> Audiobook
> Orig published in 2005
> Set on the island of Houart off the coast of France, early 1900s
> Scottish portrait painter is painting a portrait while telling his own story which led him to the island, 1st person narration
> monologue.....painter isolates self on obscure island
>. Impressionism...safe, made to hang on the wall next to Granny's needlework...interesting
>. Notoriety v. Fame
> role of critic in the art world and in the life of the artist
> Henry McAlpine, the artist
> make yourself great by denigrating others.....
> learned to impose himself on others, assaulting them with opinions
> revenge or resoklution?
> LibraryThing Review: Let me introduce you to Henry McAlpine, a self-imposed exile from England, who currently resides on an island of the coast of France in the early 1920s. In this unusually constructed novel, the entire book is a monologue by Henry, as he paints the portrait of a former friend, an English art critic. Sounds innocuous enough, but the plot thickens as both the protrait and the story progress. What follows is a harsh examination of the art world, notoriety v. fame, the manipulations of art critics in general and of Henry's friend in particular, and the disastrous outcome of the critic's choices. A dark, yet enlightening story. Very good read!
Monday, December 19, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
"Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern ****
> Audiobook
> Orig published 2011....rave reviews by LT members
> Narrator is the same man who did the Harry Potter books...fabulous
> London, 1874
>. Celia, Hector (daughter/father), Alexander/Marko
> wager
>. Les reveurs, led by the clockmaker
> grounding...making the unbelievable look believable?..Mr. Barris.....pushes each other to the bounds of what is possible...keeps both their secrets
> competion v. Collaboration
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook....Well....Wrap yourself up in a red scarf, become one of the many "reveurs" (dreamers)who follow the "Night Circus" around the world and settle in for a mystical, charming, luscious, and definitely dreamy read! Contortionists, tarot readers, illusionists and many more populate this story, this dream of two students pitted against one another in a challenge which will only end in the destruction of one them. In a Harry Potterish world of those who practice magic and those who are magic, Erin Morgenstern has captured my imagination. A real pleasure! (And I must put in a plug for the audio version with Jim Dale as narrator!)
>. Poppet & Widget......seers...twins..... Secrets lose their power when shared
> Orig published 2011....rave reviews by LT members
> Narrator is the same man who did the Harry Potter books...fabulous
> London, 1874
>. Celia, Hector (daughter/father), Alexander/Marko
> wager
>. Les reveurs, led by the clockmaker
> grounding...making the unbelievable look believable?..Mr. Barris.....pushes each other to the bounds of what is possible...keeps both their secrets
> competion v. Collaboration
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook....Well....Wrap yourself up in a red scarf, become one of the many "reveurs" (dreamers)who follow the "Night Circus" around the world and settle in for a mystical, charming, luscious, and definitely dreamy read! Contortionists, tarot readers, illusionists and many more populate this story, this dream of two students pitted against one another in a challenge which will only end in the destruction of one them. In a Harry Potterish world of those who practice magic and those who are magic, Erin Morgenstern has captured my imagination. A real pleasure! (And I must put in a plug for the audio version with Jim Dale as narrator!)
>. Poppet & Widget......seers...twins..... Secrets lose their power when shared
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
"Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh *****
> Group Read on LibraryThing
> This may sound a bit odd, but I knew as I opened the book to the first page that I would enjoy this read. The paper felt so good to the touch...it is a longtime thing for me that part of the pleasure of reading an actual book is the feel of it, the type used, the paper. You know how nowadays you can pick up a book of 300 or more pages, but the weight of the book is very light? This hardcover edition has heft! And the glossary....it is so much more than a glossary...it is a conversation about the love of language. I have never seen that before. And all of that is before even starting to actually read the book.......
> p.3...Opening line is lovely...."The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream; how could she have, living as she did in norther Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast?"
> p.35..."...how frail a creature was a human being, to be tamed by such tiny doses of this substance! She saw now why the factory in Ghazipur was so diligently patrolled by the sahibs and their sepoys--for if a little bit of this gum could give her such power over the life, the character, the very soul of this elderly woman, then with more of it at her disposal, why should she not be able to seize kingdoms and control multitudes?".....Deeti begins to see the power of opium
> p. 87...absolutely horrifying imagery of men squashing opium with their fee while totally wasted by its opiate power
>. As I began reading the first 100 pages or so, I am reminded of the way I felt when I started reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.....overwhelmed. However, taking the same leap of literary faith now as I did then, i had confidence that it would all start to make sense......and it does. So many interesting characters and themes.....opium, castes, India as the place Europe hides its shame and greed, life amidst innumerable languages and beliefs.....Ghosh has tackled a mammoth story.....enjoying it thoroughly!
> p.159..."...it was as if the uncovering of her face had stripped the veil from his own masnhood, leaving him naked and exposed to the gloating pity of the world, to a shame that could never be overcome."....Neel seeing his wife's veil dropping as the police take him away....also a metaphor for the stripping of the dignity of millions
>. Kalua's rescue of Deeti from the funeral pyre.......love it and their wedding! I also loved Neel's grand meal....complete with chamber pot for a vase!
> p.163..."Even then she did not feel herself to be living in the same sense as before: a curious feeling, of joy mixed with resignation, crept into her heart, for it was as if she really had died and been delivered betimes in rebirth, to her next life; she had shed the body of the old Deeti, with the burden of its karma; she had paid the price her stars had demanded of her, and was free now to create a new destiny as she willed, with whom she chose--and she knew that it was with Kalua that this life would be lived, until another death claimed the body that he had torn from the flames"
> p.169..."...or having discovered that life ashore was far more attractive when you were at sea than when your feet were a-trip on the slick turf of lubber-land."....like that
> p.219..."Would it not be the duty of this court to deal with such a man in exemplary fashion, not just in strict observance of the law, but also to discharge that sacred trust that charges us to instruct the natives of this land in the laws and usages that govern the conduct of civilized nations?"...First, who entrusted the English, Second....who entrusted the English?
> p.221..."In the course of his trial it had become almost laughably obvious to Neel that in this system of justice, it was the English themselves...who were exempt from the law as it applied to others: it was they who had become the world's new Brahmins."
> p.223..."Each woman had always practised her own method in the belief that none other could possibly exist: it was bewildering at first, then funny, then exciting...."....budding awareness of variation within their own culture, which is exciting to them but threatening to others
>p.232..."The table's centrepiece.....a stuffed roast peacock, mounted upon a silver stand, with its tail outspread as if for an imminent mating." How appetizing!
> I love the "Thermantidote"....the antidote to overheating which backfired! Like most of the government's antidotes in this book!
> p. 242..."We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretense of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history." Chilling words from Captain Chillingworth
> The story plays to opposites: kindness/cruelty, acceptance/rejection, loyalty/disloyalty
> Humor is delightfully dark
> So, I looked up the definition of "ibis" in case it had anything interesting to add to the understanding of the novel......
any of several wading birds related to the herons and constituting the family Threskiornithidae that inhabit warm regions in both hemispheres and feed on aquatic and amphibious animals and are distinguished by a long slender downwardly curved bill resembling a curlew's bill
Do you think the ship is feeding on the amphibious humans who come in contact with it?
> absolutely love the playfulness with the languages blending.....
> p.253..."There's nothing more annoying than to be puckrowed just when you're looking forward to a sip of laudanum and a nice long sleep."...LOL...I agree
> p.300...."...was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing to do with the response of the object of one's care--just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?"....Neel's exoerience with his cellmate ......parenthood
> p.325..."...:for when a moment arrives that is so much feared and so long awaited, it perforates the veil of everyday expectation in such a way as tio reveakl the prodigious darkness of the unknown."....Deeti boards the Ibis
> p.328..."On a boat of pilgrims, no one can lose caste and everyone is the same; it's like taking a boat to the temple of Jagannath, in Puri. From now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings....". Paulette with the women on the Ibis....I love the "ship-sibling" concept, seems true of sharing any important experience with another person.
> p.328..."It was now Deeti understood why the image of the vessel had been revealed to her that day, when she stood immersed in the Ganga (rebirth imagery); it was because her new self, her new life, had been gestating all this while in the belly of this creature, this vessel that was the Mother-Father of her new family....an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come....".
> I must admit to feeling genuine apprehension when the cat left the Ibis....
New Vocabulary:
1) elision: the act or an instance of dropping out or omitting something : OMISSION, CUT
> p.348..."...the young man burst into tears, weeping so artfully that the turban wound itself around and around the couple till they were sealed inside a snug cocoon."....wonderful imagery
> p.350..."they were more than plants to her, they were the companions of her earliest childhood and their shoots seemed almost to be her own, plunged deep into this soil; no matter where she went or for how long, she knew that nothing would ever tie her to a place as did these childhood roots."....literally and figuratively, lovely phrasing...Paulette's last views of her childhood home
> Foreshadowing in threes: cat left ship, Baboo Nob Kissin Pander's rumbling bowels, and the ship crossing the path of the drowned bodies when leaving the Ganga for the open sea.....
> p.363..."...it was impossible to think of this as water at all--for water surely needed a boundary, a rim, a shore, to give it shape and hold it in place? This was a firmament, like the night sky, holding the vessel aloft as if it were a planet or a star.".....Deeti's first thoughts upon seeing the open sea ahead of them
> p.365..."No matter how hard the times at home may have been, in the ashes of every past there were a few cinders of memory that glowed with warmth- and now,m those embers of recollection took on a new life, in the light of which their presence her, in the belly of the ship that was about to be cast into an abyss, seemed incomprehensible, a thing that could not be explained except as a lapse from sanity."
> p.367..."How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart."..........I hope it is to take them to a better life?
> This dual personality, channeling thing of Baboo Nob Kissin and Taramony is quite fascinating.....I am wondering where it will lead for him and the passengers?
> p. 415..."She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life; it was this minuscule orb--at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive , sustaining and vengeful." Deeti looking at a poppy seed
>Title: The Ibis is a vessel named after a bird that wades in the shallows, yet it sets out upon the "Black Water" full of people, many of whose lives have been shaped by the almighty poppy, and who seem to be out of their natural element in one way or another. As a reader, I am left wondering, hoping, and fearing for these characters adrift in their story. Looking forward to seeing where each of them find a place to moor.
> LibraryThing Review: "Sea of Poppies" red like an Indian version of "The Fellowship of the Ring". No coincidence that it is part of a trilogy! Ghosh's story is a daring blend of social classes/castes, languages, religions and more represented in a wonderful array of characters, all of whom dare to begin their journey out into the sea aboard the Ibis, a schooner. This is a love story, an adventure, a metaphor for life and more. The reader meets and either loves or abhors each of the memorable characters, their marvelous names, their multitude of histories, and their multiple aspects. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next installment of the trilogy, "River of Smoke".
> This may sound a bit odd, but I knew as I opened the book to the first page that I would enjoy this read. The paper felt so good to the touch...it is a longtime thing for me that part of the pleasure of reading an actual book is the feel of it, the type used, the paper. You know how nowadays you can pick up a book of 300 or more pages, but the weight of the book is very light? This hardcover edition has heft! And the glossary....it is so much more than a glossary...it is a conversation about the love of language. I have never seen that before. And all of that is before even starting to actually read the book.......
> p.3...Opening line is lovely...."The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream; how could she have, living as she did in norther Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast?"
