• I buy both printed books and digital ebooks regularly. Every so often I'll share what books I've recently purchased with Booklad readers. I'll include links to each edition so you can find out more on any specific title and make a few comments on the book. I almost always read the introductions or first chapters of books I purchase. It's like sneaking a little bit of the frosting from a birthday cake.

    Most of these books were purchased at the used bookstore where I work during the day: the Iliad Bookshop. A couple titles I ordered off of the internet (primarily Amazon.com).


    The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,reprint 2003. Introduction by Jonathan Rosen. 


     I've been enchanted with Malamud ever since I read his first collection of stories last year, The Magic Barrel, but have never read one of his novels. I sneaked a read of the first chapter and, God, it's good. I can't wait to read this novel.

    My Struggle, Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Archipeligo Books, 2012. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 

     Not sure where I came across this author, but I'm half-way through reading and it's a brilliant autobiography written as fiction (roman a clef?). The writing is so good and the scenes are so poetic and alive. I'll be doing a full review of this book when I'm done.

    Silent Cinema by Brian J. Robb. Kamera Books, 2007. DVD included. 

    Found this little gem in our silent film section. Enjoyed the introduction, so I'm going to add it to my growing library of silent cinema books. DVD has 193 minutes of extracts from classic silent films. Kamera Books, a UK publisher, has got a lot of interesting titles they are publishing.


    The Music and Art of Radiohead, edited by Joseph Tate. Ashgate Publishing, UK. 2005. 

    I've become addicted to the music of Radiohead (again) having listened to OK Computer and Hail to the Thief a dozen times during the last month. I'm half-way through the 12 essays in the book and they range from overly academic to very insightful (Mark B.N. Hansen's "Deforming Rock: Radiohead's Plunge into the Sonic Continuum"). The introduction, by Joseph Tate, is quite good, too.

    A Writer's Companion, 4th Edition, by Richard Marius. McGraw-Hill College, 1995. 

    I read a few pages of this book every night before I go to sleep. Richard Marius is a very good teacher of effective writing. Not only does he teach the subject well, but he's an incredibly good writer himself. I'm not big on "how-to" books on writing, but this one is inspiring and very practical.

    Silent Cinema: An Introduction by Paolo Cherchi Usai. Palgrave Macmillan, Revised and expanded edition, 2010. 

    This is a classic work on Silent Cinema. Originally titled "Burning Passions", it originated in a lecture Mr. Usai gave regarding the importance of preserving and studying silent films. This edition (beautifully designed and produced) has an excellent preface by David Robinson, himself a noted silent film historian. I'll be writing up a full review of this book once I have finished reading it. 


  • I’m always looking through articles and bibliographies on books; searching for new authors and new reading experiences. So when Caustic Cover Critic recommended Broken April in his Best-Books-of-the-Year (2009), I was intrigued.

    “It’s very well written, which helps, but the underlying idea is even more fascinating. The setting is Kadare’s native Albania, where the hill-dwelling people have this mad system of honor and code of behaviour called the ‘Kanun’”.


    After reading these lines from CCC, I immediately thought of the sequence in Huckleberry Finn where Huck hides in a tree and watches two families (the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons) murder each other in revenge for even earlier killings and slights of honor. That scene and Twain’s masterfully simple prose, is a lot of what Broken April is about. The difference is that rather than being an outsider looking in at this mad code of family honor, Kadare gives you the perspective of an insider, one of the family members who is questioning the code even as he is driven to honor it.

    The story is simple. The central character, 26 year old Gjorg Berisha, is returning to his country village in Albania. He is forced, through the 'Kanun" code, to murder someone in another family in revenge for a previous killing in his own family. The results of his actions, which come as a surprise, places him inside of the very code he wishes he could break out of.
    Ismail Kadare 

    Kadare’s theme of how the past influences the present, is so beautifully wound into the story, that you find yourself wondering about your own life; your own family traditions. Blind belief, honor, codes of conduct without compassion, these are the things that make up Broken April. That and compelling characters who the author manages to create empathy for even as they are committing acts of evil.


    “A pale young man sits down to an important meal. His brother has been murdered and he waits for a discussion about blood compensation to be over. If it fails, his life will be forfeit, gathered into the cycle of bloodshed as soon as he avenges (as he must) his brother. The provisions of the meal are complicated: eaten at noon with the murderer, it must conclude with the agreement of a blood price and a tour of the house, the male guests stamping their feet in every room to drive out the fued’s shadow. Then the young man’s father carves a cross on the murderer’s door and exchange a final reconciling drop of blood. The price is settled, and the stamping begins”.

    The clarity and simplicity of Kadare’s writing are what make the above passage so ominous and frightening. The thoughts and feelings of these characters caught in a murderous web of their own making are always just barely suppressed. No wonder the Shakespearean play Macbeth was a favorite of Ismail’s when he was a child. Broken April is suffused with this kind of barely controlled terror which both frightens and enthralls the reader at the same time.

    This is a writer with a profound sense of the past/present and a very deep understanding of human psychology. Although the word is over-used, I think Broken April is a masterpiece that belongs alongside Kafka and Tolstoy and other writers who look sadly upon humanity at its worst in order to free us all to become our best.

    I urge you to find a copy of Broken April by Ismail Kadare, or any other works by this remarkable Albanian author.

    Notes and links:

    My thanks to Goodreads.com for the cover picture of Broken April.
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