If one could write a story about a war in a clear, straightforward way, then that war would not have been there in the first place.

More than any war, ever, the one in former Yugoslavia felt close to me. Because it happened when I was just old enough to understand what the war was about; or perhaps old enough to understand that some things about it weren’t to be understood. Because it happened closer to me than any war that took place during my life. Because I have met Dutch soldiers who had served there as UN peace keepers; or peace-could-not-keepers, rather. Because in secondary school I had befriended two girls from Bosnia, who had fled their country during the war. Yet, when reading SaÅ¡a StaniÅ¡ić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, I realise how it seems to have taken place in a universe parallel to the safe and friendly one in which I grew up.

I was a bit hesitant about starting this book, worried that it would paint a grim and dark picture. Indeed, many parts of the book are grim and dark, yet that is not the point the book is making. This is a book about telling stories: stories about happy and sad things; stories about small details; stories to remember; stories to survive. It took me well over a hundred pages to get into the book —which isn’t entirely chronologically, while some bits, even in the context of the book, are fictional— but then I could hardly put it down. I wanted to help Alexander, the book’s main character and presumably StaniÅ¡ić’s alter ego, make sense of past and present, understand what had happened during that night in 1992 and tell stories like his late granddad had told him to do.

Stanišić, who like Alexander fled to Germany in 1992 and writes in the language of his adopted country, is here to tell us many more stories.

At the beginning of 2008, I set myself the goal to read at least one book a week. When the year ended, I was reading three books that would have counted as my 40th book. Not too bad a score, if only because the number of 52 books was as arbitrary as it was ridiculous. The resolution wasn’t even made because of a love for prose; merely, it stemmed from a strong feeling of having to make up. Make up for all those years I spent getting older without growing up, walking fast without getting further and experiencing without becoming more experienced; reading novels, which I never did enough, had become something of a metaphor for those lost years.

My goals for 2009 include to read as many good books as possible, without the number becoming a goal in itself. Other, and slightly more important, goals include growing up, getting further and becoming more experienced. In just about any aspect of life. If continuing to read books will help with that in any kind of way, then that’s only a good thing.

But I do love prose in itself and I might have loved it —and poetry, too— in 2008 more than ever. I was attempting to compile a top 10 of the books I read, but gave up after 15 titles that absolutely had to be included, which shows how many good books I read. Here, however, is an incomplete overview of some books that really mattered.

Every time I finish a book by Coetzee, I think it will take a while before I pick up the next one. But I keep being drawn to his stories and his prose and The Master of Petersburg, which I just finished, is his fifth book I have read this year. I actually had been meaning to read this one for a longer time, ever since my grandmother (who will turn 85 next weekend) had told me she had read it; I regret that I had not realised earlier that her interest in literature goes much deeper than reading popular Dutch authors.

The Master of Petersburg is not a happy book; none of Coetzee’s novels are. Depressive might even be accurate, but they are never depressing. Human failure, in particular when dealing with other humans, is described to the tiniest details, but failure does not extend beyond that: the world never fails, is not a failure, and certainly not a bad place per se. Although, I think that to a certain extent, one should be willing (and perhaps even wishing) to see that.

This book once again shows Coetzee’s almost unique talent as an author. The failure is that of a father who has lost his (step)son in a mysterious accident; he then tries to understand what happened, how and why the son died, but also, more importantly, the relationship between the father and the son. The father, it should be noted, is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian author: the book is set in 1860s Saint Petersburg and several events actually took place during Dostoevsky’s life. But the father is as much Coetzee himself, who has lost a son (Dostoevsky’s had a stepson but was outlived by him) and wrote about the experience in this book.

The other day, I had a somewhat unexpected discussion on contemporary literature with a mathematics professor. I told him to read Coetzee’s Disgrace, for I still think that is his best piece of art (although it took me some time to appreciate that). And the autobiographical Boyhood is probably his most accessible work. But this one comes close to both really.

What I understand of cricket is that someone throws a ball upon which someone else tries to hit it away using a piece of wood and then the hitter scores points by running to-and-fro two wooden Ms before the thrower’s team mates have found the ball and thrown it back to its base. I presume this is equivalent to knowing Spanish to the extent of being able to count to ten and say ‘good morning’: it is still a long, long way to Don Quixote. But, after reading Netherland, at least I am convinced of cricket’s special position among other sports; that it is a Sport with a capital S, in comparison to which other sports are nothing but games.

Joseph O’Neill’s novel, however, is not a book about cricket, just like it isn’t a novel about New York or about growing up in The Hague. It is a book about failure in life —in a short period of life— and the understanding of it, to which these things are a mere background. More importantly, it is an awfully well written story, one that makes reading a fulfilling pleasure just because of the language. O’Neill, whom I had not heard of before, but who is an Irishman who grew up in the Netherlands, then worked in London before moving to New York (and thus bound to become a great writer), really gets things. Like the post-9/11 thing: I had been struggling with that label for a while, for it is true but didn’t feel right; but then I decided that it actually fits very well, for such Big events hardly ever affect people’s lives in obvious ways and then always mixed with seemingly irrelevant personal experiences.

