JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

This is what I think of decluttering my bookshelves.

Thank you, Drogon.

What’s your self-help guide, Fahrenheit 451?

Crammed bookshelves are a good thing. Empty bookshelves = empty minds. Books I can live without, I stuff in a box and give away. Books that I love, I live with. There are a lot of them.

So we have come to this. Throughout history, people have become rich by selling us things. Now people get rich by telling us to get rid of things. (Clearing space that inevitably requires buying more things.) Clever.

Do not throw your books away in order to gain a temporary sense that your life is within your control. It never is. Give your unloved books to other readers, donate them to libraries, send them to the children in warzones who think bombs and rubble are all they can expect of life.

When my backlog (tsundoku) is too big, I refrain from buying more books until the pile of unread books is reduced. When I admit to myself that I will never read a book I own, I give it away.

Books do not exist to spark joy (I’m looking at you, Dostoevsky), though the good ones do, no matter how dire their subjects.

Books made me. Books have saved my life many times. You can argue that the words make the book, not the pages between the covers, but the design, the texture, the smell of the book is essential to my reading experience. It engraves the book in my memory. Screens surround us, and people have such short memories now. I don’t.

I have hundreds of e-books, which I resort to when the paper versions are not available. I haven’t finished a single one.

Life is chaos. It is not made neater or more comprehensible by keeping the inconvenient parts of it out of sight.

Consider that decluttering is a metaphor you take too literally.

You say Clutter, I say Begone, philistine.

David Suchet’s Poirot was a kind of super-intelligent, eccentric, cuddly penguin.

Whenever I am glum, or dispirited, or my brain won’t shut up so I can’t sleep, I put on the long-running British-made Hercule Poirot TV series starring David Suchet as the fussy Belgian detective. I have not read Agatha Christie, but I have seen every episode of the TV series at least thrice, and find it very comforting.
(more…)

This is the annual list of titles I recommend to anyone looking for an enjoyable read. When I started posting lists some years ago, even before #MeToo, I noticed that there were way fewer women writers on it, and that wasn’t right. Hello, I’m a writer and a woman. This year, the list is about 50-50. (One of the first women on my list, “J” in The Book of J, Rosenberg’s translation of a major narrative strand in the Old Testament, was a woman, probably a princess in Solomon’s court.)

Getting to 50-50 required a reassessment of my reading habits, which took years. I realized that for one reason or another most of the books I read are written by men, and this is how it’s been since I was a kid. I grew up with a boy’s reading list—lots of epics—which is probably why I am often called “Sir”, sometimes to my face.

(Actual conversation while buying movie tickets.

Ticket seller: Two for 4pm, Sir.
Me: Do I look like a man to you?
Ticket seller: No, Sir.)

I did not do a politically-correct, “Give others a chance” (What teachers used to tell me in grade school, like it was my fault no one else read the book, so I hate that) screening. Apart from seeking out more books by women, I studied my shelves to see titles I might have forgotten, and made some difficult choices. Calvino or Petrushevskaya? Mary Beard or Tom Holland (not Spider-Man)? There’s some cheating involved: All of Shakespeare’s plays count as one book, as do the five novels in the Patrick Melrose series (You have to see the excellent TV adaptation starring Benedict Cumberbatch), but Franny and Zooey and The Catcher In The Rye are two separate entries, which is another long discussion.

This is the result, and I’m happy with it. The list changes slightly every year.

* * * * *

The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Persuasion, Jane Austen
SPQR, Mary Beard
A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
HHhH, Laurent Binet
The Decameron, Boccacio
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter
Love in a Fallen City, Eileen Chang
The Stories of Your Life, Ted Chiang
The Stories of John Cheever
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
Cheri and The Last of Cheri, Colette
Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Anecdotes of Destiny, Isak Dinesen
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Don’t Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett
The Collected Poems, T.S. Eliot
The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
Night Soldiers, Alan Furst
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant
Amphigorey, Edward Gorey
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Dune, Frank Herbert
Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Black Diamond and Other Stories, Rachel Ingalls
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson
For Keeps, 30 Years at the Movies, Pauline Kael
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Little Drummer Girl, John LeCarre
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
Complete Stories, Clarice Lispector
Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Love In A Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Young Once, Patrick Modiano
Isabelo’s Archive, Resil Mojares
From Hell, Alan Moore
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki, H.H. Munro
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
The Love Object, Selected Stories, Edna O’Brien
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
The Collected Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor
The Collected Stories, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Playing With Water, James Hamilton Paterson
Cubao: Pagkagat ng Dilim, Tony Perez
There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Collected Stories, Jean Rhys
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
Collected Plays, William Shakespeare
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Georges Simenon
How to be both, Ali Smith
Longitude, Dava Sobel
The Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St. Aubyn
The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
The Door, Magda Szabo
Oliver VII, Antal Szerb
Minotaur, Benjamin Tammuz
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Ogre, Michel Tournier
The Diaries of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend
Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Jeeves stories, P.G. Wodehouse

You decide whether that’s a blessing or a curse hahahaha.

Follow Drogon and Jacob on Instagram @jessicazafrascats.

I’ve been lax about updating this blog lately—caught that evil virus that causes colds and flu, fever and chills on and off for three weeks. (You think it’s gone, but it’s only fooling you!) On the plus side I missed much of the holiday stress and traffic, and coughing gave me temporary abs.

But I’m fine now, and this blog will be updated at least twice a week from hereon. A new post appears on Instagram (@axelcarlisle maintains it, so technically I still am not on social media nyahaha) but I take the photos and write the text. Bubbles (very AbFab name) maintains the Facebook page for this blog, so if you let Facebook decide what you’re going to read for the day (Tsk, tsk), follow that. My podcast has a new episode twice a month—Yes, we’re trying to put it on iTunes and Spotify, it’s taking a while.

I plan to have two or three books out this year—stories, my novel, a Twisted remix. My online talk show will premiere soon—sign up at watchboysen.com to watch it. We’re filming new episodes of The Flip Trip, in case you’ve already memorized our Czech Republic season. Busy year, let’s get started.

If you still haven’t read Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe, get your copy at Fully Booked branches, Shopee or Lazada.

And we’re off.