> p.35..."...how frail a creature was a human being, to be tamed by such tiny doses of this substance! She saw now why the factory in Ghazipur was so diligently patrolled by the sahibs and their sepoys--for if a little bit of this gum could give her such power over the life, the character, the very soul of this elderly woman, then with more of it at her disposal, why should she not be able to seize kingdoms and control multitudes?".....Deeti begins to see the power of opium
> p. 87...absolutely horrifying imagery of men squashing opium with their fee while totally wasted by its opiate power
>. As I began reading the first 100 pages or so, I am reminded of the way I felt when I started reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.....overwhelmed. However, taking the same leap of literary faith now as I did then, i had confidence that it would all start to make sense......and it does. So many interesting characters and themes.....opium, castes, India as the place Europe hides its shame and greed, life amidst innumerable languages and beliefs.....Ghosh has tackled a mammoth story.....enjoying it thoroughly!
> p.159..."...it was as if the uncovering of her face had stripped the veil from his own masnhood, leaving him naked and exposed to the gloating pity of the world, to a shame that could never be overcome."....Neel seeing his wife's veil dropping as the police take him away....also a metaphor for the stripping of the dignity of millions
>. Kalua's rescue of Deeti from the funeral pyre.......love it and their wedding! I also loved Neel's grand meal....complete with chamber pot for a vase!
> p.163..."Even then she did not feel herself to be living in the same sense as before: a curious feeling, of joy mixed with resignation, crept into her heart, for it was as if she really had died and been delivered betimes in rebirth, to her next life; she had shed the body of the old Deeti, with the burden of its karma; she had paid the price her stars had demanded of her, and was free now to create a new destiny as she willed, with whom she chose--and she knew that it was with Kalua that this life would be lived, until another death claimed the body that he had torn from the flames"
> p.169..."...or having discovered that life ashore was far more attractive when you were at sea than when your feet were a-trip on the slick turf of lubber-land."....like that
> p.219..."Would it not be the duty of this court to deal with such a man in exemplary fashion, not just in strict observance of the law, but also to discharge that sacred trust that charges us to instruct the natives of this land in the laws and usages that govern the conduct of civilized nations?"...First, who entrusted the English, Second....who entrusted the English?
> p.221..."In the course of his trial it had become almost laughably obvious to Neel that in this system of justice, it was the English themselves...who were exempt from the law as it applied to others: it was they who had become the world's new Brahmins."
> p.223..."Each woman had always practised her own method in the belief that none other could possibly exist: it was bewildering at first, then funny, then exciting...."....budding awareness of variation within their own culture, which is exciting to them but threatening to others
>p.232..."The table's centrepiece.....a stuffed roast peacock, mounted upon a silver stand, with its tail outspread as if for an imminent mating." How appetizing!
> I love the "Thermantidote"....the antidote to overheating which backfired! Like most of the government's antidotes in this book!
> p. 242..."We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretense of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history." Chilling words from Captain Chillingworth
> The story plays to opposites: kindness/cruelty, acceptance/rejection, loyalty/disloyalty
> Humor is delightfully dark
> So, I looked up the definition of "ibis" in case it had anything interesting to add to the understanding of the novel......
any of several wading birds related to the herons and constituting the family Threskiornithidae that inhabit warm regions in both hemispheres and feed on aquatic and amphibious animals and are distinguished by a long slender downwardly curved bill resembling a curlew's bill
Do you think the ship is feeding on the amphibious humans who come in contact with it?
> absolutely love the playfulness with the languages blending.....
> p.253..."There's nothing more annoying than to be puckrowed just when you're looking forward to a sip of laudanum and a nice long sleep."...LOL...I agree
> p.300...."...was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing to do with the response of the object of one's care--just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?"....Neel's exoerience with his cellmate ......parenthood
> p.325..."...:for when a moment arrives that is so much feared and so long awaited, it perforates the veil of everyday expectation in such a way as tio reveakl the prodigious darkness of the unknown."....Deeti boards the Ibis
> p.328..."On a boat of pilgrims, no one can lose caste and everyone is the same; it's like taking a boat to the temple of Jagannath, in Puri. From now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings....". Paulette with the women on the Ibis....I love the "ship-sibling" concept, seems true of sharing any important experience with another person.
> p.328..."It was now Deeti understood why the image of the vessel had been revealed to her that day, when she stood immersed in the Ganga (rebirth imagery); it was because her new self, her new life, had been gestating all this while in the belly of this creature, this vessel that was the Mother-Father of her new family....an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come....".
> I must admit to feeling genuine apprehension when the cat left the Ibis....
New Vocabulary:
1) elision: the act or an instance of dropping out or omitting something : OMISSION, CUT
> p.348..."...the young man burst into tears, weeping so artfully that the turban wound itself around and around the couple till they were sealed inside a snug cocoon."....wonderful imagery
> p.350..."they were more than plants to her, they were the companions of her earliest childhood and their shoots seemed almost to be her own, plunged deep into this soil; no matter where she went or for how long, she knew that nothing would ever tie her to a place as did these childhood roots."....literally and figuratively, lovely phrasing...Paulette's last views of her childhood home
> Foreshadowing in threes: cat left ship, Baboo Nob Kissin Pander's rumbling bowels, and the ship crossing the path of the drowned bodies when leaving the Ganga for the open sea.....
> p.363..."...it was impossible to think of this as water at all--for water surely needed a boundary, a rim, a shore, to give it shape and hold it in place? This was a firmament, like the night sky, holding the vessel aloft as if it were a planet or a star.".....Deeti's first thoughts upon seeing the open sea ahead of them
> p.365..."No matter how hard the times at home may have been, in the ashes of every past there were a few cinders of memory that glowed with warmth- and now,m those embers of recollection took on a new life, in the light of which their presence her, in the belly of the ship that was about to be cast into an abyss, seemed incomprehensible, a thing that could not be explained except as a lapse from sanity."
> p.367..."How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart."..........I hope it is to take them to a better life?
> This dual personality, channeling thing of Baboo Nob Kissin and Taramony is quite fascinating.....I am wondering where it will lead for him and the passengers?
> p. 415..."She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life; it was this minuscule orb--at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive , sustaining and vengeful." Deeti looking at a poppy seed
>Title: The Ibis is a vessel named after a bird that wades in the shallows, yet it sets out upon the "Black Water" full of people, many of whose lives have been shaped by the almighty poppy, and who seem to be out of their natural element in one way or another. As a reader, I am left wondering, hoping, and fearing for these characters adrift in their story. Looking forward to seeing where each of them find a place to moor.
> LibraryThing Review: "Sea of Poppies" red like an Indian version of "The Fellowship of the Ring". No coincidence that it is part of a trilogy! Ghosh's story is a daring blend of social classes/castes, languages, religions and more represented in a wonderful array of characters, all of whom dare to begin their journey out into the sea aboard the Ibis, a schooner. This is a love story, an adventure, a metaphor for life and more. The reader meets and either loves or abhors each of the memorable characters, their marvelous names, their multitude of histories, and their multiple aspects. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next installment of the trilogy, "River of Smoke".
"The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters ****
> Audiobook
>. Orig. published 2009
> modern day gothic mystery, slowly unfolding.....as the era of the great familes fades and becomes ghostlike, a spirit? Starts to work on the Ayers family
Engrossing story
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook........An absolutely marvelous haunting story. Set in post-WWII England, this story follows the demise of an era, a family, and a relationship. Does the demise occur as the result of changing times or does it occur because of dark spirits? Or both? You will have to get to know Dr. Faraday and the Ayers to come to your own conclusion. Well worth the read!
>. Orig. published 2009
> modern day gothic mystery, slowly unfolding.....as the era of the great familes fades and becomes ghostlike, a spirit? Starts to work on the Ayers family
Engrossing story
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook........An absolutely marvelous haunting story. Set in post-WWII England, this story follows the demise of an era, a family, and a relationship. Does the demise occur as the result of changing times or does it occur because of dark spirits? Or both? You will have to get to know Dr. Faraday and the Ayers to come to your own conclusion. Well worth the read!
"The All of It" by Jeannette Haien *****
> Book Club, Dec. 2011
> Foreword by Ann Patchett?...."When well done, a small novel can be even more satisfying than a sweeping epic."......."It is the surest sign of a great book; the overwhelming desire to give it away"
>. Setting: Roonatellin, Ireland
> Characters: Enda & Kevin, Father Declan
> p.9..."No sense of its mysteries or feel for the way, in your spine, you canny to where a salmon is lying, patient, in the river's dark undercurrents, and how your human patience connects to the creature"s patience, the determination in yourself and the steel of your concentration alike to the fish's wait and wiliness.". Statement about life
> p.17..."...a murmurous weeping alike to the run of the hillside rivulet outside the house."...lovely
> p.31..."A far, farr different coin of spending was Enda...."......interesting phrase
> p.35..."For us back then, it was like we weren't known as being alive. "
> Vocabulary: 1) yirrol: slang for a year old ewe 2) bourne:an intermittent stream on chalk downs. 3) skurling: #4) autochthonous:
> p.46..."You've seen a good dog when its master's due home, how it'll sit, all the life of it in its ears, trying to catch a hint of a footfall on the sod a mile away...we were like that."...in fear of their father
> p.52..."Not (he spoke to himself) as lust, or as an act rehearsed and wickedly anticipated in the imagination, but as a grave, countering vitality against the rot of despair."...the quality of the act between Enda and Kevin as imagined by Father Declan
> p.76..."Ladled from the same pot of broth."... Meaning o be alike...love the phrase
> p. 79..."Banshee lamentation...that robs a wake of its true grief and turns it wild."....Father Declan's view of having professional mourners
> Father Declan fins Enda irresistable
> p.84..."...nattering on and on, telling me that what I rememberedas a full day's walk was no more than th length of a daisy petal."...Enda on the concept of a map
> p.90..."I can still see us, the way we just stood by the wall looking at the place, our to gues in our pockets for the woe of it.". First sight of their new home
> p. 95..."One thing I've learned, Father--that in this life it's best to the then and the now and the what's-to-be as close together in your thoughts as you can. It's when you let gaps creep in, when you separate out the intervals and dwell on them, that you can't bear the sorrow."
> p.137..."His thoughts rested, sunning, on her name, but not for long, the thorn to such repose being guilt.". Father Declan thinking of Enda
> LibraryThing Review:
Book Club Selection December 2011.........Foreword by Ann Patchett!?........What a gem of a novella! No wonder Ann Patchett calls it one of her favorites! The Irish tale of right and wrong with a twist. Find yourself swept up in the story of Enda, Kevin, and Father Declan. Solitude, love, salmon fishing, loyalty, and compassion...what more could anyone ask for?