I think it is a brilliant book. Not shortlisted for the Booker, but if that means something, then surely that the six other books are all brilliant. How is that?

It was always going to be a reading holiday: I really like Thessaloniki, but I’ve spent enough time there to feel a resident rather than a visitor with an urgent need to see the town. Also, more than anything, I needed some time to relax and empty the brain. Still, before I took the plane back home on Monday, I had read all the books I had bought for the purpose as well as the two spare ones I had borrowed from the library. That was when I picked up Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage from Dimitra’s pile. It turned out to be the best book I read this summer.

There are a few authors whose prose is so beautiful that after finishing a book you want to start again right away just to experience their choice of language some more. This happened to me earlier this year with Marilynne Robinson and then with Jon McGregor. Now I felt the same about Andrew Sean Greer. Apart from the subtle, almost poetic language, he shares both mentioned authors’ capacity to really and deeply understand someone’s life. It is hard to say what the book is really about without spoiling part of the story, but Greer (born in 1970) portrays an interesting and touching picture of things people didn’t talk about in the early 1950s in the USA (or anywhere else, for that matter). Added to that, the plot is as surprising as brilliant, and takes the book to even greater heights. I almost cried when I finished it on the plane.

“When you’re in a gang, you feel strong in your tummy. You run and shout and everyone else is afraid. But they don’t want me any more because I’m a dreamer [...].”

Dimitra tagged me in a meme, where I had to post lines 6, 7 and 8 of page 123 of the book that’s closest to me. I tend to wander around the flat rather a lot, so that book changes several times a minute, but at that very moment it was Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People, which after a short break I finished this week. It’s one of these books that makes you sad after you have finished it; not because of an unfinished story, but because it is so beautifully written and reading it had been such a pleasure.

I picked it up from the local library, after I had seen it being recommended by Rachel Seiffert. It does fit well in that list of books about troubled families, for it is about growing up with a father whose apparent well-meaningness is disguised by physical violence against his children and a mother who had a troubled past, even compared to the circumstances of Nazi Germany. But the book, a true memoir of Hamilton’s youth in 1950s and 1960s Ireland, lacks self-pity or a cynical world view. Rather, it is a sweet and well-written story of the common and slightly less common things that happened to the Hamilton family. I’ve read a fair number of Irish books recently –and just started another one– but this one I enjoyed the most, by far.

My problem with reading poetry is that after about ten lines, the words start to become blurry and lose their meaning. From then on, it may as well be Swahili or Basque or Klingon what I’m reading. Hence the poetry that appeals to me most is that which makes use of a lot of alliteration and assonance (thanks, Alex), making the words into a smooth and sweet flow of sounds. But I would lie if I claimed to be able to give you a list of my favourite poets or poems; neither in Dutch nor in English.

I did not have an upbringing that taught me how to appreciate arts, something which hasn’t helped me build a personal canon of poetry either. In my mum’s living room there is a poster of Marten Luther King’s I Have A Dream. It has been there since forever and was put there out of a genuine politically correctness, not because of the special meaning of King’s words. Art has always been something to appreciate just as I was (rightly) taught to appreciate a cleaner’s work. How to appreciate art we never wondered.

It is never too late to change that though. This very Saturday I found myself at the local library, browsing through its tiny selection of poetry books. In particular I was looking for something by T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden. The former was mentioned as an influence to both J.M. Coetzee and Jon McGregor, while the latter was also mentioned in relation to McGregor’s prose. I had concluded them to be ideal starting points.

They didn’t have books of either poet; hence imagine my surprise when I discovered that this very week, The Guardian is giving away booklets with selected work of some of this language’s greatest poets. They started with T.S. Eliot yesterday, while today’s booklet contained work of W.H. Auden. All for me.

Of course, most of these poems are free from copyrights and are freely available on Wikisource (or, indeed, on the newspaper’s website). But still. It could potentially make thousands of people interested in poetry. It could certainly make this person interested in poetry.

It was late, late in the evening,
  The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
  And the deep river ran on.

W.H. Auden ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’

I really loved Jon McGregor’s second novel So Many Ways to Begin which I read during the final days of 2007, but it still took several attempts for me to get started with his 2002-debut If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. To say that I was rewarded for trying is a big understatement.

The novel describes a day on an ordinary street in northern England as well as how events during this day have affected the life of one of its inhabitants three years later. In careful prose the lives of the people who live on the street are being described: the way these lives are seemingly unaffected by those of others, while they are also intertwined with them. In some cases even fatally.

Most of the book builds up to something big and, probably, bad that is going to happen. Which, in the end, does explain some questions that occur during reading. But not in a way where every tiny detail throughout the book turns out to have a meaning in some bigger scheme. The small details that matter remain small details and I think it’s McGregor’s way of describing them that makes me so mightily impressed by this book. There is also the fact that most of the book is set on the day princess Diana died, something that is not mentioned at all. I am happy to take this as a statement for the importance of ordinary everyday things.

