Ataraxia

A Married Man by Piers Paul Read is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, although it is only 5577 th on The Greatest Books of All Time; it used to be in my Top 200, now, after reading it for the second time, I don’t know, but maybe I have a conclusion by the time I finish this note…you may have some suggestions if you visit https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/08/do-you-have-any-suggestions-how-to-make.html   9 out of 10   Piers Paul Read https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/a-married-man-by-piers-paul-read-is-as.html mesmerized me, when I first met A Married Man, only now it is a second encounter, and I have had some objections, if minor, while the first time I placed in the headline of my note ‘as close to perfection as possible’   Barrister John Strickland is probably more distant from yours truly, and that may be part of the ‘problem’ – though let me conclude from here that the oeuvre is excellent, even if the maximum expectations have ...

  When Breath Becomes Air is The 2016 Winner of The Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography, the finalist for The Pulitzer Prize, Biography or Autobiography, it has about 850,000 ratings on Goodreads, and some 68,000 reviews, an average of 4.41 out of 5 stars, it is just 3186 th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, you could visit   https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html my blog for more reviews   7 out of 10   I thought of Joyce Carol Oates https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-wheel-of-love-and-other-stories-by.html as I have been reading more of her short stories, and one, Sex With Camel, has some morbid jokes, including one with ‘there are some good news and bad news’, with the question, what bad news?   ‘They stopped chemotherapy, and the good news? They stopped chemotherapy’ in fact, I am pretty sure that I made a mistake, and said this in the wrong order, it should have been the ...

  Mastiff by Joyce Carol Oates is the second story in the Collection Lovely, Dark, Deep, which was shortlisted for The 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Literature; Them is the highest ranking oeuvre by Joyce Carol Oates, it is 658th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, though I do not see why Black Water is not somewhere in the first 1,000, for more reviews you could visit my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and/or the YouTube channel   9 out of 10   Joyce Carol Oates https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-wheel-of-love-and-other-stories-by.html is one of the best novelists of our time, and I need to get the stamina to start with Blonde, though I am daunted by the size of it, 1110 pages, which on the flip side, could offer so many hours of dazzling narrative   Mastiff has a lot of drama, unfolding rather quickly, seeing that this just a short story: Mariella is the main character, she is on this hike, a f...

  Genesis   I try to find the Absolute Truth and where else it could be explained if not in the bible… In my childhood, an old woman was talking nothing but the Holy Scriptures to my sister and me. If she is a believer, in my case this over exposure has somehow burnt the feeble interest in the stories of the bible. For most of the time I have been not just an atheist, but one who enjoyed mocking various religious <<misconceptions>> - as I saw them. I had great fun watching Religulous and comedians poking fun at Christian texts. I did not turn around. Not yet, but I try to see the light, be good, stop lying and try compassion for a change, The highest expectation comes from a different approach- Instead of finding holes in the story of creation, which could not possibly take place a few thousand years ago, as fundamentalists maintain- I try to use a spiritual reading. Go beyond the literal sense and see the paradise as possible here and now. Not in Eden as a place s...

  Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield 10 out of 10     Diary of a Provincial Lady is an exalting novel, fictional diary based on the life of the author, whose children, Lionel and Rosamund, have inspired the characters of Robin and Vicky – treated with kindness, but also with an impressive, X ray like manner and humor…when they show the normal indifference to the misfortune of others and a rather cruel disinterested towards Mademoiselle, their mother thinks of the appropriateness of writing a version of A High Wind in Jamaica and then when they receive the visit of the boy called Henry, she thinks that it is not proper to say parents always prefer and are partial towards their children, since she can see the superiority of the visitor when compared with her own members of the family…     The only ‘problem’ with this superb magnum opus was that one part of this reader was enthused and wanted to see what happens next and all the way to the end, while the ...

  Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov can be found on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction 10 out of 10     The novel that ‘everyone must read’ has a fabulous start, where a major sees a militiaman with a penguin and he says take it to the zoo, but when they meet some time later and the militiamen is with the penguin, and the major asks what have you been doing, I said take it to the zoo and the answer is ‘we have been to the Zoo and then the circus, now we are going to the pictures…without spoiler alerts, let us just say that the ending is equally provocative, unexpected, both amusing and sad.   It always helps the reader enjoy the book more when he, she or they (as we may have to refer to others in the near future, taking into consideration those who are not binary, male or female and transition, are in between, etcetera) can identify with the hero or the main character and this is what happened...