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Morning All,
Welcome to the 4th issue of the Cultural Reads Newsletter.
A bi-weekly book, music, and movie recommendation from different countries all around the world.
In this week’s newsletter: USA, France, Colombia.
During the summer of 2019, my housemate and I traveled to Lake Ohrid in Macedonia. When searching for activities, we found a small leather shop offering bookbinding workshops. We decided to give it a go and, despite being on holiday, arrived 10 minutes before the opening time.
Not much later, the big and friendly-looking owner appeared on his bike to open the store for us. He welcomed us with a warm smile, followed by a double shot of Rakija (a hard liquor that served as a tradition and amplified the warm welcome feeling).
As we sat there learning how to bind books, a somewhat geeky-looking man with glasses and white socks in sandals walked in. He went straight to the old piano in the middle of the small store and started playing You Must Believe in Spring by Bill Evans. It turned out he was a university professor teaching film music and had to leave his close friend for a job in another country. Playing this jazz piece was his emotional way of saying goodbye. As you can imagine, this unique moment stayed with us, and the song became a memory of our trip.
Although I wish this were the story of me discovering Bill Evans, I had actually heard about him before. He had long been in my top 3 jazz musicians, and the trip only confirmed that.
Evans, born in 1929 in New Jersey, was one of the best pianists of his time. He featured on the infamous Kind of Blue album alongside Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley and produced many albums of his own.
Amongst my favorites are Portrait in Jazz and Live at the Village Vanguard.
France is known for its movie scene (think of Festival de Cannes), so it shouldn’t surprise you that this newsletter features several French movies. A recent one I particularly enjoyed was Deerskin.
Deerskin is an absurdist comedy about a man who becomes mesmerized by his leather deerskin jacket. He pictures himself in a world with only one coat, his. To create this world, he is willing to deceive and even kill. A hilarious and strange movie that surprises with its uniqueness but also contains an underlying symbolic message.
Gabriel García Márquez is considered one of the best authors of all time.
The Colombian author is known for popularizing magic realism, a literary style that inserts magical elements into otherwise ordinary and realistic situations.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, with his most famous works being One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. I’m still to try reading his works in Spanish, but it’s a challenge.
