Currently reading
The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories
Her Benny
Vedere din Parfumerie
Mysticism and Logic (Western Philosophy)
The Analects of Confucious
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
Does Anything Eat Wasps?: And 101 Other Unsettling, Witty Answers to Questions You Never Thought You Wanted to Ask
Mutual Aid
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
The Brothers Karamazov
My Family and Other Animals
It's really a collection of amazing anecdotes, as memorized by a slightly strange child, but I'm ok with that. The stories are incredibly funny, and very telling of animal and human nature. Durrell seemed a very democratic child, so the liberal use of the word "peasants", even when the label really sticks, is the only uncomfortable note. Well, that and either Durrell or his family has a disproportionate share of crazy. Am in Malta, and read this around the time I took the most astonishing trip to the Blue Lagoon. The "natural" blue of the Mediterranean, just before it transmogrifies into the Blue Lagoon, is something Durrell tries to describe in any number of ways. "Blue Glass" is as close as he gets, but not by much. More like the course of the strongest blue blood.His accounts of porpoises leaping in a moonless bay, mixing phosphorescent drops of ocean with thousands of fireflies is absolutely magical. Here's hoping the real Greece matches it in some slight way.
