Desert island books:
- Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
- Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange
- The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić
- The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak
- Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac
April 18-19, 2026: highlighted passages from The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth
(abridged from the translation)
An English friend of mine once wrote me a letter. She knew Croatian. She had written the letter when she was upset. The letter sincerely touched me, but I could not suppress my laughter… she had written in Croatian on an English typewriter. Before my eyes crawled little touching sentences shoving past each other to express their pain as fast ad they could. All the seriousness was destroyed by the absence of the diacritic marks, and the image of pain had been transformed into its opposite.
Maybe I should call her, have a chat before she goes to bed, rock her to sleep with words that mean nothing, complain of my low blood pressure, she’ll wake up then, I’ve got low blood pressure as well today. She’ll ask where I’ve been to the doctor, I should tell her everything in detail, ask her whether she’s been to the market…
Coming into the world at a time when people were destroying everything in front of them — towns, people, memory — the little boy remembered everything, in his own way admittedly. Coming into the world at a time when his mother tongue had been forcibly divided into three, he speedily mastered all three variants, in his own way admittedly.
Angels were invented by grown-up people, to make life more bearable. Writers are grown-up people, who like inventing things. An angel’s only as good as his writer. Still, just in case, I have left each of them a little feather so that real angels can find them in that terrible “divine darkness”.
Jan 19, 2026: highlighted passages from Cujo, Stephen King
Or she could just leave well enough alone and ease Brett’s mind. They could enjoy the rest of their visit without thoughts of home intruding constantly. And… well, she was a little jealous of Cujo right about now. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Cujo was distracting Brett’s attention from what could be the most important trip he ever took. She wanted the boy to see a whole new life, a whole new set of possibilities, so that when the time came, a few years from now, for him to decide which doors he wanted to step through and which ones he would allow to swing closed, he could make those decisions with a bit of perspective. Perhaps she had been wrong to believe she could steer him, but let him at least have enough experience to make up his mind for himself.
Was it fair to let his worries about the damned dog stand in the way of that?
She was afraid that if she told Holly these things, her sister’s reaction would be horrified anger rather than anything rational and helpful. Why horrified anger? Perhaps because, deep down in a part of the human soul where Buick station wagons, and Sony color TVs with Trinitron picture tubes, and parquet floors can never quite make their final stilling impact, Holly would recognize that she might have escaped a similar marriage, or similar life, by the thinnest of margins.
She hadn’t told because Holly had entrenched herself in her upper-middle-class suburban life like a watchful soldier in a foxhole. She hadn’t told because horrified anger could not solve her problems. She hadn’t told because no one likes to look like a freak in a sideshow, living through the days and weeks and months and years with an unpleasant, uncommunicative, sometimes frightening man. Charity had discovered there were things you didn’t want to tell. Shame wasn’t the reason. Sometimes it was just better—kinder—to keep up a front.