Ulysses

 

Two songs played in my head when I read Ulysses: 1. Lullaby - The Cure 2. Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

I spent five years waiting to find someone I could talk to about Ulysses, and today the journey ended.

Tiny story: Golden Beans

 

Alex learned how to play the bass at age of thirteen by watching YouTube tutorials, three years later her band played every weekend at a small café downtown. They named the band Golden Beans and managed to hit more than one million plays of their post-punk music on social media platforms. One of their songs went viral while they were recording themselves drinking coffee inside a coffee plantation. Little they knew that it would be a one-hit-wonder. 

That day Dan, the drummer, stole fresh seeds jokingly saying that they were magical, and all managed to run away without getting caught. As long as they had those seeds, they were going to be famous forever. Alex laughed but didn´t hesitate to take one of the seeds as an amulet. Whenever she needed to compose a song, she had to carry the seed with her.

What they didn´t know is that the coffee plantation belonged to no one, it was cursed and the family owners disappeared without leaving a trace. Although the harvest was abundant, no one wanted to pick it up and it was left there to rot. 

During those three years, they kept playing at the café without being noticed. People thought they were playing a cover song from that thirty-second viral video at a random coffee plantation. They played the same songs every night without knowing how they got there in the first place. None of them revealed that they kept those coffee beans stolen from that abandoned coffee plantation.  

Tiny Review: Awake in Spring

 

Text version:

I'm terrible at writing reviews or recommending books. I'm either way too excited, and I feel like I want to hug the book or because I feel frustrated and furious with the author. There's nothing in between. Most of the time I regret my behavior because I know that it's likely that the author may have enjoyed the writing process.

This poetry book written in Spanish falls in the first category. I'm a slow reader and it took me weeks to finish it. Each poem relates to other books I've read, and made me wonder that it would be amazing to spend an evening drinking tea with Lenina. I was happy to find a contemporary author with such mature style at her young age.

I tend to close poetry books that transmit unclear drama, or that tend to be way too romantic (or love haters). Her book was not the case.

It transmits universal thoughts and feelings beyond love, like the quest for knowledge, human existence, childhood memories and what is like feeling those memories. It felt like I was inside Lenina's daily thoughts on existence. I wish her the best in her writing career.

Libraries

 

Have you ever visited a library? Do you have a favorite one? I would like to know. Lately I've been wanting to grab some snacks and just walk to the nearest library. When I was young, I enjoyed the one at school and later during my undergraduate years the library became my home. Those were though years for me at home. I never felt being enough there.

I bought this beautiful magazine three years ago, because I love libraries. I can't get enough of its content. It talks about libraries, public, private ones, and how it shapes readers and writers. How it shapes societies, and it speaks about times when Egyptian kings had libraries in remote cities aiming to have a universal knowledge.

Is this possible? We don't know, but the path is fun, and we do enjoy walking surrounded by old encyclopedias. There's one I intend to attend, it's near my home and belonged to Cesar Brañas. I would like to see what kind of books he collected.

One of the articles shares the library of the philosopher Michel de Montaigne who believed that us readers should enjoy good books. He never aimed to accumulate amount of pages read. Do you agree with him?