♣ I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

A book I enjoyed reading is Everything is illuminated from Jonathan Safran Foer. It's a bit hard to explain what the book is about, but it's fascinating from the very start.

There are three intertwining stories. The first storyline in the book is about Jonathan, a. k. a. "Jon-fen", an American tourist looking for his roots in Ukraine. Between his reporting on the journey, you can also read some extracts from the diary of Alex, his Ukranian guide. He comments on the trip from his own particular perspective. What makes it even more interesting to read, is that Alex is making an attempt to write down his thoughts in English. Since  he's not very familiar with the language he uses a translator from time to time, which results in some funny sentence constructions. Alex's chronicles were my absolute favourite part. I loved it! The third storyline is a bit hard to follow and tells some legends about Jonathan's family.

The book reads like a train. ;-)

(leest als een trein...)

I enjoyed it so much that I want to start another one of his books soon: Stop eating animals

If you don't like reading, there's also the film starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz from the band Gogol Bordello. The film focuses on Jonathan's trip to Ukraine and is hard to compare to the book. But it's a masterpiece on it's own. I love the filmwork, the soundtrack and... Alex! :-)

“From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light—a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut’s eyes."

Alex

"My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. Father used to dub me Shapka, for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that. It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative. I have many many girls, believe me, and they all have a different name for me. One dubs me Baby, not because I am a baby, but because she attends to me. Another dubs me All Night. Do you want to know why? I have a girl who dubs me Currency, because I disseminate so much currency around her. She licks my chops for it."

Jonathan ("Jon-fen" according to Alex...)

That's all folks!