AROUND TOWN
What they're reading
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JASMINA DORDEVICOVA
Co-owner of Big Ben bookshop
Recently I read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. The story is simple: A young man named Daniel is taken by his father to the "cemetery of lost books." Daniel chooses a book by Julian Carax, and the whole thing starts to develop around that book. Daniel discovers that several people who are mentioned in the book disappeared, and that somebody is trying to destroy all the books by Carax that exist. It's very cool.
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MIROSLAVA NEMCOVA
Vice chairwoman of the Chamber of Deputies, bookstore owner
I recently finished reading The Seven Maverick Women by Elena Poniatowska. It describes the life of seven extraordinary women who affected the cultural life of Mexico. They were the painters Frida Kahlo and Maria Izquierdo; the authors Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos and Nellie Campobello; a poet, Pita Amor; and I would not want to forget Nahui Olin, a symbol of women's sexual emancipation. They were exceptional personalities and their lives were riveting dramas.
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LIBOR PESEK
Conductor laureate, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
A short time ago I read a Kurt Vonnegut book called Bluebeard. I'll turn 72 this year, and you become a little bit impatient with all the stories people invent. What I do read besides fiction are my Buddhist books: The Zen Doctrine of No Mind by Suzuki, Alan Watts' The Way of Zen, The Sutra of Huineng and The Diamond Sutra -- these are my constant companions. But this book is very good. It's about this painter, an Armenian, and he has no paintings left because he painted them with poor-quality colors and they all faded. Which reminds me very much of conducting: Besides records, which somehow remain, the rest of our work vanishes.
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