> Foreword by Ann Patchett?...."When well done, a small novel can be even more satisfying than a sweeping epic."......."It is the surest sign of a great book; the overwhelming desire to give it away"
>. Setting: Roonatellin, Ireland
> Characters: Enda & Kevin, Father Declan
> p.9..."No sense of its mysteries or feel for the way, in your spine, you canny to where a salmon is lying, patient, in the river's dark undercurrents, and how your human patience connects to the creature"s patience, the determination in yourself and the steel of your concentration alike to the fish's wait and wiliness.". Statement about life
> p.17..."...a murmurous weeping alike to the run of the hillside rivulet outside the house."...lovely
> p.31..."A far, farr different coin of spending was Enda...."......interesting phrase
> p.35..."For us back then, it was like we weren't known as being alive. "
> Vocabulary: 1) yirrol: slang for a year old ewe 2) bourne:an intermittent stream on chalk downs. 3) skurling: #4) autochthonous:
> p.46..."You've seen a good dog when its master's due home, how it'll sit, all the life of it in its ears, trying to catch a hint of a footfall on the sod a mile away...we were like that."...in fear of their father
> p.52..."Not (he spoke to himself) as lust, or as an act rehearsed and wickedly anticipated in the imagination, but as a grave, countering vitality against the rot of despair."...the quality of the act between Enda and Kevin as imagined by Father Declan
> p.76..."Ladled from the same pot of broth."... Meaning o be alike...love the phrase
> p. 79..."Banshee lamentation...that robs a wake of its true grief and turns it wild."....Father Declan's view of having professional mourners
> Father Declan fins Enda irresistable
> p.84..."...nattering on and on, telling me that what I rememberedas a full day's walk was no more than th length of a daisy petal."...Enda on the concept of a map
> p.90..."I can still see us, the way we just stood by the wall looking at the place, our to gues in our pockets for the woe of it.". First sight of their new home
> p. 95..."One thing I've learned, Father--that in this life it's best to the then and the now and the what's-to-be as close together in your thoughts as you can. It's when you let gaps creep in, when you separate out the intervals and dwell on them, that you can't bear the sorrow."
> p.137..."His thoughts rested, sunning, on her name, but not for long, the thorn to such repose being guilt.". Father Declan thinking of Enda
> LibraryThing Review:
Book Club Selection December 2011.........Foreword by Ann Patchett!?........What a gem of a novella! No wonder Ann Patchett calls it one of her favorites! The Irish tale of right and wrong with a twist. Find yourself swept up in the story of Enda, Kevin, and Father Declan. Solitude, love, salmon fishing, loyalty, and compassion...what more could anyone ask for?
Saturday, December 3, 2011
"Innocent" by Scott Turow ****
> Audiobook
> Mystery/Suspense
> Orig published 2010
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook........I think the reason that I liked this story so much is that I liked the movie, "Presumed Innocent" , and kept picturing Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, and Raul Julia in the roles, and I also knew the back story. It is a good courtroom drama and I would enjoy seeing the movie. Where is the limit to protecting those we love?
> Mystery/Suspense
> Orig published 2010
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook........I think the reason that I liked this story so much is that I liked the movie, "Presumed Innocent" , and kept picturing Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, and Raul Julia in the roles, and I also knew the back story. It is a good courtroom drama and I would enjoy seeing the movie. Where is the limit to protecting those we love?
Thursday, December 1, 2011
"Private Life" by Jane Smiley *****
> Orig. published 2010
> Setting: Moves from Missouri to San Francisco area, around 1905...time of San Francisco Great Earthquake
> Characters: Margaret (daughter of Lavinia, whose husband committed suicide), Andrew Early (Margaret's husband, and astronomer who is brilliant but severely lacking social skills, whose mother perished in the great earthquake), Naoko (servant girl at boarding house in which Margaret gave birth to Alexander, (Dora, Margaret's brother-in-law's sister, a reporter)
> Epigraph..."In those days all stories ended with the wedding." - Rose Wilder Lane, Old Home Town
> p.28..."She didn't know what to make of herself, truly. She might have said that for ten years (and who could remember before that?) she had repeatedly pressed on, doing and thinking what she judged to be right and natural at the time, only to be told afterward that she had done just the wrong thing. It was as if she were plowing a furrow, intent upon the ground in front of her, only to stop and look around and discover that she was in the wrong field, and, indeed, the wrong country entirely."......Margaret's sense of not being right in the world
> Lavinia's primary goal was to get her three daughters married to the right men
> p.57..."Mrs. Bell's attitude was one of grievance against Dora for, in the first place, having no feminine assets and, in the second place, making nothing of those she had."....LOL
> p.58..."It was the death of Lawrence that did him in."...LOL
> p.61..."Even so his presence had an odd effect on her--it was as if something around her, some field or edge, were impinged upon or dented by the same thing, but much more powerful around him. It was a relief he was sitting across the room."...Margaret's impression of Andrew before he proposed
> p.114..."But even the longest book, she now understood, was the merest reduction of any experience, or any life."
> p.125..." It was as if he were a dye and she were white wool. Looking at him and holding him dyed her through and through."...Margaret's love for her first child, Alexander
> p.144..."Their lives were mostly private now, lived side by side as necessary, but whatever there had been for them both--in the earthquake or the moon book or their hopes for Alexander--had dissipated the way certain qualities of light did."
> p.203..."Just then, she saw Andrew as the world saw him, and she did it all at once, as if he had turned into a brick and fallen into her lap--who he was was that solid and permanent for her--he was a fool."
> p.214..."Through the years no one had said what she now thought, which was that marriage was relentless, and terrifying,m and no wonder that when her father died her mother had risen from her bed and gone to work."
> p.233..."She thought of her mother and Mrs. Early. The one so busy, the other so elegant. They had known what marriage was like. They had known what ANDREW was like. That they had colluded in bringing this very moment about made her tremble with something unspeakable."
> p.248..."She could describe this feeling she had,m that her marriage had become an intolerable torture, that the sight of his head ducking slightly as he went through doorways of the new house was repellent to her, that she felt warm, humid air press against her when he entered the room, that his voice made her want to scream, that she thought he was a fool and even a madman, and that she was going mad herself, that, from the outside, every marriage looked as bad to her, because she knew every house she passed was a claustrophobic cell where at least one of the partners never learned anything, but did the same things over and over, like an infernal machine, and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave any relief."
> LibraryThing Review: I think that Jane Smiley has a true gift in her ability to take a commonly understood concept and weave it into a meaningful story. "Private Life" concerns itself with the private life of a married couple, the private side that no one can see from the outside looking in. It isn't necessarily a pretty picture, but it is very real for many people. What do couples accept about one another, what do they regret, what makes them furious, and most importantly, what makes them stay? These are some of the issues addressed in this story of a brilliant/crazy man and his wife whose mother was relieved to "finally" marry her off at the spinsterly age of 27, around 1900. The couple weathers two world wars and their own relationship.....tough to call on which is more difficult! This is the best Smiley novel I have read since "A Thousand Acres".
> Setting: Moves from Missouri to San Francisco area, around 1905...time of San Francisco Great Earthquake
> Characters: Margaret (daughter of Lavinia, whose husband committed suicide), Andrew Early (Margaret's husband, and astronomer who is brilliant but severely lacking social skills, whose mother perished in the great earthquake), Naoko (servant girl at boarding house in which Margaret gave birth to Alexander, (Dora, Margaret's brother-in-law's sister, a reporter)
> Epigraph..."In those days all stories ended with the wedding." - Rose Wilder Lane, Old Home Town
> p.28..."She didn't know what to make of herself, truly. She might have said that for ten years (and who could remember before that?) she had repeatedly pressed on, doing and thinking what she judged to be right and natural at the time, only to be told afterward that she had done just the wrong thing. It was as if she were plowing a furrow, intent upon the ground in front of her, only to stop and look around and discover that she was in the wrong field, and, indeed, the wrong country entirely."......Margaret's sense of not being right in the world
> Lavinia's primary goal was to get her three daughters married to the right men
> p.57..."Mrs. Bell's attitude was one of grievance against Dora for, in the first place, having no feminine assets and, in the second place, making nothing of those she had."....LOL
> p.58..."It was the death of Lawrence that did him in."...LOL
> p.61..."Even so his presence had an odd effect on her--it was as if something around her, some field or edge, were impinged upon or dented by the same thing, but much more powerful around him. It was a relief he was sitting across the room."...Margaret's impression of Andrew before he proposed
> p.114..."But even the longest book, she now understood, was the merest reduction of any experience, or any life."
> p.125..." It was as if he were a dye and she were white wool. Looking at him and holding him dyed her through and through."...Margaret's love for her first child, Alexander
> p.144..."Their lives were mostly private now, lived side by side as necessary, but whatever there had been for them both--in the earthquake or the moon book or their hopes for Alexander--had dissipated the way certain qualities of light did."
> p.203..."Just then, she saw Andrew as the world saw him, and she did it all at once, as if he had turned into a brick and fallen into her lap--who he was was that solid and permanent for her--he was a fool."
> p.214..."Through the years no one had said what she now thought, which was that marriage was relentless, and terrifying,m and no wonder that when her father died her mother had risen from her bed and gone to work."
> p.233..."She thought of her mother and Mrs. Early. The one so busy, the other so elegant. They had known what marriage was like. They had known what ANDREW was like. That they had colluded in bringing this very moment about made her tremble with something unspeakable."
> p.248..."She could describe this feeling she had,m that her marriage had become an intolerable torture, that the sight of his head ducking slightly as he went through doorways of the new house was repellent to her, that she felt warm, humid air press against her when he entered the room, that his voice made her want to scream, that she thought he was a fool and even a madman, and that she was going mad herself, that, from the outside, every marriage looked as bad to her, because she knew every house she passed was a claustrophobic cell where at least one of the partners never learned anything, but did the same things over and over, like an infernal machine, and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave any relief."
> LibraryThing Review: I think that Jane Smiley has a true gift in her ability to take a commonly understood concept and weave it into a meaningful story. "Private Life" concerns itself with the private life of a married couple, the private side that no one can see from the outside looking in. It isn't necessarily a pretty picture, but it is very real for many people. What do couples accept about one another, what do they regret, what makes them furious, and most importantly, what makes them stay? These are some of the issues addressed in this story of a brilliant/crazy man and his wife whose mother was relieved to "finally" marry her off at the spinsterly age of 27, around 1900. The couple weathers two world wars and their own relationship.....tough to call on which is more difficult! This is the best Smiley novel I have read since "A Thousand Acres".
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
"The Colour" by Rose Tremain *****
> Audiobook
> English author, orig. published 2003
> Characters: Joseph & Harriet and his mother, Lillian (emigrate to New Zealand from England), Dorothy and her son Edwin (was blown off the porch by a powerful wind as an infant), the Maori Paree who was Edwin's nanny, Will (boy who sold himself to Joseph for sexual favors), Chin Pao Yi (Chinese vegetable merchant who had left family back in China
> Start a farm in New Zealand.....Joseph discovers a small amount of gold in their stream and becomes infected by the need for "the colour".....the couple drift apart
> Beautiful prose, poetic
> Chin Li....found gold in his vegetable patch
> Edwin has a deep spiritual connection to Paree....when she disappears, he believes he is dying......
> LibraryThing Review: Read this novel and become engrossed in the hearts and minds of Harriet & Joseph, Dorothy & Edwin, Chin Pao Yi and more. Follow the harsh details of survival in New Zealand, where so many try to find "the colour" of gold in the mountains. This story is harsh, the prose is lyrical, spiritual, and terrible. I could hardly stop until I finished. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
> English author, orig. published 2003
> Characters: Joseph & Harriet and his mother, Lillian (emigrate to New Zealand from England), Dorothy and her son Edwin (was blown off the porch by a powerful wind as an infant), the Maori Paree who was Edwin's nanny, Will (boy who sold himself to Joseph for sexual favors), Chin Pao Yi (Chinese vegetable merchant who had left family back in China
> Start a farm in New Zealand.....Joseph discovers a small amount of gold in their stream and becomes infected by the need for "the colour".....the couple drift apart
> Beautiful prose, poetic
> Chin Li....found gold in his vegetable patch
> Edwin has a deep spiritual connection to Paree....when she disappears, he believes he is dying......
