Elif Shafak

This book is a house with multiple doors, endless corridors and windows into eternity. No two readings of The Arcades Project can ever be identical. After you finish it, the way you perceive the city you live in won’t be the same again. Streets and arcades, modernity with its illusions and promises, all told through the eyes and wanderings of a flaneur…. It is an unfinished project, but then again, perhaps a book of this magnitude could never have a definite end. Benjamin is an extraordinary thinker, a lonely rebel, an odd revolutionary that doesn’t quite fit into any tribe, a man of immense intellect and hopeful despair, and in the words of Hannah Arendt, a failed mystic. I love all of that about him.