Disordered World - Amin Maalouf

Subtitled "Setting a New Course for the Twenty-first Century"

An interesting analysis of the current Middle East and where we find ourselves in general today. Maalouf has the advantage of having witnessed first hand the breakdown of social order and the slip into chaos in Lebanon.
He looks at how the West has misused its strength and created political and social disasters in countries in the Middle East, and indirectly helped create Islamic fundamentalism.  He has a long chapter on how political leaders everywhere have lost any sense of legitimacy in the eyes of their people by being tied to narrow special interests of all stripes.  He also talks about how a post-ideological world has fractured into a tribal world based on ethnicity, religion, skin colour, wealth.

He finishes the book with some chapters on how to rebuild, on how to reestablish a solidarity that can transcend cultures, ethnicities and religion.  Very idealistic.  Based on values of culture (I am reminded here of the effect on culture and its values of the cataclysm of WW I).
It is a nice vision, but I am more inclined to agree with Zizek's idea that change to the system will only come after collapse into chaos, probably provoked by environmental crises.

I find his non-fiction style a bit heavy and pedantic, but the ideas are interesting.

Worth rereading.

Comptine des coupables - Carin Gerhardsen

Translation of a mystery originally written in Swedish.

Scandinavia produces some brilliant dark mystery writers.  Cleverly conceived, full of surprises and side mysteries connected to the lives of the characters.  Hangs together brilliantly.

Find more.

The Blue Door - Andre Brink

A short book, but clever.  According to Brink, exploring the possibility of how everything could be different.  Done on a couple of levels.  First, an almost surreal level where the main character leaves and returns to his studio cottage, but when he returns, everything has changes - the layout, his wife, children (none in initial life), even the colour of the door one time.  Also, on a more human level, where he remembers an affair he had with a passionate, fully alive coloured woman (takes place in South Africa) where he made the choice to not run off with her - and regrets how his life might have been lived differently, more passionately.  His affair also bumped him off another road of marrying his fiancee and joining the established, moneyed white elite of the country.

Well-told in sparing language.

Scenes from a Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee

A writer I usually find very gripping and intense.  This book is autobiographical fiction and unfortunately it suffers from the same thing that annoys me in so much current literature - too much navel gazing and whining about life.  Head up the arse...
Will pick up some of his other stories as I haven't read him for a while.

Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway

A book I haven't read in years, decades even.  A great writer.  Stories worth reading, but I still know them too well.  Hemingway's he-man thing just doesn't grab me.

A Concise History of Romania - Keith Hitchins

Unfortunately a rather dull history focusing on the traditional areas of politics, international relations and key figures.  Very little detail on the changes in the lives of the actual citizens.

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Slavoj Zizek

Because the essays in this book are tied to a set of events (Arab Spring, Occupy) there is a bit more coherence and his points are more approachable.  Still, there is nothing like a consistent vision as to what might take the place of Capitalism.  He does make some good points though.  One point is impossibility of imagining what might come next, as it would be something completely new (or something old and even uglier...) and beyond what we currently have experience with.  He also makes clearer the link between capitalism and materialism - the great strength of capitalism is its productivity, its ability to produce material goods.  As long as our values are so tied to material goods, capitalism is here to stay.  His criticism of leftist ideas as simply prolonging the life of what is inherently an untenable economic structure is interesting... there is a point to be made here, but post-capitalism is hard to imagine and may not necessarily be any nicer.
The other point he makes is that revolution is probably impossible - the true endpoint of capitalism resides in the coming environmental cataclysm and ecological collapse.
I do enjoy his surprising take on current events, and his ability to make clear the underlying presumptions or false narratives in our media's discussion of these events.

Trouble in Paradise - Slavoj Zizek

Supposedly a critique of capitalism in four parts.  Zizek makes some interesting points but I find them rather overwhelmed by terminology and ruminations based on cultural theory a la Lacan et cie. Theoretical ramblings, polemical asides and divagations into current hot issues make it hard to follow his critical threads.
Maybe if you have background in Marxist theory, psychoanalysis and postmodernism this book would be approachable.

Comments about Zizek (and even more so about Lacan) are very mixed - from brilliance to charlatanism.

Crowded Grave - Martin Walker

ETA, Neanderthal and early Homo Sapiens history, animal rights activists - and foie gras.

