Here I Am? Yeah, I've actually gotten that feeling too. Which is why I haven't jumped on it yet.

it might make you want to manufacture z’s

“When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears. Like Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka—or perhaps like Mann’s The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder—The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.

A delightful fictional memoir about César Aira’s small hometown. The narrator, born the same year and now living in the same great city (Buenos Aires) as César Aira, could be the author himself. Beginning with his parents—an enigmatic handsome black father who gathered linden flowers for his sleep-inducing tea and an irrational, crippled mother of European descent—the narrator catalogs memories of his childhood: his friends, his peculiar first job, his many gossiping neighbors, and the landscape and architecture of the provinces. The Linden Tree beautifully brings back to life that period in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Perón, aspired to a newly created middle class.

As it moves from anecdote to anecdote, this charming short novella—touching, funny, and sometimes surreal—invites the reader to visit the source of Aira’s extraordinary imagination.

Next I'd love to see a book on armed combat from a C-level executive

better than bolano

I really want to read that now.

I was invited to a leadership book club. This is the first book:



Seems that a lot of former military personnel start consulting and/or mentoring businesses. I read a sales book titled “Never Fly Solo” by an Airforce pilot and it was a mixture of service experiences and how to apply the lessons learned to business.



For fun I’m cracking open Lucifer’s Hammer tonight. I borrowed it from a coworker so I’ll need to get it read pretty quickly.

It's good so far, more grounded and less fantastical than his other books. But it really flows.

I'm completely unfamiliar with his work, unfortunately. Part of what attracted me though about the blurb you posted is the reference to the fantastical. I'm big into that. What other works would you recommend for a first timer who digs magical realism?

I attempted Lucifer's Hammer a couple years ago and didn't get very far. I did enjoy the list of characters at the beginning, with one guy simply listed as "child molester."

I think Ghosts and The Literary Conference are two that I remember fondly, and also two that I desperately want to re-read.