Book Review: Poemas Esenciales, Rubn Daro

Book Review: Poemas Esenciales, Rubén Darío

My Favorite Poem of the book:

"Románticos somos... ¿Quién que Es, no es romántico? Aquel que no sienta ni amor ni dolor, aquel que no sepa de beso y de cántico que se ahorque de un pino: será lo mejor"

My Full Review:

Pending review, I promise I'll revisit because I love Ruben Dario's works.

My Other 2024 Readings.

graphic explanation of what I did all this time ✨

Feel free to ask for the extra spicy version 😘🔥🔞

I woul like to put you in my bottom shelf then😏 you have a nice couple of tomes I. Your behind shelf 🍑🤭 and I sure have a big book to squeeze in 😏

Sincerely, CBD.

I'm very interested in your book, please send it to me. I need to see if it will fit 😉😏

Well, it's gonna take me forever to post all the pending book reviews I have, so I'll add the pics with the quote I liked and once I feel like revisiting them, I'll complete them with my opinion

Book Review: Three Blind Mice, Agatha Christie

My Review in a Tweet:

Agatha Christie's stories are a little cheesy, but despite that, they remain charming and puzzling, encouraging the reader to decipher for himself who's the culprit. This book in particular reunites delightful investigators: Poirot, Mrs Marple, Harley Quin and Sergeant Trotter.

My Full Review:

This book is another "first" for me, as my only contact with Agatha Christie's works was through the movie adaptations with Kenneth Branagh as the famous detective Hercule Poirot.

Imagine my delighted surprise when I realized the first story on this book was no other than the play in "See How They Run" (2022), another wonderful and funny whodunnit.

Since I'm not british, I don't know the tune for "Three Blind Mice", but the author was able to communicate the silliness of the murderer and the unnerving nature of all children lullabies, no matter where they are from.

The misteries in the book rely heavily on the dialogues and interviews from the investigator to the suspects, leaving descriptions of characters and places very short and a little dry.

The mysteries themselves are quite entertaining, only a couple of them were "predictable" (which I can tell if it is a good point for Agatha, for laying out the clues for the reader, or for me, being "smart enough" to solve the mystery before the reveal). Some of them felt a little rushed or solved out of nowhere, but those were only a few.

This is what I would call a nice summer reading: short stories, easy to pick up and to put down once you finish a mystery, engaging and entertaining.

8/10

My Other 2024 Readings.

Book Review: Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

My Review in a Tweet:

I'm not drawn to Non-Fiction, but this autobiographic tale, while a bit slow, captivated me. The fourth part is jarring because it's a random collage of stories; the rest of the narration was great, coming back and forth in her memories until the moment she leaves the continent.

My Full Review:

Trying to diversify my readings, I picked up again this book I got as a Christmas present back in 2015 but never managed to finish. I'm not entirely sure this book qualifies as Non-Fiction, since it's still very poetic in the way the author describes her years in her coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills, but I describe it as NF because it is an autobiographic narration of a period of her life.

I still had to drag myself a little through some parts of the book, but that's not on Isak Dinesen (or more accurately, on Karen Blixen, her real name), it's on me and the genres I usually read being quite different from this. The book itself is structured into five parts, each of them separated into smaller chapters.

Even then, I enjoyed this book: Dinesen/Blixen has an artistic soul and a taste for the beauty in the world that makes her descriptions and tales really outstanding and marvelous, giving the reader a careful and joyful glimpse into the Africa of the early years of the 20th Century. The love she distills for her farm and the workers that come and go in her life, while sometimes might sound "problematic" from our modern set of values, makes you ache when tragedies and setbacks occur.

I wish the expression "abanico cultural" (cultural fan, as in the accesory for the hot days) existed in English, because that's what this book opens in front of you: a range of cultural and sometimes religious ways of being human, with just a tinge of the author's bias, and even when she's more openly judgemental of the ways of the masai and the other tribes, she still sees the beauty and wonder of their lifestyles.

The final part of the book, when she describes how all the problems of the farm start to pile up and she has to sell and leave Africa, really makes you feel sorry for her, hoping that fate will smile to her and turn the downtrend of her coffee productivity. When she finally leaves, it's like waking up from a pleasant dream of a sweet memory, and you are left with that bittersweet taste of longing.

7.5/10

My other 2024 readings.