Resistance Man - Martin Walker

Another good mystery (with a shootout at the end...sigh).  It involves art theft, French Resistance history, spying, internal security agencies, and nuclear warhead development.  As well as the usual wines, cheeses and good meals.

Il tempo invecchia in fretta: nove storie - Antonio Tabucchi

Another bit of a hit and miss by Tabucchi.  The more traditionally told stories I enjoyed, but his run-on endless paragraph monologue stories I had trouble focusing on and following - too much effort for what they were.

I suspect his big work is Sostiene Pereira.

Time's Arrow - Martin Amis

A brilliant project, but somewhat of a better idea than read, though still compelling enough.  The original idea is to retell the main character's life story backwards from old age to birth.  Movements are backwards, interactions are backwards, even conversations are backwards - it sometimes requires a fair bit of effort to picture exactly what is happening.  The main character is also a former Nazi involved in the work and death camps.
Something about the recounting of events backwards makes them all the more creepy and horrific. For example, exhuming corpses, bringing them back to life and restoring them to their homes.  In some way, it rehumanizes all these small horrors.  The narrator (a person or voice living inside the narrator's head) constantly refers to the amazing power of creativity in the universe -  all the humans dug up from the earth, pulled in from the smoke in the air, brought to life in the gas chamber on the back of a van.  The astounding ability of a foot to create an ant by simply lifting itself from the ground.  Somehow this again underlines the incredible destructive force of Nazis in particular but also of humans in general.
In recounting the human interactions backwards, especially those focused on women, you also get a sense of the violent emotional swings that run through troubled relationships.

An incredible feat of imagination on Amis' part.

The Devil's Cave - Martin Walker

Another well-written mystery, detective novel.  This time he links arms trading, shady property development and international finance with the small village in Dorgodgne through a holiday development proposal.  Same big shootout at the end, but not as Ramboesque as in the last one I read.
Still want to read more.

Madness in the Family - William Saroyan

Bit of a forgotten writer.
Some amusing short stories about life and the Armenian community in Fresno in the early and mid-20th c.
His stories seem very light, and not typical of the more angst ridden work of the 20th century, but he actually addresses some deep, almost mystical issues in some of them.  There is almost a sense of Sufi wisdom, or traditional wisdom and social insight of traditional middle-eastern societies.
The influence of his Armenian-ness, his cultural background is what makes him interesting in this book.

Try a couple more.

Fenland Chronicle - Sybil Marshall

A reference from the book "Fields".
A lovely chronicle of life in another time - a small village and farming community on the fens at the end of the 19th C and the beginning of the 20th C.  The original manuscript was started by the author's father in the wonderful voice of a man of little education of the time - lovely vocabulary and turns of phrases.  It reads more as spoken word than as writing.  The author finished off the book after her father's death and then went on to collect her mother's story.

A great evocation of life in another time before so much of what has shaped our life in the course of the 20th century, when people's worlds were much smaller.

Bruno - Martin Walker

A mystery/detective novel.  Well-written, evocative of place (Dordogne region, small village) with a nicely maintained building tension.  This part I really enjoyed, like a Louise Penny on steroids.  But the end of the book is very American - irresistible sexual attraction between two main gun-toting characters,  bit shoot out with a paramilitary flair.  Reads well at the time, but after the tension wears off, it seems a bit stereotyped in structure.
Will try a couple more before finally deciding.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

A history of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic States and Western Russia from the late 20's (Stalin's takeover) to the end of WWII.  An account of the upheaval, planned murder, mass relocations and the effects of war in this area that was occupied three times over that period - first by Russia and Germany, then by Germany and finally by Russia.
The history of this time period is not well-presented in the West's version of WWII.
Some facts:
In this period, Germany and Russia killed roughly the same number of people.
Most Jews who were killed in the war came from Poland - Western European Jews represented a small percentage.
As many Poles were killed by the Russians and the Germans as Jews.
Belarus lost half of it's population at that time.
Jews represented less than 1% of the German population at the start of the war.
More Jews were killed in one day by a bullet to the head than all the people who died in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped.
The Allies actually did not see any of the German death camps - they were all liberated by the Russians.  The Allies saw the work or concentration camps, and more people survived in those than died.
The Russian's system of concentration camps was far larger than what was established by the Nazis.

There is also some discussion of why Hitler and the Nazis developed the war plans they did, and also why Stalin was involved in so much ethnic and political cleansing (or Terrors).

A good read for a revision of our picture of WWII and where the action really was.