R is for...

I think 2017 is the year of me inadvertently consuming some very romantic media. Paterson, La La Land, Moonlight... Do Not Say We Have Nothing was also so romantic, dripping in homoeroticism of the very honeyed kind, very Moonlight-like in that way. Today I went out with Emily and I made her buy the Thien book and I splurged in 4 books at Payot:

• The Idiot by Dostoyevsky 
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, which I had first heard of as a film that's coming out this year

The last one is so great... it's a hazy humid summer just dripping in romance. If this book had a taste it would be apricots, just like the thick apricot juice that Mafalda makes for Oliver every morning.

It's a very 'Crush Songs by Karen O' type book, I think. So I've put her on and I'm gonna keep reading. I want to read fast but I also find myself savoring each sentence.

I got The Idiot because I'm thinking of getting more into Russian literature, about which I know nothing. I realised today that Russian literature is such a thing, more of a thing than, say, Spanish literature, or whatever. You actually hear about people studying Russian literature a lot, it's about as common as studying Classics or even Art History. And apparently Russian literature is very different. So I'm going to investigate that. I'm excited.