> LibraryThing Review: Read this novel and become engrossed in the hearts and minds of Harriet & Joseph, Dorothy & Edwin, Chin Pao Yi and more. Follow the harsh details of survival in New Zealand, where so many try to find "the colour" of gold in the mountains. This story is harsh, the prose is lyrical, spiritual, and terrible. I could hardly stop until I finished. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
"The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai *****
> Indian author, orig. published 2006
> Booker Prize winner, and National Book Award Winner
> Book Club Selection, January 2012
> Set in the Himalayas
> Characters: The Judge, Sai (his granddaughter), Biju (son of the judge's cook)
> Sai goes to jungle to live. With her uncle, the judge, when her parents are run over by a bus on Moscow
> Epigraph: "Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive"
- Jorge Luis Borges
> Opening line - "All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths."....lovely
> p.4..."They sipped and ate, all of existence passed over by nonexistence,, the gate leading nowhere, and they watched the tea spill copious, ribbony curls of vapor, watched their breath join the mist slowly twisting and turning, twisting and turning."...love the prose
> In India, personal records included caste
> p. 29..."The system might be obsessed with purity, but it excelled in defining the flavor of guilt. There was a titillation to unearthing the forces of guilt and desire, needling and prodding the results." - The Catholic Church
> p.33..."Like other elderly people, he seemed not to have traveled forward in time but far back. Harking to the prehistoric, in attendance upon infinity, he resembled a creature of the Galapagos staring over the ocean."...about the judge
> p.33..."...they were four shadow puppets from a fairytale flickering on the lumpy plaster wall--a lizard man (the judge), the hunchbacked cook, a lush-lashed maiden (Sai) and a long-tailed wolf dog...". The household in the Himalayas."
> Vocabulary:
1)borborygmus: a rumbling sound made by the movement of gas in the intestine
2) pisciculture: fish culture
3) eructation: the act of belching gas from the stomach
4) maund: a hand basket
5) cupules: a small cup-shaped depression
6) gompa:
7) purdah: a practice inaugurated by Muslims and later adopted by various Hindus and found especially in India that involves the seclusion of women from public observation by means of concealing clothing including the veil and by the use of high-walled enclosures, screens, and curtains within the home
8) pangolin: any of several Asiatic and African edentate mammals of Manis or related genera of the order Pholidota having the body covered with large flattened reddish brown imbricated horny scales, feeding chiefly on ants, and somewhat resembling in habit and structure the American anteaters
9) carom:a game played by two or four persons with round wooden counters on a large square board having corner pockets
10) cuprous: of, relating to, or containing copper in the univalent state
11) chitinuous: of a white or colorless amorphous horny substance that forms part of the hard outer integument of insects, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates and occurs also in fungi, being a polysaccharide structurally similar to cellulose except that the repeating unit is derived from acetylglucosamine instead of glucose
> p.39..."He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow."
> p.49..."...taxi drivers direct from Punjab--a man is not a caged thing, a man is wild wild and he must drive as such, in a bucking yodeling taxi."---In NYC where Buji delivers Chinese food on bicycle
> p.79`..."Saeed, he relished the whole game, the way the country flexed his wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it. When it came time, he who had jigged open every back door, he who had, with photocopier, Wite-Out, and paper cutter, spectacularly sabotaged the system (one skilled person at the photocopy machine, he assured Biju, could bring America to its knees), he would pledge emotional allegiance to the flag with tears in his eyes and conviction in his voice. The country recognized something in Saeed, he in it, and it was a mutual love affair. Ups and downs, sometimes more sour than sweet, maybe, but nonetheless, beyond anything the INS could imagine, it was an old-fashioned romance." ---illegal entry to USA
> p.93..."Don't go in for a life where time doesn't pass.....".
> p.99..." the Triumphant After The Green Card Return Home"
> p.102..."This was what happened he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again....The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore."
> p.121..."Sweet flake. Heart like a cake. She went to city hall with Saeed--rented tuxedo, flowery dress--said 'I do,' under the red white and blue. Now they were practicing for the INS interview." -- marriage to get a green card
> p.147..."That support for a cow shelter was in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true and that, when he died, he was put through the Hindu machinations of the beyond. What, though, if other gods sat upon the throne? He tried to keep onb the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn't tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any."......Doubts common for many
> p.157..."Then he shouted along with the crowd, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he'd never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history.".....the power of a crowd...
> p.167..."...old hatreds are endlessly retrievable."
> the judge was absolutely horrible to his wife Nimi
> p.175..."He remembered the center of the Buddhist wheel of life clasped in a demon's fangs and talons to indicate the hell that traps us: rooster-snake-pig; lust-anger-foolishness; each chasing, each feeding on each consumed by the other
> p.177..."But so fluid a things was love. It wasn't firm, he was learning it wasn't a scripture; it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal, taking the mold of whatever he poured it into. And in fact, it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels. It could be used for all kinds of purposes...He wished it were a constraint. It was truly beginning to frighten him."
> p.182..."You have to swear at a creature to be able to destroy it."
> p.184..."In this room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their heads and yet they would e begging to come crawling in...".
> p.199..."The Indian gentleman, with all self-respect to himself, should not enter into a compartment reserved for Europeans, any more than he should enter a carriage set apart for ladies. Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European, have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian and in all such cases, identify yourself with the race to which you belong." - H.Hardless, "The Indian Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette
> p.205..."But profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations working one against the other. They were damning the third world to being the third world."
> p.208..."All those pathetic Indians who glorified a friendship that was later proclaimed by the other [white] party to be nonexistent"
>p.209..."Why is the Chinaman yellow? He pees against the wind, HA HA. Why is the Indian brown? He shits upside down, HA HA HA." childhood taunts
> p.220..."He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything but an 'Indian' foreigner."
> p.222..."...God was just wilderness and space, said the husky voice, careless with the loss of love. It took you to the edge of all you could ber the--it let go, let go...". song lyrics
> p.244..."He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation."
> p.250..."But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart."....perhaps the moral of the entire book
> p.252..."There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to--everyone had to accept imperfection and lss in life."......another moral of the story
> p.254..."The missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace."....commentary on usefuness of religion
> p.256..."Every singe thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world. Sisters' marriages, younger brother's studies, grandmother's teeth--all on hold, silenced, until he left, strove, sent something back."....the pressure of the immigrant
> p.267..."How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people's countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?" Biju thinking to himself before returning home
> p.268..."Year by year, his life wasn't amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing air. .......Shouldn't he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquich this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest of all luxury of not noticing himself at all"
> p.269..."You are maaking a big mistake. Still a world, my friend, where one side traves to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king. You want your son to be on this side or that."
> p.292..."A man wasn't equl to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm."...the judge, whose precius dog, Mutt, was missing
> p. 295..."There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice--the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event."
> p.299..."He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presentd as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that ld many to America fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience: where you never heard the demands of servnts, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely lookinh after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey."
> p.300..."Sweet drabness of home---slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing--that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant."
> p.306..."He had been recruited to bring his countrymen into the modern age, but he could only make it himself by cutting them off entirely, or they would show up reproachful, pointing out to him the lie he had become.".....the judge's experience.....the judgement?
> LibraryThing Review: Fantastic writing, memorable characters, and a gripping combination of plots! It is no wonder that Desai won multiple awards for this novel The story is set in the Indian Himalayas and in New York City. It is the tale of the battle for identity in a new culture, in an old culture, and in a culture containing both. It is about the simplicity of life and love and its complexity. This is the story, as noted on the flyleaf, of big and small. Identity of self and country, love of a dog, betrayal to a lover, betrayer of a culture, hiding from truths and lies, and disillusionment everywhere. I know, sounds depressing, and thank goodness the author injects a wonderful wit to break it up. However, I will remember Sai, the Judge, Biju, Lola and Noni, Father Booty and many others for a long time. This is the type of powerful novel I thoroughly enjoy reading because it challenges my life assumptions about meaning.
> Booker Prize winner, and National Book Award Winner
> Book Club Selection, January 2012
> Set in the Himalayas
> Characters: The Judge, Sai (his granddaughter), Biju (son of the judge's cook)
> Sai goes to jungle to live. With her uncle, the judge, when her parents are run over by a bus on Moscow
> Epigraph: "Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive"
- Jorge Luis Borges
> Opening line - "All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths."....lovely
> p.4..."They sipped and ate, all of existence passed over by nonexistence,, the gate leading nowhere, and they watched the tea spill copious, ribbony curls of vapor, watched their breath join the mist slowly twisting and turning, twisting and turning."...love the prose
> In India, personal records included caste
> p. 29..."The system might be obsessed with purity, but it excelled in defining the flavor of guilt. There was a titillation to unearthing the forces of guilt and desire, needling and prodding the results." - The Catholic Church
> p.33..."Like other elderly people, he seemed not to have traveled forward in time but far back. Harking to the prehistoric, in attendance upon infinity, he resembled a creature of the Galapagos staring over the ocean."...about the judge
> p.33..."...they were four shadow puppets from a fairytale flickering on the lumpy plaster wall--a lizard man (the judge), the hunchbacked cook, a lush-lashed maiden (Sai) and a long-tailed wolf dog...". The household in the Himalayas."
> Vocabulary:
1)borborygmus: a rumbling sound made by the movement of gas in the intestine
2) pisciculture: fish culture
3) eructation: the act of belching gas from the stomach
4) maund: a hand basket
5) cupules: a small cup-shaped depression
6) gompa:
7) purdah: a practice inaugurated by Muslims and later adopted by various Hindus and found especially in India that involves the seclusion of women from public observation by means of concealing clothing including the veil and by the use of high-walled enclosures, screens, and curtains within the home
8) pangolin: any of several Asiatic and African edentate mammals of Manis or related genera of the order Pholidota having the body covered with large flattened reddish brown imbricated horny scales, feeding chiefly on ants, and somewhat resembling in habit and structure the American anteaters
9) carom:a game played by two or four persons with round wooden counters on a large square board having corner pockets
10) cuprous: of, relating to, or containing copper in the univalent state
11) chitinuous: of a white or colorless amorphous horny substance that forms part of the hard outer integument of insects, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates and occurs also in fungi, being a polysaccharide structurally similar to cellulose except that the repeating unit is derived from acetylglucosamine instead of glucose
> p.39..."He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow."
> p.49..."...taxi drivers direct from Punjab--a man is not a caged thing, a man is wild wild and he must drive as such, in a bucking yodeling taxi."---In NYC where Buji delivers Chinese food on bicycle
> p.79`..."Saeed, he relished the whole game, the way the country flexed his wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it. When it came time, he who had jigged open every back door, he who had, with photocopier, Wite-Out, and paper cutter, spectacularly sabotaged the system (one skilled person at the photocopy machine, he assured Biju, could bring America to its knees), he would pledge emotional allegiance to the flag with tears in his eyes and conviction in his voice. The country recognized something in Saeed, he in it, and it was a mutual love affair. Ups and downs, sometimes more sour than sweet, maybe, but nonetheless, beyond anything the INS could imagine, it was an old-fashioned romance." ---illegal entry to USA
> p.93..."Don't go in for a life where time doesn't pass.....".
> p.99..." the Triumphant After The Green Card Return Home"
> p.102..."This was what happened he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again....The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore."
