baffled by your symmetry.

Day 07- A Book that’s hard to read – Shadow of the Wind

Okay, so I'm pretty useless at keeping up to date with things. A day behind again. 

"Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'Cemetary of Forgotten Books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles. To this library, a man brings his ten-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book...but as Daniel grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find..."

This book bored me to tears for the first three chapters. I understood it was going somewhere, but I wasn't entirely sure I had the motivation to get there. After taking a semester of Spanish, I realise it's because they're so avid in their description/have incredible run on sentences/etc. When you're on a bus for 10 hours a day, anything - anything that ameliorates your boredom is suddenly intensely motivating. We were about to reach Barca when I finished this book, so it was kind of exciting given the fact that I had just spent a couple of hundred pages reading about it. BUT IT'S COMPLETELY WORTH IT.


+ it has this awesome rustic map of Barca, and how you can follow the "Shadow of the Wind" trail... kind of like being given an intimate guided tour by Carlos Ruiz Zafon himself. This makes it automatically awesome.

A treasure map!

The cultured tourist: clutching a battered copy of 'Shadow of the Wind' rather than  Lonely Planet. 

Casa Battlo, in the flesh!
source: tom26er

It also has a recommended reading list, which is pretty perfect. I wish more authors did the same thing. When you've finished a book and there's no more to come, you feel like pulling it apart form its seams, to see how all the pieces are arranged, how the story came into being - how the author feels. And when you can't do that, the easiest thing is to push yourself headlong into another, and another, until your heartbeat stops racing and you can quell that niggling urge to consume another book.


(Carlos Ruiz Zafon recommends The Blind Assassin, Possession and The Name of the Rose, among others.)

Day 7-  A Song That Gets Your Heart Racing

I've seen Jonathan Boulet live twice, and they remain, to date, as the most energetic band I've ever seen play. It's dizzying, and all you feel like doing is jumping, moving, swaying like some kind of drunken retard despite the fact you haven't even had water in the last hour. It's indescribable, really, the way it infuses me with energy. For an instance, I thought they'd also head to Fall's in Marion Bay but they only played in Lorne, and that kind of broke my heart. He's also in another band, called Parades, which is fantastic.

This video is made of win. I guess you can see the similarities between that and Jonathan Boulet, but in the end, I don't care as long as he keeps making music. Parades toured last year with Ernest Ellis (another fantastic up-and-comng Australian artist) - or was scheduled to, at least.