2006 books

45) William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside, 1992
Very different territory for Burroughs in this reminiscence of cats he has known. Anecdotal, sentimental without being saccharine, even those who dislike cats will very likely get something out of it.

2006 books

46) Gaétan Soucy, the little girl who was too fond of matches, 1998
A deliberately difficult book to form any kind of mental dialogue with, its talkative narrator being a nameless teenage girl whose weird father dies in the first paragraph. With her and her brother never having been beyond the boundaries of their home, her perspective is particularly unique and discomfiting when she becomes forced to deal with the outside world. She also has a gender identity problem, and this is totally embedded into her narrative to the extent that the reader also becomes unsure, and from there the nightmare gets progressively worse. An impressive, disturbing and cunningly told story, with very menacing undercurrents.

2006 books

47) Gao Xingjian, Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather, 2004
Short tales from the 2000 Nobel Prize winner, these are succinct, ordinary stories that focus on small events, even moments, in people's lives. Nevertheless I didn't get as much out of it as I'd hoped, though the last story 'In an Instant' does become rather cleverly hypnotic. These are the stories Gao believes best represent what he is now striving to achieve in his fiction, though one can't help feeling what a loss it is that he had to destroy so much of his creative work in his more energetic youth under the Cultural Revolution.

Six Billion Worlds

  Life on the the Pangales Canal, Madagascar   [ GUILHEM ALANDRY ]

  Village life in Manang, Nepal   [ CHARLES HAVILAND ]

  Toomelah aborigines, Australia   [ HEATHER FAULKNER ]