Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai

Blurb from Goodreads

Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town—offers long rants and disquisitions on his own attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! At least, I hope everyone had a great start to the work week. I hope it is not as manic as the song by The Bangles goes. Why are the weekends just two days? Nevertheless, I hope you were all able to shrug off the weekend blues. I can’t say I am successful. I wish weekends were longer. It comes as no surprise that Monday is the least favorite day of the week by most. Still, Mondays don’t have to be that bad. The first day of the week is a chance to learn and grow. It is an opening for a new start. As such, I hope that everyone will have a productive and great week ahead. On another note, we are really approaching the final stretch of the year. I hope that the remaining days of 2023 will be filled with nothing but good news and blessings. I hope you will be repaid for the hard work you poured in this year.

In terms of reading, 2023 has been a year of surprises. For the second year running, I was able to read over 100 books. This was a lifelong dream I finally achieved last year. I thought this year was going to be a slow reading year but the opposite happened. Not only that, I have broken my personal record year and I am extending it even more with every book I read. I am currently reading George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, my 115th book this year. The year is far from over, thus, I have more opportunities to extend my personal record. Apart from this, I have read my 1,000th and my 1,100th novels this year. I have been thinking about how a tenth of all the novels I read were books I read just this year. Unfortunately, I am lagging quite behind on my reading challenges. Nevertheless, it is my goal to complete these reading challenges; this is my goal for the remaining weeks of the year.

Opening this blogging week is another Goodreads Monday update. The book that I am featuring this week, however, is not part of any of these reading challenges. Nevertheless, László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a book that I am looking forward to. Actually, I was considering making the book part of my foray into European literature this year but due to time constraints, I won’t be able to. I have been focusing on books that are part of my reading challenges. I have been looking forward to exploring the oeuvre of the Hungarian writer whom I first encountered during the lead-up to the awarding of the 2018/2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was touted as among the frontrunners; it ultimately went to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Austria’s Peter Handke (2019). This setback, however, did not dampen my growing interest in his works.

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, if I manage to read it in early 2024, will be my second novel by Krasznahorkai, after Sátántangó. In reading the former, I will be building on what the latter has established. Sátántangó was rather dark but it provided me with a distinct literary experience, something I am expecting from Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. The novel was originally published in 2016 in Hungarian as Báró Wenckheim hazatér. Its English translation was released in 2019, with the English translation winning the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel, it seems, has an experimental structure, with pages-long sentences and unbroken paragraphs. This is quite similar to Sátántangó so it should be no trouble. I am, above all, interested in what the book has to offer, of what dimension of the Hungarian writer’s oeuvre it will let me experience.

How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!