#cal (bernard mac laverty)

[mariemariemaria]

'They sat at the table and watched the news on television. The Army had shot a deaf mute, saying that he had been seen carrying a weapon, but by the time they had reached the dead man an accomplice had removed the gun. A Catholic father of three had been stabbed to death in a Belfast entry. The police said that there was no known motive for the killing. Gerry Fitt had had a steel door put on his house.' ‎ — 'Cal', Bernard Mac Laverty (1983)

lmao i may not be loving this novel so far but i have to hand it to mr mac laverty he kinda went off here. points were made

[scandireader]

He realized that he had said her name for the first time and it was like meat in his mouth.

Bernard Mac Laverty, Cal

[scandireader]

I've been ill in bed for two days now and I've started rereading Cal by Bernard Mac Laverty, which I read once and was obsessed with as an eighteen-year-old and then never touched again... I'm about 40 pages in now and I'm surprised how many details I can still remember

[scandireader]

I compiled a reading list for 2020! There's no way I can read all of these books in one year but my goal is to read as many of them as I can. A lot of these are books I own but haven't read yet. Let me know if you've read any of these and what you thought of them or if you're also planning on reading them! List is under the break.

Plain = to read

* = reread

Winter

Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the crossing places

Richard Llewellyn, How green was my valley

*Harry Martinson, Aniara

Chris Kraus, I love Dick

Karin Boye, Kallocain

*Bernard Mac Laverty, Cal

*J.D. Salinger, The catcher in the rye

Spring

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Euripides, Bacchae

Janet Lewis, The wife of Martin Guerre

E.E. Cummings, Selected poems

Ezra Pound, Cathay

Maria Popova, Figuring

Ian McEwan, Machines like me

Lisa Taddeo, Three women

Kenneth Koch, Rose, where did you get that red?

Margaret Atwood, The testaments

Summer

Sandra Cisneros, Woman hollering creek and other stories

Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo

Angela Carter, Angela Carter's book of fairy tales

Marianne Fredriksson, Simon och ekarna

August Strindberg, Röda rummet

Paulo Coelho, The alchemist

Donna Woolfolk Cross, Pope Joan

Naomi Wolf, The beauty myth

Ann Brashares, The second summer of the sisterhood

Angela Carter, Nights at the circus

Madeline Miller, Circe

*Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice

Autumn

Shirley Jackson, We have always lived in the castle

Eudora Welty, The Robber Bridegroom

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

Bram Stoker, Dracula 

Winter

*Henrik Ibsen, A doll house

Henrik Ibsen, The wild duck

Anne Brontë, The tenant of Wildfell Hall

Karen Blixen, Babette's feast

Robert Musil, The man without qualities

Jane Austen, Northanger abbey

[scandireader]

What are your top 20 favourite books?! X

Ooh, that's a nice question! My top 20 favourite books, a mix of English and Scandinavian and in no particular order:

Harry Martinson, Aniara

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso sea

Dodie Smith, I capture the castle

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber 

Bernard Mac Laverty, Cal

Astrid Lindgren, The brothers Lionheart

Knut Hamsun, Pan

Ovid, The metamorphoses

Philip Pullman, His dark materials trilogy

T.H. White, The once and future king

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Stephen Chbosky, The perks of being a wallflower

Jeffrey Eugenides, The virgin suicides

Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

Ian McEwan, Sweet tooth

Donna Tartt, The secret history 

Richard Adams, Watership Down

Torgny Lindgren, The Light 

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[scandireader]

Books I'll try to finish before 2019 is over:

Alice Thomas Ellis, The inn at the edge of the world

Bernard Mac Laverty, Cal

(Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the crossing places)