Dr. Dillingham reads

I've posted book recommendations from my former English professor before. I recommended he read our latest book club read, Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Declares: A Testimony, and he wrote to say he liked it. I couldn't believe he approved of a book we read. He's so well-read and discriminating in his tastes that I thought he'd hate anything we chose. :)

Here's an excerpt from his e-mail with other recommendations in case you are looking for some intellectual reading:

"I can't remember right now whether I have mentioned to you already that I did read Tabucchi's Pereira Declares: A Testimony, with great enjoyment. I plan to look around for more of Tabucchi's work. That's a very clever and powerful novel.

Coincidentally, I read it as part of a sequence of reading that started with Sandor Marai's Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948, and included a couple of books by the British travel writer, Norman Lewis---his amazing memoir, Jackdaw Cakes, and his book on being in Spain during the 1930s and then his diary (published much later) Naples '4, which chronicled his time as part of the occupation of southern Italy in that year. So the whole account of life in Portugal leading up to WWII was part of a fairly rich context and probably acquired some added intensity from the related readings."