Combustion - Bangkok, Thailand

At six in the evening
as hell replaced heaven,
a skyscraper was scraped,
by the clouds up in flames.

In praise of sincerity - Montesquieu

In this little book, as the title suggests, Montesquieu praises sincerity as a virtue. This is done at two different levels.
In private life sincerity is advised as opposed to indulgence. A real and useful friendship should always be based on absolute honesty, even when this leads to conflicts with personal pride, or especially when that happens.

On the passion of love - Blaise Pascal

In this short treaty, Blaise Pascal - who for the most part of his life worked as a scientist - expounds his views about love and passion. He tries to point out the relation of these feelings with all the other aspects of life.

Nobel prize for literature awarded to Han Kang

Han Kang, a female Korean writer, was just awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. This is what I wrote down after reading some of her works a couple of years ago.

Convalescence, Human acts, The vegetarian - Han Kang

The spice-box of the earth - Leonard Cohen

As in Let us compare mythologies, in this collection Cohen also alternates Garcia Lorca's style inspired poems - assemblies of images, sounds and loosely connected symbols - and other compositions that can be more clearly paraphrased and literally interpreted, with an explicit message. Those of the second type might be slightly more numerous, while the style of the first batch is even more mature and inspiring than in the previous book.

Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of smoke, Flood of fire) - Amitav Gosh

I first read a book by Amitav Gosh more than twenty years ago, during my first trip to Myanmar, when two Italian ladies on a boat ride along the Irrawaddy river gave me a copy of a short story collection by this Indian master. A few years later I got to admire his talent after reading "The glass palace" and since then I've read anything by him I've happened to come across.

Taking (contradictory) sides

I’ve noticed that, save for an irrelevant minority, people tend to stick to either one of the following groups: 1) those who are against Israel invading Lebanon AND in favor of Russia invading Ukraine or else 2) those who are in favor of Israel invading Lebanon AND against Russia invading Ukraine. The bullshitting-pseudo-noble-reason they might claim they took those contradicting sides for doesn’t matter much, like any other bullshitting-pseudo-noble-reason for that matter. It’ll be something about imperialism, capitalism, communism, totalitarianism, nationalism, fascism, racism, terrorism, zionism, islamism or any other “-ism”. What’s sure is that they are taking sides against one invasion AND in favor of the other one. Either one.