Art Garfunkel famously keeps track of the books he has read since 1968. As of writing this, the count is 1327 (he does not add a review). I thought I could do something similar but I am adding short reviews of books as I read them, and I rake my brain over what I read over the last decades. This is, evidently, a work-in-progress: there are 584 reviews so far. Titles marked with a * are particular favorites.
Steen Steensen Blicher: Samlede noveller *
A parson, living in rural Denmark, and a wanderer, visiting remote villages and homesteads. He also wrote fiction and poetry extensively and did a bit of translation. The first Danish short story writer of real significance and master of this medium. His core work of some 20 or 30 stories are masterpieces that can stand up to anything. His worldview is melancholic or even tragic, and his prose introduces forward-looking techniques such as highly unreliable narrators. Even after all the years (he lived from 1782 to 1848) his best stories are as fresh as anything written in Denmark and are genuinely wonderful literature and very readable. No cobwebs here.