> p.121..."Sweet flake. Heart like a cake. She went to city hall with Saeed--rented tuxedo, flowery dress--said 'I do,' under the red white and blue. Now they were practicing for the INS interview." -- marriage to get a green card
> p.147..."That support for a cow shelter was in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true and that, when he died, he was put through the Hindu machinations of the beyond. What, though, if other gods sat upon the throne? He tried to keep onb the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn't tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any."......Doubts common for many
> p.157..."Then he shouted along with the crowd, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he'd never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history.".....the power of a crowd...
> p.167..."...old hatreds are endlessly retrievable."
> the judge was absolutely horrible to his wife Nimi
> p.175..."He remembered the center of the Buddhist wheel of life clasped in a demon's fangs and talons to indicate the hell that traps us: rooster-snake-pig; lust-anger-foolishness; each chasing, each feeding on each consumed by the other
> p.177..."But so fluid a things was love. It wasn't firm, he was learning it wasn't a scripture; it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal, taking the mold of whatever he poured it into. And in fact, it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels. It could be used for all kinds of purposes...He wished it were a constraint. It was truly beginning to frighten him."
> p.182..."You have to swear at a creature to be able to destroy it."
> p.184..."In this room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their heads and yet they would e begging to come crawling in...".
> p.199..."The Indian gentleman, with all self-respect to himself, should not enter into a compartment reserved for Europeans, any more than he should enter a carriage set apart for ladies. Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European, have the courage to show that you are not ashamed of being an Indian and in all such cases, identify yourself with the race to which you belong." - H.Hardless, "The Indian Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette
> p.205..."But profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations working one against the other. They were damning the third world to being the third world."
> p.208..."All those pathetic Indians who glorified a friendship that was later proclaimed by the other [white] party to be nonexistent"
>p.209..."Why is the Chinaman yellow? He pees against the wind, HA HA. Why is the Indian brown? He shits upside down, HA HA HA." childhood taunts
> p.220..."He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything but an 'Indian' foreigner."
> p.222..."...God was just wilderness and space, said the husky voice, careless with the loss of love. It took you to the edge of all you could ber the--it let go, let go...". song lyrics
> p.244..."He knew the way to coax strength was to pretend it existed, so that it might grow to fit its reputation."
> p.250..."But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart."....perhaps the moral of the entire book
> p.252..."There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to--everyone had to accept imperfection and lss in life."......another moral of the story
> p.254..."The missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace."....commentary on usefuness of religion
> p.256..."Every singe thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world. Sisters' marriages, younger brother's studies, grandmother's teeth--all on hold, silenced, until he left, strove, sent something back."....the pressure of the immigrant
> p.267..."How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people's countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?" Biju thinking to himself before returning home
> p.268..."Year by year, his life wasn't amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing air. .......Shouldn't he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquich this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest of all luxury of not noticing himself at all"
> p.269..."You are maaking a big mistake. Still a world, my friend, where one side traves to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king. You want your son to be on this side or that."
> p.292..."A man wasn't equl to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking, corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm."...the judge, whose precius dog, Mutt, was missing
> p. 295..."There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice--the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event."
> p.299..."He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presentd as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that ld many to America fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience: where you never heard the demands of servnts, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely lookinh after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey."
> p.300..."Sweet drabness of home---slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing--that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant."
> p.306..."He had been recruited to bring his countrymen into the modern age, but he could only make it himself by cutting them off entirely, or they would show up reproachful, pointing out to him the lie he had become.".....the judge's experience.....the judgement?
> LibraryThing Review: Fantastic writing, memorable characters, and a gripping combination of plots! It is no wonder that Desai won multiple awards for this novel The story is set in the Indian Himalayas and in New York City. It is the tale of the battle for identity in a new culture, in an old culture, and in a culture containing both. It is about the simplicity of life and love and its complexity. This is the story, as noted on the flyleaf, of big and small. Identity of self and country, love of a dog, betrayal to a lover, betrayer of a culture, hiding from truths and lies, and disillusionment everywhere. I know, sounds depressing, and thank goodness the author injects a wonderful wit to break it up. However, I will remember Sai, the Judge, Biju, Lola and Noni, Father Booty and many others for a long time. This is the type of powerful novel I thoroughly enjoy reading because it challenges my life assumptions about meaning.
Monday, November 14, 2011
"The Widow of the South" by Robert Hicks ***
> USA author, orig. published in 2005
> Debut novel
> Based on true events during the Civil War, the battle at Franklin, Tennessee which left 9200 men wounded and 1500+ dead
> Carrie McGavock story based in historical fact, Widow of the South, Keeper of the Book of the Dead...3 of her 5 children sied very young and she had been a fog of depression and grief until the battle forced her to turn her home into a field hospital
> Vocabulary: 1) ambuscade:to place in ambush
> p.27..."But in those moments before the fight, if you were a smart man, you'd figure out a way to convince yourself that it didn't matter to you if you lived or died."
> So strange that people would set up for a battle as if it were a picnic, "...as if he were watching a fabulously intricate play."
> p.136..."I was freer than I'd ever been. I felt obliged to the world, a world much larger than that contained between the four walls of Carnton, and although the burden seemed larger, I was similarly enlarged by the burden of shouldering it."
> p.143..."It is possible to know yourself--every kindness, every urge to violence, every petty resentment--in chaos. I discovered that my mind sharpened as my surroundings grew more uncertain and unfamiliar."
> p.145..."Loneliness was what we feared about death, he said, and to embrace it in life seemed mad."
> LibraryThing Review: This is one of those works of historical fiction in which the historical part was really interesting, but the fiction was just so-so. Carrie mcGavock,aka The Widow of the South and The Keeper of the Book of the Dead, is a fascinating historical figure. She realized her purpose in life after the nightmarish battle in franklin Tennessee during the Civil War. Her purpose? To care for and watch over the dead, numbering 9200! I was not particularly engaged by the fictional part of the story however. It felt as if the author was trying too hard t make each character amazing in some way, and the plot too mystical. For me it just didn't work.
> Debut novel
> Based on true events during the Civil War, the battle at Franklin, Tennessee which left 9200 men wounded and 1500+ dead
> Carrie McGavock story based in historical fact, Widow of the South, Keeper of the Book of the Dead...3 of her 5 children sied very young and she had been a fog of depression and grief until the battle forced her to turn her home into a field hospital
> Vocabulary: 1) ambuscade:to place in ambush
> p.27..."But in those moments before the fight, if you were a smart man, you'd figure out a way to convince yourself that it didn't matter to you if you lived or died."
> So strange that people would set up for a battle as if it were a picnic, "...as if he were watching a fabulously intricate play."
> p.136..."I was freer than I'd ever been. I felt obliged to the world, a world much larger than that contained between the four walls of Carnton, and although the burden seemed larger, I was similarly enlarged by the burden of shouldering it."
> p.143..."It is possible to know yourself--every kindness, every urge to violence, every petty resentment--in chaos. I discovered that my mind sharpened as my surroundings grew more uncertain and unfamiliar."
> p.145..."Loneliness was what we feared about death, he said, and to embrace it in life seemed mad."
> LibraryThing Review: This is one of those works of historical fiction in which the historical part was really interesting, but the fiction was just so-so. Carrie mcGavock,aka The Widow of the South and The Keeper of the Book of the Dead, is a fascinating historical figure. She realized her purpose in life after the nightmarish battle in franklin Tennessee during the Civil War. Her purpose? To care for and watch over the dead, numbering 9200! I was not particularly engaged by the fictional part of the story however. It felt as if the author was trying too hard t make each character amazing in some way, and the plot too mystical. For me it just didn't work.
"The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald ****
> Orig. published 1978
> British author
> p.1..."She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and tryng, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel whch it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiabe. They had taken on too much." ----sums up the entire story
> haunted by a poltergeist, commonly referred to by the locals as a "rapper"
> p.88...."The shop had been transformed into a silent battleground in a nominal state of truce.".....midway through the story
> p.102..."I don't know that men are better judges than women, said Florence, 'but they spend much less time regretting their decisions."...True?
> p.103..."I value most the one virtue which need not therefore be referred to as a virtue. I refer to courage."
> p.108..."A good book is the preciuos life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity."....Florence
> p.158...Closing line..."As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop."
> LibraryThing Review: Another charmer by Penelope Fitzgerald! The courageous Florence Green attempts to open a bookshop even though the local odds are against her. Or should I say that the odd locals are against her?! The shop supporters battle valiantly against the social matriarch of the small community....you have to love the local vet, Raven, the 10 year old knuckle rapping Christine, and the recluse who comes out to battle to the death for the bookshop, Mr. Brundish. This is a novella perfect for a long afternoon read in your favorite chair!
> British author
> p.1..."She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and tryng, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel whch it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiabe. They had taken on too much." ----sums up the entire story
> haunted by a poltergeist, commonly referred to by the locals as a "rapper"
> p.88...."The shop had been transformed into a silent battleground in a nominal state of truce.".....midway through the story
> p.102..."I don't know that men are better judges than women, said Florence, 'but they spend much less time regretting their decisions."...True?
> p.103..."I value most the one virtue which need not therefore be referred to as a virtue. I refer to courage."
> p.108..."A good book is the preciuos life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity."....Florence
> p.158...Closing line..."As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop."
> LibraryThing Review: Another charmer by Penelope Fitzgerald! The courageous Florence Green attempts to open a bookshop even though the local odds are against her. Or should I say that the odd locals are against her?! The shop supporters battle valiantly against the social matriarch of the small community....you have to love the local vet, Raven, the 10 year old knuckle rapping Christine, and the recluse who comes out to battle to the death for the bookshop, Mr. Brundish. This is a novella perfect for a long afternoon read in your favorite chair!
"Custom of the Country" by Edith Wharton ****
>. Orig. published 1913
> Audiobook
> Set in New York City
> Undine Spragg- obsessed with being accepted into New York's high society, heartless, egocentric, materialistic
> Title: indictment of America as hugely materialistic....plot focuses on marriage market, compares European priority on ideals to American focus on work..
> Men v. women: women set apart as separate, trained to focus on the material without any understanding of how it comes about
> LibraryThing Review: Edith Wharton's damning portrait of the never satisfied, social climbing, money grubbing American is an excellent read. Follow the marital career of Undine Spragg and cringe throughout the entire story. Undine represents all that is base and ugly about the upstart American women contrasted with the elegant, complex European social system. I particularly love the closing, as Undine ponders her awareness that there is one thing she cannot have. She cannot be the wife of an asmbassador because she has been divorced. How crushing! To me, this is a harsher, clunter Edith Wharton than I am used to, yet still wonderful!
> Audiobook
> Set in New York City
> Undine Spragg- obsessed with being accepted into New York's high society, heartless, egocentric, materialistic
> Title: indictment of America as hugely materialistic....plot focuses on marriage market, compares European priority on ideals to American focus on work..
