a journal of the [second] plague year

Read the picaresque El Buscòn (in French, translated by Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne), dating from 1602-1604, but the classic French translation from a century later is quite enjoyable and the story often hilarious. (I read this book after reading in 2019 the BD (comics) by Alain Ayroles and Juanjo Guarnido called les Indes Fourbes, that was inspired from El Buscòn and pretended to produce its sequel, located in South America). Also read the second volume of Olen Steinhauer, The Confession, just as impressive a dig into the minutiae of a Balkanic socialist dictature as the first one. And into the complex mind of another militia inspector in the homicide squad. (Just wondering if there were truly paper cups in the post-war Eastern block!)

Made my first fresh pastas with the traditional pasta machine my daughter got me as a Xmas present! I need improvements but, despite the mess this creates (flour everywhere!), it is a real treat to eat fresh pastas. The next goal is to check if soba noodles can be made with the machine….

Watched some parts of a rather terrible Korean series, Demon Catchers (or The Uncanny Counter). With absolutely no redeeming feature, although a very popular show… And the beginning episodes of another SF Korean series, Alice,  playing with time travel themes until it hit the usual paradoxes. (At least the physics fomulae on the white boards sounded correct, even though the grossly romanticised home office of a physics professor made no sense.)

Gave up on Augusto Cruz’ London after Midnight. Which revolves around the search for a surviving copy of the 1927 horror movie London after midnight, made by Tod Browning, and seemingly cursed. The plot is terrible and the style awful, an unpalatable endless infodump… Read P. Djeli Clark’s delightful short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo, which is a prequel to Haunting of tramcar 105 about a supernatural Cairo in the early 1900’s.

The one-hundred year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared [book review]

Scandinavian picaresque, in the spirit of the novels of Paasilinna, and following another book by Jonas Jonasson already commented on the ‘Og, The Girl who saved the King of Sweden, but not as funny, because of the heavy recourse to World history, the main (100 year old) character meeting a large collection of major historical figures. And crossing the Himalayas when escaping from a Russian Gulag, which reminded me of this fantastic if possibly apocryphal The Long Walk where a group of Polish prisoners was making it through the Gobi desert to reach India and freedom (or death). The story here is funny but not that funny and once it is over, there is not much to say about it, which is why I left it on a bookshare table in Monash. The current events are somewhat dull, in opposition to the 100 year life of Allan, and the police enquiry a tad too predictable. Plus the themes are somewhat comparable to The Girl who …, with atom bombs, cold war, brothers hating one another…