Jon McGregor is only two years older than I am and was in his mid-twenties when he wrote this book. When I think of this, it makes me incredibly jealous. But it also means he has got forty years of writing ahead of him. And I have got forty years of reading his books ahead of me.

The Baltic Way was a human chain formed in the late summer of 1989 –that late summer of 1989– that ran almost 400 miles from Vilnius, via RÄ«ga, to Tallinn. Which, as we know, are the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, more commonly known under the common denominator The Baltic Countries. They weren’t independent countries back then though. They had been, during the interbellum, but then came the second world war, after which they had disappeared off the map and become part of the Soviet Union. Something which no one seemed to have noticed. But by forming this chain, commemorating 50 years of non-independence, the local people wanted to send a signal to the world.

Thanks to sad stories like this, and the fact that there is something very underdog about them, I have had a weak for all three countries for a long time. I visited them in 2004, shortly after they had joined the European Union. I only stayed for a week, and didn’t see more than the three capitals and the Lithuanian seaside town of KlaipÄ—da, but I wish I could have stayed longer. I really liked it there, thought all three countries were really sweet; with Vilnius probably the sweetest town I’ve ever visited.

Jaan Kross was an Estonian writer. Was, because he passed away in December, at the age of 87. It was through an obituary in The Guardian that I first heard about him and started to read Treading Air.

Reading books by local authors –Pamuk for Turkey, Murakami for Japan, a dozen contemporaty authors for England– is an interesting way of getting a feeling for a country; hence it is strange that I had yet to read a book by a Baltic writer. But Treading Air seemed like a good place to start. For on one hand it is a work of fiction: the ‘biography’ of one Ullo Paerand as researched and written by his equally fictional friend Jaak Sirkel. It describes the ups and downs of Paerand’s life and the cleverness he uses to work his way through hard times. At times I found it hard to believe that Paerand never really existed.

On the other hand, the book works well as an introduction into Estonia’s history. For not only does Paerand’s life roughly span the time from the nation’s first indepence to (just before) regained independence, also several actual historical figures play a role in the book: from writers to politicians and sports people. The translator has included a list of these people at the end, which proved itself useful many times. So it was like reading a history book too, something which is never a bad thing in my world.

One of the most impressive parts of the book is set in 1944, when the Germans have just retreated and the Sovjets not yet arrived, and Ullo Paerand is asked by a hastily formed Estonian government to translate a new declaration of independence into English and read it out on the short-wave. More than fifty times he explains how Estonia is a small country with a weak army that wants nothing but to peacefully coexist next to its neighbours. He starts daydreaming of the message reaching Churchill, who could then convince Stalin, who could perhaps…

But no one was listening.

The five best books I read in 2007:

1. The Rotter’s Club (Jonathan Coe)
2. Boyhood (J.M. Coetzee)
3. So Many Ways to Begin (Jon McGregor)
4. Snow (Orhan Pamuk)
5. Havoc (in its Third Year) (Ronan Bennett)

Rachel Seiffert’s Field Study is the best –and only– compilation of short stories I read, while Frank Westerman’s Ararat is both the best work of non-fiction as well as the best book I read in Dutch. I must have written it here several times before, but reading books has become a new obsession and it’s a really good one. I honestly wonder how I used to spend all my time when I read five books of fiction a year. Especially those years when I didn’t own a computer.

Also, speaking of books, I realised that I lied when I wrote earlier that I never read a French book. I read Frédéric Beigbeder’s €8.99 –the oh-so-postmodernist novel whose title was also its price– a few years ago. It wasn’t very good.

2007 Christmas songs top 3:

1. Eux Autres – Another Christmas Time At Home [via]
2. Fireflies – X-mas Song [via]
3. Rose and Gregory – Merry Christmas (I Don’t want To Fight Tonight) [via]

If at school we were to do ten exercises, I always gave up halfway through the tenth one. That is, I didn’t just abandon it, I just made it appear as if I had tried really hard, but totally overlooked the second part. I’m awful like that. I suppose it explains the lack of motivation I’ve felt through most of December, which is the Friday afternoon (or the last exercise) of the year after all.

And it’s not like work is very stressful at the moment; in fact it might be one of the most quiet times of the year. I actually have more problems with other things, like sending emails or even listening to music, that seem to require a much bigger effort from my brain than spending an extra hour debugging some perl code. Which says a lot about me, probably.

I did develop a new musical obsession though, on the aforementioned Eux Autres, whose new album Cold City was released earlier this month. And I managed to write a post for Filles Sourires about Ukrainian Fotomoto. I also read a couple books, of which I found JPod annoying and Norwegian Wood very sweet, even despite the overabundance of sex.

But most of all I spend my time looking forward to Friday, lunch time, when my Christmas holidays will start. More than ten days of doing nothing, of not being able to bury my already dead brain in some perl code any more. Perhaps I’ll even start making sense by then.