books @ cc.

by Elfriede Jelinek (1981)

A somewhat failed musical prodigy, the strict and rigid Erika Kohut taught piano at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory during the day and trawls the porn districts by night. Living (and still sleeping in one bed) with her domineering mother, who’s “old enough to be her grandmother”, her life has been congenitally forced along her Mother’s ideal.

by Robert O. Paxton (2004)

In this book, Paxton claims that the way to understand fascism is to observe it in action. Dividing the book in chronological sections, Paxton observes the evolution of fascism from its invention and creation, the “common thread”, the social and political space and conditions, the seeds and the full blooms in different countries, and the potential of fascist re-emergence in modern world.

by Georges Perec (1969)

Born out of a self-imposed formalist grid of lipogram, A Void is essentially a parody of thriller and noir fiction, loaded with plots and subplots, pursuits, vengeance and grim conclusions, amazingly engrossing and well-written despite the missing ‘e’ letter throughout the whole novel.

by Georges Perec (1978)

A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time the moment the protagonist (if he may be called so) Bartlebooth, dies. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints, resulting in an encyclopaedic work that is not just fascinating in its richness and masterful construction, but also beautiful, ordinary, bizarre, moving, and heart-wrenching.

How the secrests of the brain were uncovered in seventeenth-century England
by Carl Zimmer (2004)

An account of how people “first” became aware of the secrets of human brain in the seventeenth century, with particular focus on major players, i.e. Thomas Willis and his contemporaries such as Wren, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle and Hooke.

Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe
by Piero Camporesi (1989)

Divided into 19 chapters, Bread of Dreams is an account on how (as summarized by the jacket) “many people in early modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs.”