Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

This is another one of my all time favourite authors. Picked this book up at the second hand book shop that also has a cafe and occasionally music in the courtyard, was very happy to get a copy. Such a slim little book, chock full of intense readerly experience. It made me think somehow of 'concentration' of reading experiences - remining me that some books are kind of full of air, the interesting thoughts are few and far between, they are like eating fluffy white bread that doesn't reallly nourish or engage you in digestion, you can eat slices and slices before feeling satisfied. Other books, like this one, are intense dark rye, where just a sliver has such intense flavour that you linger over the sliver, and need time before the next slice. That was a laboured way of saying that I'm reading this book slowly, that I've stopped just 2 chapters from the end, because I worry that I've whizzed through annd haven't really given it the time for ruminating that I'd like to. Every few pages I smile, or snort in happy recognition, or want to write down quotes, or draw it, or read it out loud to someone. It seem wry and full of amazing images and like a kind of mirage, hinting at meanings, showing them, obscuring them.

The stories are all about cities, tiny little vignettes of mystical cities, but the characteristics of these cities are the characteristics of our cities, all cities, of us, of all people. It maps the spread of fears and desires and movements and change and lack of change, of ritual and interractions. It has a reallly lovely texture about it.