 anos aprendia ao longo da sua vida toda no início do século XX...). Diria que hão-de ser os livros que vão encher as prateleiras das livrarias portuguesas no próximo ano. Tem uma coisa muito boa: podemos ler o primeiro capítulo de cada livro - haverá maior perfeição do que podermos ver logo o que vale um livro? Como é que vocês fazem para decidir se querem ler um livro? Eu leio a primeira página. É o suficiente.

The 10 Best Books of 2008

Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin

Published: December 3, 2008

The editors of the Book Review have selected these titles from the list of 100 Notable Books of 2008.

FICTION

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER
Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.

In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo­kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is another, waiting to be born.” (Excerpt)

A MERCY
By Toni Morrison.
Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95.

The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears. (First Chapter)

NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill.
Pantheon Books, $23.95.

O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief “in its salvific worth” — is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations. (First Chapter)

2666
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.

Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered. (Excerpt)

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.

There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord. (Excerpt)

NONFICTION

THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
By Jane Mayer.
Doubleday, $27.50.

Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush’s anti­terrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced” interrogation methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation’s history.

THE FOREVER WAR
By Dexter Filkins.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.

The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war on terror.” (First Chapter)

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95.

This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences — and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion. (First Chapter)

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.

In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the “harvest of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created “a newly centralized nation-state,” Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” (First Chapter)

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French.
Alfred A. Knopf, $30.

The most surprising word in this biography is “authorized.” Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist’s command of story and character, and he patiently connects his subject’s brilliant oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life. (First Chapter)