What Are You Reading in Lisbon?

I often read more than one book at a time, and my most recent compendium of odds and ends has been especially pleasurable, a great way to begin what will be a year of living in Lisbon and topping off a number of books-in-progress.
I'm still buzzing from Roy Kesey's prize-winning novella, Nothing in the World. The main character, Josko Branovic, is conscripted into a hastily assembled Croatian army unit in the face of the Serb invasion. He's a dreamy loner given a gun and just enough professional supervision to make him, when he's the only surviver of a rocket attack on his isolated platoon, truly dangerous to himself and others, especially when a shard of shrapnel in his skull has given him access to a siren's song he follows across a war's wasted landscape. In the past couple of years I've read a number of Roy Kesey's stories, and I'm always impressed at how he can inhabit fictional worlds that appear to be far from his own experience.
Soon after finishing Kesey, I turned the last page on Octavia Butler's Mind of My Mind. The mutants of this early novel by the MacArthur-annointed science-fiction writer remain recognizable as flawed and fragile humans, and Butler does this without long bladelike fingernails, super tongues, conjured storms or blue skin. Instead, she imagines a small multi-racial group of humans who can share thoughts, and the shifting collective interior landscape she fashions for her characters is all the drama we need.
Meanwhile, I've reread Goncalo M. Taveres's Mister Valery, one of a number of short books that make up the Portuguese author's growing fictional "neighborhood." Each book--in deft translations by Roopanjali Roy--features very short stories by or about characters whose personalities are based on the work of famous writers: Mr. Brecht, Mr. Henri, Mr. Calvino, Mr. Valery, etc. (Taveres even provides a little street map with the locations of his characters.) Taveres's work will first appear in the United States this fall in the magazines Hunger Mountain and Ninth Letter.
Right now I'm in the middle of War Music, Christopher Logue's ongoing and very free translation of Homer's The Iliad. Despite an occasional anachronistic misstep, Logue's version is oddly faithful to the original, and a wild ride to read--rhythms uncoiling like tight springs, breathless cinematic shifts of scene, luscious language worth lingering over that never gets in the way of the headlong narrative pull.
What's next? I'll probably try Monica Ali's new novel Alentego Blue, set in the Alentego region of Portugal, where she owns a home. No matter what book I may be reading at the time, every day I dip into Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, the posthumous prose compendium of the musings of Bernardo Soares, one of the Portuguese poet's alter egos. The book is translated with what apppears to be transparent ease by Richard Zenith: "But I control myself and calm down. 'I'm the size of what I see!' And the phrase becomes my entire soul, I rest all my emotions on it, and over me, on the outside, as over the city on the outside, there descends an indecipherable peace from the hard moonlight that broadly begins to shine as the night falls." It is hard to beat an idle moment spent trolling for entries like that.--Philip Graham