> Men v. women: women set apart as separate, trained to focus on the material without any understanding of how it comes about
> LibraryThing Review: Edith Wharton's damning portrait of the never satisfied, social climbing, money grubbing American is an excellent read. Follow the marital career of Undine Spragg and cringe throughout the entire story. Undine represents all that is base and ugly about the upstart American women contrasted with the elegant, complex European social system. I particularly love the closing, as Undine ponders her awareness that there is one thing she cannot have. She cannot be the wife of an asmbassador because she has been divorced. How crushing! To me, this is a harsher, clunter Edith Wharton than I am used to, yet still wonderful!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
"Men in the Sun" by Ghassan Kanafani ****
> Palestinian author, died in 1972 when car exploded, evidence pointed towards Israel
> Orig. published 1956, short story collection
> "Men in the Sun":
> "A Hand in the Grave":
> "Letter From Gaza":
> LibraryThing Review: This is a collection of short stories written by a Palestinian author who was assasinated by car bomb in 1972. He himself left palestine as a young child, moved around the Middle East, finally settling in Beirut, Lebanon. This short story collection was well written, moving, and surprisingly devoid of anger. The stories tell tales of loss, courage, danger which although literally set in the Middle East, are really about universal truths of being a human being. The prose is very good, the plots moving and powerful, and I was left with a deep sense of how much a person can endure in order to survive.....loss of life, loss of a homeland, loss of a child, loss of a friend. So, in the end, the stories share the thread of loss and how it impacts the human heart.
> Orig. published 1956, short story collection
> "Men in the Sun":
- Three men try to get to Kuwait with the help of a lorry driver and all die when they must stay in the tank of the lorry longer than expected
- intensity of the sun is metaphor for the intensity of what they are willing to risk and endure to reach their goal
- "Just imagine! In my own mind I compare these hundred and fifty kilometres to the path which God in the Quran promised his creatures they must cross before being directed either to Paradise or to Hell. If anyone falls he goes to Hell, and if anyone crosses safely he reaches Paradise. Here the angels are the frontier guards."
- "....patience is the brother to agreement."
- A family and servants flee after Jews force them from their homes, and a young child's perspective makes the story
- "Pain had begun to undermine the child's simple mind"
- Oranges symbolized the homeland....
- "You were huddled there , as far from your childhod as you were from the land of the oranges - the oranges which, accrding to a peasant who used to cultivate them until he left, would shrivel up if a change occurred and they were watered by a strange hand".......
- A father lives in fear that his son will be the death of him
- Can Fate be interfered with or changed?
> "A Hand in the Grave":
- Two med students intend to steal a skeleton from a graveyard and are foiled by fear
- Not a particularly good story
- A mother is proud to have her son leave to join the fedayeen
- Acceptance of the difference in the nature of each creature
> "Letter From Gaza":
- An amputated limb is the symbol of how a young man would feel if he were to leave his war torn country to seek personal gain
- "Come back, to learn from Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth."
> LibraryThing Review: This is a collection of short stories written by a Palestinian author who was assasinated by car bomb in 1972. He himself left palestine as a young child, moved around the Middle East, finally settling in Beirut, Lebanon. This short story collection was well written, moving, and surprisingly devoid of anger. The stories tell tales of loss, courage, danger which although literally set in the Middle East, are really about universal truths of being a human being. The prose is very good, the plots moving and powerful, and I was left with a deep sense of how much a person can endure in order to survive.....loss of life, loss of a homeland, loss of a child, loss of a friend. So, in the end, the stories share the thread of loss and how it impacts the human heart.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
"The Clouds" by Aristophanes ****
> Written 423 B.C., Greek playwright
> Vocabulary: 1) casuistry: the study of or the doctrine that deals with cases of conscience b : the reasoning about or resolution of questions of right or wrong in conduct through the application of religious or secular ethical principles and rules 2) empyrean: the earthly perfection of the individual to a height no less empyrean than Luther's ideal of religious salvation
> p.17..."Drat this stinking war anyway! It's ruined Athens. Why, you can't even whip your own slaves any more or they'll desert to the Spartans.".....the more things change the more they stay the same!
> p.28..."Why, the man who has mastered the ass of the gnat could win an acquittal from any court!"...LOL
> p.33..."You see, only by being suspended aloft, by dangling mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean."...Socrates' response to being called a snob
> clouds are the gods according to Socrates....lovely poetry sung by approaching Clouds on p.37
> p.39..."Those were the Clouds of heaven, goddesses of men of leisure and philosophers. To them we owe our repertoire of verbal talents: our eloquence, intellect, fustian, casuistry, force, wit, prodigious vocabulary, circumlocutory skill...".
> Closing is wonderfully satirical....Strepsiades has lit the "Thinkery" on fire, and stands on the roof looking down at the fleeing Socrates, who queries, "What is thy purpose upon my roof?" to which Strepsiades replies, " Ah, sir. I walk upon the air and look down upon the sun from a superior standpoint."....laughing at sophistry
> LibraryThing Review: What a pleasant surprise this drama was! I picked this ancient Greek play up in anticipation of an intellectual muscle stretcher and ended up laughing out loud. Who knew Aristophanes could be so wonderfully entertaining! That silly old Socrates! This drama was entered into a competition in roughly 423 B.C. as an attempt to regain the playwright's standing as the champion. Excellent choice! He poked fun at the Sophists quite well! Very readable too!
> Vocabulary: 1) casuistry: the study of or the doctrine that deals with cases of conscience b : the reasoning about or resolution of questions of right or wrong in conduct through the application of religious or secular ethical principles and rules 2) empyrean: the earthly perfection of the individual to a height no less empyrean than Luther's ideal of religious salvation
> p.17..."Drat this stinking war anyway! It's ruined Athens. Why, you can't even whip your own slaves any more or they'll desert to the Spartans.".....the more things change the more they stay the same!
> p.28..."Why, the man who has mastered the ass of the gnat could win an acquittal from any court!"...LOL
> p.33..."You see, only by being suspended aloft, by dangling mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean."...Socrates' response to being called a snob
> clouds are the gods according to Socrates....lovely poetry sung by approaching Clouds on p.37
> p.39..."Those were the Clouds of heaven, goddesses of men of leisure and philosophers. To them we owe our repertoire of verbal talents: our eloquence, intellect, fustian, casuistry, force, wit, prodigious vocabulary, circumlocutory skill...".
> Closing is wonderfully satirical....Strepsiades has lit the "Thinkery" on fire, and stands on the roof looking down at the fleeing Socrates, who queries, "What is thy purpose upon my roof?" to which Strepsiades replies, " Ah, sir. I walk upon the air and look down upon the sun from a superior standpoint."....laughing at sophistry
> LibraryThing Review: What a pleasant surprise this drama was! I picked this ancient Greek play up in anticipation of an intellectual muscle stretcher and ended up laughing out loud. Who knew Aristophanes could be so wonderfully entertaining! That silly old Socrates! This drama was entered into a competition in roughly 423 B.C. as an attempt to regain the playwright's standing as the champion. Excellent choice! He poked fun at the Sophists quite well! Very readable too!
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
"Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage" by Hazel Rowley ****
>.Book Club selection, Nov
> State Senator....ass't Secretary of the Navy.......polio....Gov. of NY....
>. Eleanor......smart.....insecure......60 visits a week to make contacts...Earl Miller/bodyguard...Val-Kill cottage with Nan and Marion..love affair with Lorena Hickok...rel w/ Joe Lash
>Franklin......Mama's boy, ambitious, flirtatious, liberal......Lucy Mercer......Missy LeHand...egocentric!
> Sara Roosevelt....FDR's mother...controlled finances right through the presidency until her death
>. Louis Howe.......Franklin's alter-ego
>. Six births, five survived
>. Felt Rowley worked hard to be fair, maybe too hard.....maybe not
> Couldn't help but compare Franklin's fight with polio to my father's...Franklin could afford to go to all the specialists, have servants to take care f his every need.....my father was unemployed, broke, and if a wonderful doctor hadn't offered to enter him in an experimental rehab program being set up for military vets with limb loss, I do not know how things would have turned out
> Interesting comment from another biography of FDR....One "runs" for office, it is a political "race", you can be a "running mate", etc......no wonder they felt FDR had to avoid being seen while being carried, or being photographed in a wheechair
> the ego of men in politics is mythic.....stogies and women
> Their love of communal life was appealing..made me think of Jasmine!
> Famous Eleanor quotes: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Eleanor_Roosevelt/
> Parallels with Obama administration: Inheriting economic disaster, Eleanor's effort to remembr returning veterans and their families
> LibraryThing Review: I just devoured this book. I am not an historian, so I cannot debate the veracity of the facts. However, assuming this story sprung from research with integrity, it was a fascinating read. Indeed, a remarkable relationship existd between Franklin & Eleanor. It was based on acceptance of one another which stemmed from them being accepting of people in general. Superficial traits and public opinion had little to do with their loyalties, although they did require secrecy to live as their true selves. I like the idea that they both retained their humanity, the good, the bad, and the ugly, despite their public lives. Who are we to judge? As seems to be true for many memorable leaders, it seemes to me that the children probably suffered more than either parent. In this case, both parents were great leaders, so I would be interested to learn more about the impact their life choices had on their five children. Most interesting to me: their love of communal living combined with their fierce independence and their personal insecurities.
> State Senator....ass't Secretary of the Navy.......polio....Gov. of NY....
>. Eleanor......smart.....insecure......60 visits a week to make contacts...Earl Miller/bodyguard...Val-Kill cottage with Nan and Marion..love affair with Lorena Hickok...rel w/ Joe Lash
>Franklin......Mama's boy, ambitious, flirtatious, liberal......Lucy Mercer......Missy LeHand...egocentric!
> Sara Roosevelt....FDR's mother...controlled finances right through the presidency until her death
>. Louis Howe.......Franklin's alter-ego
>. Six births, five survived
>. Felt Rowley worked hard to be fair, maybe too hard.....maybe not
> Couldn't help but compare Franklin's fight with polio to my father's...Franklin could afford to go to all the specialists, have servants to take care f his every need.....my father was unemployed, broke, and if a wonderful doctor hadn't offered to enter him in an experimental rehab program being set up for military vets with limb loss, I do not know how things would have turned out
> Interesting comment from another biography of FDR....One "runs" for office, it is a political "race", you can be a "running mate", etc......no wonder they felt FDR had to avoid being seen while being carried, or being photographed in a wheechair
> the ego of men in politics is mythic.....stogies and women
> Their love of communal life was appealing..made me think of Jasmine!
> Famous Eleanor quotes: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Eleanor_Roosevelt/
> Parallels with Obama administration: Inheriting economic disaster, Eleanor's effort to remembr returning veterans and their families
> LibraryThing Review: I just devoured this book. I am not an historian, so I cannot debate the veracity of the facts. However, assuming this story sprung from research with integrity, it was a fascinating read. Indeed, a remarkable relationship existd between Franklin & Eleanor. It was based on acceptance of one another which stemmed from them being accepting of people in general. Superficial traits and public opinion had little to do with their loyalties, although they did require secrecy to live as their true selves. I like the idea that they both retained their humanity, the good, the bad, and the ugly, despite their public lives. Who are we to judge? As seems to be true for many memorable leaders, it seemes to me that the children probably suffered more than either parent. In this case, both parents were great leaders, so I would be interested to learn more about the impact their life choices had on their five children. Most interesting to me: their love of communal living combined with their fierce independence and their personal insecurities.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
"The Mighty Angel" by Jerzy Pilch *****
> Polish author
> Originally published 2000
> Narrator is writer, named Jerzy, writing about his 18 visits to the "alco" unit in a rehab facility
> p.32..."This nightmarish asininity had to be finally brought to a stop, the truth had to be looked manfully in the eye, and the truth was not pouring vodka down the drain or throwing bottles out of the window; the truth was drinking."
