I'm a bit late on this week's Top Ten Tuesday, a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. I haven't been blogging long enough to read ten books in the lifespan of my blog, so I'll write about the books I loved lately.
1. One Day by David Nicholls - A refreshing, slightly melancholic story of two people spanning over two decades. My review.
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - One of the best books I've ever read ant not only during the span of my blog. Truly a favorite and a book I'll be returning to plenty of times in the next years. My review.
3. The Return of Filip Latinovicz by Miroslav Krleža - A book by a Croatian author, dealing with some of his favorite topics. Art, liberty, homesickness, love, infatuation, crime, family, human psychology, existentialism, decadentism and many, many more. A true gem of Croatian and other south Slavic literatures.
4. Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah by Miljenko Jergović - A short story collection, each was inspired by a traditional Bosnian folk song. A book that breathes and smells of my native Bosnia.
5. The Counterfeiters by André Gide - A gentle book that seems to float somewhere between a dream and reality and has one of the most interesting compositions I've ever read featuring a novel in a novel. A lot of events are inspired by Gide's real life.
6. The Woman of Rome by Alberto Moravia - I wrote a paper on this book and thanks to the paper i had to delve deeply into the text which got me thinking about the beauty of Moravia's language, the excellent portrayal of the main character, Adriana, and his subtle writing about Rome, politics and human destiny. Had there not been my paper, I probably wouldn't have liked it as much.
7. Balthasar's Odyssey by Amin Maalouf - Balthasar is a Christian living in the Levant. He sets of to a journey to track down a book. The journey takes him as far as London. Maalouf's themes are universal and almost the same from book to book, and yet always brought to us with a dash of new thinking.
8. Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque - A powerful antiwar book that shows us what happens when guns fall silent and you have to continue with your every day life. Strong, moving and above all - haunting.
9. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - A gentle book that reminded me a lot of Dickens. A bildungsroman about a girl who's drawn in to events she can't understand, thus being forced to grow up sooner. In the end, her childhood innocence is lost forever and we are left with a strong message: that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
10. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco - Plenty of literary critics have said that this wasn't one of Eco's finest, but I disagree. Maybe I'm just too fond of Eco, but I think The Prague Cemetery is as good as his earlier work. It's a story of conspiracy, murder, mystery and fine philosophy.
I've read all of these books during this year and this list features some really great books. I'm happy!
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