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Invisible Cities is one of six entries for Italo Calvino (1923-1985) in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The other five are

• The Castle of Crossed Destinies(1969, translated into English 1977, on my TBR);
• If On a Winter’s Night, a Traveller(1979, translated 1981, see my review;
• Our Ancestors (1960, translated into English 1962.  This is the ‘heraldic trio’ comprising The Cloven Viscount,  (1952, translated 1959) The Baron in the Trees(1957, translated 1959, on my TBR) and The Nonexistent Knight, 1959, translated 1962);
• The Path to the Nest of Spiders(1947, translated 1947 and revised 1998. I have this on order); and
• Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988, essays, translated 1993)

(Links on the titles are to Wikipedia.)

(1001 Books does not include The Complete Cosmicomics (1997), probably because it’s not a novel, it’s a collection of short stories, one of which…

If anything in this review raises issues for you, help is available at Beyond Blue.

The Crying Room is Gretchen Shirm’s second novel: you can read my review of Where the Light Falls (2016) here. The novels share similar preoccupations: failures of communication, mismatched personalities and an enigmatic disappearance that leaves damaged people in its wake.  But though both novels are quiet, reflective meditations that reveal the inner worlds of introspective characters, The Crying Room begins with a striking evocation of the commodification of grief in our time.

The Crying Room is literally, just that.  Susie, who cries easily, is employed to monitor people who use it, who come in to shed their tears and then leave.  She intervenes only if someone comes in on three consecutive days because it is her job to determine whether or not these recurrent visitors would benefit from counselling sessions.  There is…

Girl On A Balcony Watching A Couple By A Lake – Philip Richard Morris.(1836-1902) Wikioo.

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Do you have the skills, the wisdom and the self-awareness to observe without evaluating? This is not easy, as many of us tend to jump to quick, unconsidered conclusions and to make speedy, unthinking evaluations of other people, of situations, even of ourselves.

Alexander Jawlensky. Girl With A Red Bow. 1911. Wikimedia Commons.

“One of the signs of intelligence is to be able to accept the facts without being offended.”

Richard P. Feynman

This quotation complements the one above; it brings in the concept of being offended by ‘the facts’ rather than observing them with an open mind and looking at what may be our own biases, prejudices and rigidities.

I am not implying here that we ‘should’ never be offended…