The Running Man by Richard Bachman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This chronological King journey is not a sprint; it's more of a marathon. So I'm still at the 80s and one book before the Gunslinger, which kicked off the Dark Tower series. The Running Man is a decent book, a greatly paced one, a dystopian sci-fi novel, over 20 years before the Hunger Games series. It has a kinship with a previous Bachman novel, the Long Walk, the only exception being that the latter would never be made into a movie with Arnie starring in it. This book is a meditation on television, social inequality, and on people not giving a shit about what's going on outside their yard. It's not one of King's greats but definitely not one of his worst. The story of Ben Richards is dark, intriguing and captivating, and as every good dystopian sci-fi novel, it is an imaginative commentary on the author's present: 35 years later, it's still an entertaining, amazingly relevant read.

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Sorry, Wrong Country by Konstantine Paradias
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We spend so much time reading and writing fiction perpetuating the same clichés about life, the universe and everything, that sometimes we forget how truly unbelievably funny and unimitably weird non-fiction stories can be. Well, this story collection with its adorable weirdos is a proper kick in fiction’s crotch. Konstantinos’s style may have been shaped from fiction, and I’m pretty sure (or in a few cases, I just hope) that the lines between memory and imagination in this book were quite blurry, but it is in these short non-fiction stories that he really shines, as it feels like this guy was absolutely enjoying every single word he typed. You could take these stories as polaroids of a modern Greece in the recession. Or as portraits of love letters to a bunch of shady characters of Konstantinos’s past, caught in shady places doing shady things. However you see them, you will quickly realize that the best thing about Sorry Wrong Country is not just the author’s talent for observation of these fringe characters he crossed paths with but in the tender –yet downright funny– way he treats their life stories while making them subjects: Konstantinos’s weaves these stories with a freshness, an unpredictability and a non-cheesiness in his prose, seamlessly connecting the detail with the abstract, the real with the surreal, the sweet with the bitter, and the sardonic haha with the ironic boohoo. These everyday stories of a small country’s unsung heroes, each of them deserving to fill a novella in their own right, will introduce you to a side of Greece that you won’t find in your average coffee table book; they will make you think of the human condition – even better, they’ll make you chuckle with it, and in every few pages, you’ll catch yourself wondering how well you know your customers, your coworkers or your next-door neighbors, wherever you may live.

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