#if they aren't endlessly intertwined what even is the point

[joziokowalski]

4 and 10 for the books ask game

hehee thank you for asking!! i ended up typing up a lot of words, but then why shouldn't i type up a lot of words about my favourite books. many thanks for giving me an excuse to do so!

4. What are your top 3 comfort reads?

1 e m forster: a life by p n furbank i'm very fond of biographies in general and this one is my absolute favourite. it's as informative as one could wish, and personally i found it extremely engrossing - i feel like it's easy to assume that forster couldn't have had a very exciting life, but this narration, to me, was a real page-turner. very endearing, frequently quite hilarious, i love the fact that it's written in a tone similar to that of forster's own novels, i e often ironic but also brimming with warmth and sympathy for its subjects, even though they aren't idealized in the slightest. it's got lots of excerpts from diaries, letters, etc. so one gets to look into a lot of forster's (as well as lots of other people's) thoughts that he didn't write down for publication, and personally i have found those extremely valuable at many points in my life. the book itself is quite hefty so i wrote out many passages of it into a notebook when i was leaving for university to make sure i would have them with me if i need to come back to them. generally, i'd say one of the comforts of a good biography is that it makes one feel that ultimately every life can be narrated in a way that makes one see the value of it, so maybe those of us who tend to find things rather pointless and meaningless can take a break from that, and this particular biography delivers this 100%

2 the orchid trilogy by jocelyn brooke the thing about this book is that it feels like it was written specfically for my own personal enjoyment. it's like a perfect amalgamation of all the things i tend to love in a book. fictionalized autobiography - check. a dense web of references to artists i'm familiar with and fond of - check. a tone of melancholy and nostalgia married perfectly to irony - check. a deeply obsessive nerd of a narrator who can and will tell you everything about his subjects of interest - check. a preoccupation with the themes of failure, disappointment, adolescence, mediocrity and inferiority, a fascination with the morbid and the sinister coupled with childish naivety, (homo)eroticism always camouflaged in one way or another but in such a manner that only makes it stand out more, a gorgeous gorgeous personal mythology and a sense of getting to borrow someone's very extraordinary personal lens and look at the world with new eyes. and it's funny - at least i have found myself laughing out loud many a time while reading it. there is something especially touching to me in the fact that i only discovered it by sheer accident and even though it's so intertwined with so many of the things i adore i can't think how i could've come upon it if not for a myriad of circumstances coming together. it's a gem i could very well have missed, which i think is quite fitting considering that so much of this book is about the narrator's search for elusive objects that have the power to afford him transcendent extasies but can only be encountered by chance

3 ferdydurke by witold gombrowicz this might be an odd choice of a comfort book, seeing that it's the opposite of peaceful or warm or any other associations the word carries, but that's what it is to me, mainly because i find it endlessly ValidatingTM. firstly, a huge chunk of it is basically merciless absurdist satire levelled at some of the things i also despise with a passion (cough cough school episodes). generally it exposes many things one is normally supposed to accept as if they were ok for the fever dream that they are. and secondly, we reasonable psychologically aware people talk so much about the dangers of depending on other people's perceptions of ourselves, being preoccupied with how we appear to others, giving others the power to define us, we all know very well that those are the things that pave the road to misery and we're trying very hard to liberate ourselves from that, which is very healthy and reasonable of us. but mr gombrowicz frankly chooses violence and embraces neurosis, and posits all those things as unavoidable ("Man Is Profoundly Dependent On The Reflection Of Himself In Another Man's Soul Be It Even The Soul Of An Idiot". yeah panie witoldzie i sure am). so what you get in ferdydurke is a disgustingly relatable deep dive into the horrors of being a person among other people & Being Perceived. his characters have no selves outside of their interactions with others, they are either shaped by other people's treatment of them or artificially shape themselves to resist the influence of others, and they will spend every waking moment fighting tooth and nail to gain control over how others perceive them. and it's a romp! it's one of the funniest books i've ever read. gombrowicz & his narrator is a delightful self-absorbed contrarian who doesn't leave a table unflipped or an apple cart unupset. and, paradoxically, reading about the neuroses that plague one's life can feel extremely comforting when they're presented so unapologetically and with such incisive wit

10. What is your favorite genre book to recommend to someone who doesn’t usually like that genre?

hmm. the problem is, i don't think i read much of what could be labelled as genre books, so i'm actually the one who should be taking recommendations here! the only GenreTM genre i'm really into is nautical fiction, and i won't be very original here - i'll just say that the aubrey-maturin novels by patrick o'brian are gorgeously well-written and so rich in their subject matter, style and manner, that anyone, i believe, could find something in them to enjoy. there's the immersive historical setting, beautiful language, lots of humor (both of the subtle and cringe awkward in-your-face variety), delightfully vivid characters and so much more. if the imagined addressee of my recommendation happens to dislike quick-paced plot-driven adventure stories or lengthy descriptions of sea battles, they will be relieved to find that there aren't that many action sequences in these novels and plot development is very often not the priority. and though the amount of naval jargon may seem intimidating at first, one quickly sees that understanding it at all times actually isn't that much of a requirement, and the novels are written in a way that a reader who doesn't have any knowledge of it will have key terms explained to them when necessary, and at other times will have characters to relate to who don't understand a damn thing of all the sailor talk either. (another author i love who technically fits the genre is herman melville and i sure do believe that moby dick and billy budd are gorgeous wonderful amazing books that are very much worth reading, but tbh i would generally hesitate to recommend them unless to a kind of person i believe would really enjoy them - for better or for worse, they are not everyone's cup of tea, and many of the features that might attract or put someone off don't have much to do with the nautical aspect of these stories imo)