A little list of literary inspirations took from my 2010 books
I. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
‘I’m being ironic. Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite.’
II. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
‘Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.’
III. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
‘The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds - for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.’
IV. Watership Down, Richard Adams
‘Oh, Hazel, look! The field! It’s covered with blood!’
V. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.’
VI. Lezioni di fotografia, Luigi Ghirri
‘La fotografia non è un problema, la fotografia è un enigma, perché il problema ha una soluzione e l’enigma è un problema che non ha soluzione.’
VII. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
‘The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.’
VIII. Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You in All The Confusion?, Johan Harstad
‘Magnificent, magnificent desolation’
IX. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
‘For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?’
X.Trilobites and other three short stories, Breece D’J Pancake
‘August seems early for the hills to rust with dying trees, early for embankments to show patches of pale clay between milkweed and thistle. All is ripe for fire.’
I hope you will appreciate these books as I did.