> Chapter 13, "Passages" consists solely of passages from other real life authors about drinking ..."And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with a cloud"...Revelations
>Love of his life...Ala-Alberta asks him "why do you drink?"....p. 60 is a rambling set of excuses.....
> Title references: the name of a pub, the name of a constellation of stars (actually Orion, which he describes as having a raised bottle to its lips), quote from Revelations
> p.78..."...the dream of a deep sleep is the dream of every drunkard."
> Vocabulary: 1) exegetes/one who practices exegesis, an explanation, most often of religious texts 2) farinaceous/containing or made of meal or flour b : containing or rich in starch 3)tumid/formed as if by swelling or inflation
> Characters: Don Juan the Rib (hairdresser & musiccontaining or made of meal or flour b : containing or rich in starch ian), Columbus the Explorer (a social studies teacher), Simon Pure Goodness (law student), Old Kubica (narrator's grandfather, drunkard), she-therapists (therapists on the ward whose platitudes bother narrator)
> p.86..."A person writes a book and he thinks that when the book goes out among people it will change the world--and that, I assure you, is a very great delusion. Yet to write without the faith that writing will change the world--such a thing is impossible,"
> p.86..."...an alcoholic will escape into death more readily than he will admit his powerlessness with regard to booze."
> p.154..."I'm not capable of describing my own liberation as a series of plausible events; I lack the ability to convey the evolutionary history of my own resurrection--I present only these epiphanic stanzas, though my resurrection too was like an epiphany, like a haiku; it wal like a single line of poetry, unerring as lightning."
> LibraryThing Review: I think Jerzy Pilch is a phenomenal writer! In "The Mighty Angel" Pilch bombards the reader with the experience of being a regular on an "alco" ward in a rehab facility. Question.....Are the characters, like Don Juan the Rib, the Queen of Kent, and the Hero of Socialist Labor, representations of aspects of the narrator, or individuals? The narrator's perspective on alcoholism, alcoholics & alcohol is gritty, tough, and incredibly insightful. Is it just a coincidence that the narrator is named Jerzy, is a writer, and has been to rehab eighteen times? Just read this masterpiece and see how the narrator fares. This is my second Pilch novel and they were both five star reads!
> Originally published 2000
> Narrator is writer, named Jerzy, writing about his 18 visits to the "alco" unit in a rehab facility
> p.32..."This nightmarish asininity had to be finally brought to a stop, the truth had to be looked manfully in the eye, and the truth was not pouring vodka down the drain or throwing bottles out of the window; the truth was drinking."
> Chapter 13, "Passages" consists solely of passages from other real life authors about drinking ..."And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with a cloud"...Revelations
>Love of his life...Ala-Alberta asks him "why do you drink?"....p. 60 is a rambling set of excuses.....
> Title references: the name of a pub, the name of a constellation of stars (actually Orion, which he describes as having a raised bottle to its lips), quote from Revelations
> p.78..."...the dream of a deep sleep is the dream of every drunkard."
> Vocabulary: 1) exegetes/one who practices exegesis, an explanation, most often of religious texts 2) farinaceous/containing or made of meal or flour b : containing or rich in starch 3)tumid/formed as if by swelling or inflation
> Characters: Don Juan the Rib (hairdresser & musiccontaining or made of meal or flour b : containing or rich in starch ian), Columbus the Explorer (a social studies teacher), Simon Pure Goodness (law student), Old Kubica (narrator's grandfather, drunkard), she-therapists (therapists on the ward whose platitudes bother narrator)
> p.86..."A person writes a book and he thinks that when the book goes out among people it will change the world--and that, I assure you, is a very great delusion. Yet to write without the faith that writing will change the world--such a thing is impossible,"
> p.86..."...an alcoholic will escape into death more readily than he will admit his powerlessness with regard to booze."
> p.154..."I'm not capable of describing my own liberation as a series of plausible events; I lack the ability to convey the evolutionary history of my own resurrection--I present only these epiphanic stanzas, though my resurrection too was like an epiphany, like a haiku; it wal like a single line of poetry, unerring as lightning."
> LibraryThing Review: I think Jerzy Pilch is a phenomenal writer! In "The Mighty Angel" Pilch bombards the reader with the experience of being a regular on an "alco" ward in a rehab facility. Question.....Are the characters, like Don Juan the Rib, the Queen of Kent, and the Hero of Socialist Labor, representations of aspects of the narrator, or individuals? The narrator's perspective on alcoholism, alcoholics & alcohol is gritty, tough, and incredibly insightful. Is it just a coincidence that the narrator is named Jerzy, is a writer, and has been to rehab eighteen times? Just read this masterpiece and see how the narrator fares. This is my second Pilch novel and they were both five star reads!
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
"The Pets" by Bragi Olafsson ***
>. Icelandic author
> orig. Published 2001
An odd Icelandic story about a man hiding under a bed in his own apartment throughtout an evening in which his friends have a party without him. It is a quick read....mildly engaging with a disappointing ending. The characters are interesting and the plot is clever, yet pverall the story falls short somehow. Oh well......
> orig. Published 2001
An odd Icelandic story about a man hiding under a bed in his own apartment throughtout an evening in which his friends have a party without him. It is a quick read....mildly engaging with a disappointing ending. The characters are interesting and the plot is clever, yet pverall the story falls short somehow. Oh well......
Saturday, October 29, 2011
"Cathedral of The Sea" by Idelfonso Falcones. **
> Audiobook
> orinally published 2006
> Spanish author, attorney by training
> set in 14th century Spain, Barcelona
> Jews as evil, wore bands so gentiles would not associate
>Charcters: Barnat/ forced to flee his land w/ son, Arnau
Grau/Barnat's brother- in- law, potter turned politician
> Bernat is hung for his role in an urising of the poor,.......Arnau and adopted son, Juan, must fend fr selves......Arnau becomes a stone mason and Juan goes into the church
> Inquisition and expulsion of Jews comes into play
> class and reigious clashes are a major theme
>. LibraryThing Review: Boring!
> orinally published 2006
> Spanish author, attorney by training
> set in 14th century Spain, Barcelona
> Jews as evil, wore bands so gentiles would not associate
>Charcters: Barnat/ forced to flee his land w/ son, Arnau
Grau/Barnat's brother- in- law, potter turned politician
> Bernat is hung for his role in an urising of the poor,.......Arnau and adopted son, Juan, must fend fr selves......Arnau becomes a stone mason and Juan goes into the church
> Inquisition and expulsion of Jews comes into play
> class and reigious clashes are a major theme
>. LibraryThing Review: Boring!
Friday, October 21, 2011
"The Museum of Eterna's Novel: The First Good Novel" by Macedonia Fernandez - ****
> Originally published in 1982, Open Letter edition 2010
> Argentinian author
>. Written in 1930s and 1950s, not published until after his death per his wishes
> 50+ prologues......to readers, to critics, to characters, witty, profound, confusing,
> p.VI.. "Macedonio Fernandez was the first novelist for whom the problem pof writing was so explicitly the problem of the reader."
> p.VII..."The only things that can't die are the things that haven't begun. This is true of novels and it is true of humans, too."
> p.XIV..."The only sertainty is that Macedonio once held his living hands to these pages. It's like laying one's ear to a train track to listen for the vibrations of a train that passed fifty years ago."
>p.XV....Although "The Museum of Eterna's Novel" eludes categorization, its many prologues and self-conscious use of authorial persona often lead to its characterization as an example of proto-postmodernism. Macedonio himself would have shrugged off this label, and insisted instead that the novel is a sketch for a metaphyics wherein love conquers death."
> p.XV....."There are prologues of salutations, prologues introducing the author and the characters, prologue-letters to the critics, prologues about characters who were rejected, a prologue of authorial despair and, of course, prologues about prologuing."
> p.8..."This will be the novel that's thrown violently to the floor moist often, and avidly taken up again just as often. What other author can boast of that?"...I second that!!!
> p.35..."Every character only halfway exists, because none was ever introduced who wasn't taken by half or more from 'real life' people. That's why there's a subtle discomfort and agitation in every character's 'being', since there are several humans wandering the world that a novelist used partially for a character and who feel a discomfort in their 'being' in life. Something of them is in a novel, fantasized in written pages, and it can';t truly be said where they really are."
> LibraryThing Review: This is the perfect book for the reader who loves abstract art, who trusts that meaning and beauty are in there somewhere if only one sticks with it....this is a novel about a ranch named "the Novel".......this is a novel with 50+ prologues.....not a typo...50+ prologues. This is a novel for the reader who revels in metaphysics......the metaphysics of the written word. Did I like it? I don't know. Would I recommend it? I don't know. Was it a memorable intellectual experience? Absolutely!
> Argentinian author
>. Written in 1930s and 1950s, not published until after his death per his wishes
> 50+ prologues......to readers, to critics, to characters, witty, profound, confusing,
> p.VI.. "Macedonio Fernandez was the first novelist for whom the problem pof writing was so explicitly the problem of the reader."
> p.VII..."The only things that can't die are the things that haven't begun. This is true of novels and it is true of humans, too."
> p.XIV..."The only sertainty is that Macedonio once held his living hands to these pages. It's like laying one's ear to a train track to listen for the vibrations of a train that passed fifty years ago."
>p.XV....Although "The Museum of Eterna's Novel" eludes categorization, its many prologues and self-conscious use of authorial persona often lead to its characterization as an example of proto-postmodernism. Macedonio himself would have shrugged off this label, and insisted instead that the novel is a sketch for a metaphyics wherein love conquers death."
> p.XV....."There are prologues of salutations, prologues introducing the author and the characters, prologue-letters to the critics, prologues about characters who were rejected, a prologue of authorial despair and, of course, prologues about prologuing."
> p.8..."This will be the novel that's thrown violently to the floor moist often, and avidly taken up again just as often. What other author can boast of that?"...I second that!!!
> p.35..."Every character only halfway exists, because none was ever introduced who wasn't taken by half or more from 'real life' people. That's why there's a subtle discomfort and agitation in every character's 'being', since there are several humans wandering the world that a novelist used partially for a character and who feel a discomfort in their 'being' in life. Something of them is in a novel, fantasized in written pages, and it can';t truly be said where they really are."
> LibraryThing Review: This is the perfect book for the reader who loves abstract art, who trusts that meaning and beauty are in there somewhere if only one sticks with it....this is a novel about a ranch named "the Novel".......this is a novel with 50+ prologues.....not a typo...50+ prologues. This is a novel for the reader who revels in metaphysics......the metaphysics of the written word. Did I like it? I don't know. Would I recommend it? I don't know. Was it a memorable intellectual experience? Absolutely!
Friday, October 14, 2011
"Mantissa" by John Fowles ****
> English author
> 20th century author is visited by a modern day muse and helps him work through variations on the erotic themes in his writing
> she takes multiple forms...challenges him...
> originally published 1982
> LibraryThing Review: What an unusual experience! Feel like listening in on the interaction between the modern day incarnation of an ancient muse and the author of erotic literature? This is the book for you. At first I was a bit put off, but then I became totally engaged with the bizarre plot. The muse is a shapeshifter who challenges, engages and inspires the author. Fascinating piece of writing!
> 20th century author is visited by a modern day muse and helps him work through variations on the erotic themes in his writing
> she takes multiple forms...challenges him...
> originally published 1982
> LibraryThing Review: What an unusual experience! Feel like listening in on the interaction between the modern day incarnation of an ancient muse and the author of erotic literature? This is the book for you. At first I was a bit put off, but then I became totally engaged with the bizarre plot. The muse is a shapeshifter who challenges, engages and inspires the author. Fascinating piece of writing!
