A little list of literary inspirations took from my 2011 books

I. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
‘I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, / How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, / And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, / And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.’

II. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.’

III. Sostiene Pereira, Antonio Tabucchi
‘E quando il dottor Cardoso uscì dalla porta e scomparve nella strada lui si sentì solo, veramente solo, e pensò che quando si è veramente soli è il momento di misurarsi con il proprio io egemone che vuole imporsi sulle coorti delle anime. Ma anche se pensò così non si sentì rassicurato, sentì invece una grande nostalgia, di cosa non saprebbe dirlo, ma era una grande nostalgia di una vita passata e di una vita futura, sostiene Pereira.’

IV. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Kenzaburo Oe
‘Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder / Komm und führe mich nur fort / Da wischt mir die Tränen / mein Heiland selbst ab’

V. Hitching Rides with Buddha, Will Ferguson
‘I’m going to follow the cherry blossoms.’

VI. Il mare non bagna Napoli, Anna Maria Ortese
‘Cora ci stava mettendo gli spaghetti nel piatto, e lui disse « basta » dopo due forchettate. Non mangiava molto, come tutti gli ambiziosi. Sapeva che il mangiare addormenta.’

VII. The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald
‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

VIII. An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions.

IX. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas (père)
‘People ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or, if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.’

X. After Dark, Haruki Murakami
‘People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far the maintenance of life is concerned. They are all just fuel. Advertising filler in the news paper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills; when you feed them to fire, they are just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘oh This is Kant’ or ‘Oh This is Yomuri evening edition’ or ‘Nice tits’, while it burns. To the fire, they are nothing but scraps of paper. It is the exact same thing. Important memories , not-so-important memories, totally useless memories : there is no distinction — they are all just fuel’

XI. The Year of the Hare, Arto Paasilinna
‘One cannot mess around casually with Vatanen.’

I hope you will appreciate these books as I did.

10 books from 2010
9 books from 2009