200 kilos of sandalwood Recommended for 2009 
With some delay, as usual, I send you the list of recommendations for this year has just begun. As always, it is an arbitrary selection I made in my readings, 2008.
The delay is due (and I mean more like recommendation that as an excuse) to have spent the first days of getting lost in the Provence. Said Thomas Mann and Death in Venice
to travel is a hygienic measure that one must take from time to time. Especially, I would add, if you live in a country like Spain.
readings are twelve for twelve months. There is less novel and more tests on the recommendations of previous years. He added three comics for the simple reason that I believe the smartest thing I've read this year. There are also two great books on India and two fiction books are not novels.
I wish you health, peace and good reads for 2009, and remember that he spends more time reading, less time you have to slaughter their neighbors, a habit is deeply rooted in the history of mankind.
- Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (Anagram). Why on earth should write a writer? Why can not one limited to the overwhelming apathy of Bartleby, Melville's character that before any order, invitation or suggestion responded tersely and unchanging with his "I'd rather not? What about the writers not work? Can you write a book only footnotes page?
- Want to Be a Millionaire, Vikas Swarup (Anagram). Highly original novel about the story of an extraordinarily complex country: India. All in fifteen questions and answers, as in the famous quiz show.
- innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley (Anagram). The adventures of an anthropologist among Dowayan caustic Cameroon. Without ethnocentric paternalism.
"Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth (Mondadori). One of the best books of the novelist of Newark. Roth raw, oozing sarcasm and black humor and the healthy habit of laughing without mercy of their own.
"The truce Mario Benedetti (Bibliotex). In one of his most famous novels, Uruguayan writer investigates the mechanisms of disenchantment, in how life is slipping through your fingers and nothing you can do about it.
-India on the inside: a cultural guide for the traveler, Alvaro Enterría. Comprehensive and entertaining encyclopedia of India. Nothing topical or superficial. A true gem written with passion and scholarship on this complex country.
-The farewells, Juan Carlos Onetti (reading point). The preferred Onetti novel of hers. A story in which almost nothing seems to stand still, but in which almost anything goes.
"I would not have seen the man, the first Once you entered the store, nothing but hands, "
-head dog Morten Ramsland (The Salamander). The novel has something of the mythical, primordial or foundational history. A hallucinatory narrative that Garcia Marquez or Gunter Grass is that for this magnificent novel.
"Somewhere in eastern Germany, my grandfather runs across a plain. The Germans pursued and lost a shoe, is freezing. Crescent lies a pale glow over the landscape and transforms it into a plowed field with soldiers frozen, half-buried in mud. "
-hidden pages of history By Fernando Marias and Juan Bas (Target). The plots contain an interesting paradox: they tend to be pure foolishness on the ground but also journalistic and entertaining in fiction. What if Goya had painted three pestles? What if Lorca had survived his execution?
-Pyongyang by Guy Delisle (Astiberri). Viewed from outside the political system of North Korea is the most delusional imaginable. What exactly is the Juche? What is the border between ideology and religion?
-Gorazde: protected area , Joe Sacco (Planeta DeAgostini). A must on the Balkan conflict drawn by a real war reporter. Sacco Balloons are spectacular.
-Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Norma Editorial). Satrappi becomes something like a Mafalda in Tehran. With sensitivity and intelligence, tells the recent history of their country through their own.
