My favorite books are the ones where I want to slow down and enjoy the process of reading, feel the sentences. What happens is not important. It’s about the atmosphere, the sense of impermanence, sadness, but without plainly suffering. I’m going to put a few points. Hopefully someone can help.
– writing is more important than plot
– subtlety is important
– sadness is a part of it, but it’s not the most important.
Few books that I liked: Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin), Out Stealing Horses (Per Petterson), Memoirs of Hadrian (Marguerite Yourcenar), Heaven and Hell (Jon Kalman Stefansson), A Happy Death (Albert Camus), The Summer Book (Tove Jansson), Einstein’s Dreams (Alan Lightman), Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque), Letters to a Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke), Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer), Stoner (John Williams), Paper Houses (Dominique Fortier)
Few things on why, to get the idea: “Out Stealing Horses” has an old guy coming to a cabin, story is about one summer when he was a kid, but it’s also about his days at the cabin.
*“Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.”*
Great care has been put into descriptions of his days at the cabin, where not much happens. There is a dog, he is repairing stuff, there are birds, a fire in the cabin, a sense of cold nights, one neighbor he befriends.
I liked how the biologist in “Annihilation” seeks refuge in nature, and her inner monologs about it. I like the care for his friend in Rilke letters, descriptions of nihilism in “Norwegian Wood”, the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter in “The Summer Book”, love for literature in “Heaven and Hell”.
Few movies with the same feeling: Taipei Story (dir. Edward Yang), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve), Nomadland (Chloe Zhao), A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick), Sound of Metal (Darius Marder), Petite Maman (Celine Sciamma), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky), Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), The Fire Within (Werner Herzog), Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch), Paterson (Jim Jarmusch), Baraka (Ron Fricke)
by abouthodor