Sunday, October 9, 2011
"Biographie de la faim" by Amelie Nothomb ****
> Belgian author, read in original French
> Autobiographical, from author at age 9 to age 21.....
> Amelie, the daughter of a Belgian diplomat is obsessed with the idea of hunger and the role it plays in our lives.....hunger for food, for material goods, for connection, for despair
> Starts with description of culture of the island culture of Vanuatu where there is no hunger, food is aplenty for the taking, so the inhabitants want nothing
> Author herself goes through phases including anorexia....not clear how much is true
> p.19 - "Le reve des physiciens est de parvenir a expliquer l'univers a partir d'une seule loi. Il parait que c'est tres difficile. A supposer que je sois un univers, je tiens en cette force unique: la faim."
> at a young age she was scandalized by fairy tales and the message they sent
> p.25 - "Trop sucre: l'expression me parait aussi absurde que "trop beau" ou "trop amoureux"."
> At one point she wants "more" love from her mother and her mother implies that there is a limit, and also that one must earn love...."J'etais comme la famille royale anglaise apprenant qu'elle allait devoir payer des impots: Quoi? Tout ne m'etait-il pas du?"
> While in Bangladesh she must write weekly to her Belgian grandparents and she and her beloved sister, Juliette, write almost word for word the same letters. Amelie overhears her parents laughing about the similarity between the letters...."Sans le savoir, nous produisions peut-etre ainsi une explication au mystere journalistique du Bangladesh: si deux etres distincts tentaient de commenter l'actualite de ce pays, une fatalite verbale leur faisait ecrire des textes d'une identite confrondante."
> p.150 - "Nous allions sans cesse a la plage. Le golfe du Bengale etait d'une beaute apocalyptique: jamais je n'ai vu meer aussi agitee. Je ne pouvais resister a l'appel des vagues immense: j'etais dans l'eau du matin au soir."
> p.179 - De tous les pays ou j'ai vecu, la Belgique est celui que j'ai le moins compris. C'est peut-etre cela, etre de quelque part: ne pas voir de quoi il s'agit. Sans doute est-ce pour cette raison que j'y commencai a ecrire. Ne pas comprendre est un sacre ferment pour l'ecriture. Mes roman mettaient en forme une incomprehension qui croissait."
> LibraryThing Review: Amelie Nothomb is a fascinating writer! In this book she recounts her thoughts and experiences from the age of nine through the age of twenty-one. She is the daughter of a Belgian diplomat, so she and her family lived in New York, Bangladesh, Japan, and more. There is no aspect of Nothomb's surroundings or experience which is spared her quite profound scrutiny and philosophizing. She is witty and also a bit scary in her self-awareness and a delight to read.
> Autobiographical, from author at age 9 to age 21.....
> Amelie, the daughter of a Belgian diplomat is obsessed with the idea of hunger and the role it plays in our lives.....hunger for food, for material goods, for connection, for despair
> Starts with description of culture of the island culture of Vanuatu where there is no hunger, food is aplenty for the taking, so the inhabitants want nothing
> Author herself goes through phases including anorexia....not clear how much is true
> p.19 - "Le reve des physiciens est de parvenir a expliquer l'univers a partir d'une seule loi. Il parait que c'est tres difficile. A supposer que je sois un univers, je tiens en cette force unique: la faim."
> at a young age she was scandalized by fairy tales and the message they sent
> p.25 - "Trop sucre: l'expression me parait aussi absurde que "trop beau" ou "trop amoureux"."
> At one point she wants "more" love from her mother and her mother implies that there is a limit, and also that one must earn love...."J'etais comme la famille royale anglaise apprenant qu'elle allait devoir payer des impots: Quoi? Tout ne m'etait-il pas du?"
> While in Bangladesh she must write weekly to her Belgian grandparents and she and her beloved sister, Juliette, write almost word for word the same letters. Amelie overhears her parents laughing about the similarity between the letters...."Sans le savoir, nous produisions peut-etre ainsi une explication au mystere journalistique du Bangladesh: si deux etres distincts tentaient de commenter l'actualite de ce pays, une fatalite verbale leur faisait ecrire des textes d'une identite confrondante."
> p.150 - "Nous allions sans cesse a la plage. Le golfe du Bengale etait d'une beaute apocalyptique: jamais je n'ai vu meer aussi agitee. Je ne pouvais resister a l'appel des vagues immense: j'etais dans l'eau du matin au soir."
> p.179 - De tous les pays ou j'ai vecu, la Belgique est celui que j'ai le moins compris. C'est peut-etre cela, etre de quelque part: ne pas voir de quoi il s'agit. Sans doute est-ce pour cette raison que j'y commencai a ecrire. Ne pas comprendre est un sacre ferment pour l'ecriture. Mes roman mettaient en forme une incomprehension qui croissait."
> LibraryThing Review: Amelie Nothomb is a fascinating writer! In this book she recounts her thoughts and experiences from the age of nine through the age of twenty-one. She is the daughter of a Belgian diplomat, so she and her family lived in New York, Bangladesh, Japan, and more. There is no aspect of Nothomb's surroundings or experience which is spared her quite profound scrutiny and philosophizing. She is witty and also a bit scary in her self-awareness and a delight to read.
Friday, October 7, 2011
"Pink-On-Pink" by Teresa Schreiber Werth - *****
Teresa Schreiber Werth nails breast cancer......each and every piece struck home in my soul.......Fantastic!
"Salmon Fishing in Yemen" by Paul Torday - ****
> Debut novel
> British author
> Fiction, collection of memos, e-mails, and journal entries about a project proposed by a Yemeni sheikh to introduce salmon fishing in Yemen
> Characters: Alfred Jones (scientist approached to develop the project), Sheikh Muhammed (Yemeni, owns Scottish castle and sees the project as a metaphor for the journey from skepticism to hope and belief, risks assasination from Al Queda for introducing this frivolous Western activity), Mary Jones (Alfred's wife, an economist, detached and distanced and thinks all things about faith are basically frivolous), Peter Maxwell (communications director for the Prime Minister, perpetual manager f image), Harriet (consultant acting as liason between the Sheikh and the british fishery experts, fiance fighting in Iraq)
>Politics: project undertaken to balance negative image of British-Yemeni relations
>Money: project seen as a great way to bring millions into the coffers of the various departments working on the project
> Class: the Sheikh sees salmon fishing as a sport to be shared across social classes in Yemen
> Faith: the Sheikh equates the time spent fishing in hopes of a catch to hope which he equates with faith
> bringing water to the desert....a symbol of transformation
> other "insane ideas where belief has overcome reason and judgement: the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China - the Milleniium Dome.....we arre not the first and will not be the last people to defy common sense, logic, nature."
> p.57 - "I have spoken to many scholars and imams about my dream of salmon fishing, I have told them how I believe this magical creature brings us all nearer to God - by the mystery of its life, by the long journey that it makes through the oceans until it finds the waters of its home streams which is so like our own journey towards God....".
> p.195 - "The same God who created me, created the salmon, and in his wisdom brought us together and....."
> p.214 - "I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb." - Fred while in Yemen. At home, on sunday, he goes shopping!
> p.229 - "That is why some of our people hate the West so much. They wonder what the West has to offer that is so compelling that it must be imposed upon us, replacing our religion of God with the religion of money, relacing our piety and our poverty with consumer goods that we do not need, forcing money upon us that we cannot spend or if we do, cannot repay, loosening the ties that hold together families and tribes, corroding our faith, corroding our morality."
> - p.281 - The Fisherman's Rhyme - "Rod, reel,/Flask, creel/Net, fly book/And lunch"
> p.292 - "I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the frst step away from a world that only recognised what it could count measure, sell or buy."
> p.325 - "I believe in it because it is impossible."
> LibraryThing Review: Salmon fishing in Yemen? Impossible? One of the closing lines of this book is , "I believe in it because it is impossible." Paul Torday has written a lovely novel about transformation, faith, belief, and love. A Yemeni sheikh who loves salmon fishing proposes to bring the sport to his home country, and the relationship between himself and the fishery scientist whom he employs leads to transformation. The story unfolds as a collection of memos, letters, and e-mails and they reveal the role of politics, money, and personal ego in distorting and hiding the true meaning of the project. Torday is also able to make interesting observations about the nature of the differences between Yemenis and British society. I read this book during the course of a long, lovely day and hope that other readers will enjoy and appreciate it as I have.
> British author
> Fiction, collection of memos, e-mails, and journal entries about a project proposed by a Yemeni sheikh to introduce salmon fishing in Yemen
> Characters: Alfred Jones (scientist approached to develop the project), Sheikh Muhammed (Yemeni, owns Scottish castle and sees the project as a metaphor for the journey from skepticism to hope and belief, risks assasination from Al Queda for introducing this frivolous Western activity), Mary Jones (Alfred's wife, an economist, detached and distanced and thinks all things about faith are basically frivolous), Peter Maxwell (communications director for the Prime Minister, perpetual manager f image), Harriet (consultant acting as liason between the Sheikh and the british fishery experts, fiance fighting in Iraq)
>Politics: project undertaken to balance negative image of British-Yemeni relations
>Money: project seen as a great way to bring millions into the coffers of the various departments working on the project
> Class: the Sheikh sees salmon fishing as a sport to be shared across social classes in Yemen
> Faith: the Sheikh equates the time spent fishing in hopes of a catch to hope which he equates with faith
> bringing water to the desert....a symbol of transformation
> other "insane ideas where belief has overcome reason and judgement: the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China - the Milleniium Dome.....we arre not the first and will not be the last people to defy common sense, logic, nature."
> p.57 - "I have spoken to many scholars and imams about my dream of salmon fishing, I have told them how I believe this magical creature brings us all nearer to God - by the mystery of its life, by the long journey that it makes through the oceans until it finds the waters of its home streams which is so like our own journey towards God....".
> p.195 - "The same God who created me, created the salmon, and in his wisdom brought us together and....."
> p.214 - "I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb." - Fred while in Yemen. At home, on sunday, he goes shopping!
> p.229 - "That is why some of our people hate the West so much. They wonder what the West has to offer that is so compelling that it must be imposed upon us, replacing our religion of God with the religion of money, relacing our piety and our poverty with consumer goods that we do not need, forcing money upon us that we cannot spend or if we do, cannot repay, loosening the ties that hold together families and tribes, corroding our faith, corroding our morality."
> - p.281 - The Fisherman's Rhyme - "Rod, reel,/Flask, creel/Net, fly book/And lunch"
> p.292 - "I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the frst step away from a world that only recognised what it could count measure, sell or buy."
> p.325 - "I believe in it because it is impossible."
> LibraryThing Review: Salmon fishing in Yemen? Impossible? One of the closing lines of this book is , "I believe in it because it is impossible." Paul Torday has written a lovely novel about transformation, faith, belief, and love. A Yemeni sheikh who loves salmon fishing proposes to bring the sport to his home country, and the relationship between himself and the fishery scientist whom he employs leads to transformation. The story unfolds as a collection of memos, letters, and e-mails and they reveal the role of politics, money, and personal ego in distorting and hiding the true meaning of the project. Torday is also able to make interesting observations about the nature of the differences between Yemenis and British society. I read this book during the course of a long, lovely day and hope that other readers will enjoy and appreciate it as I have.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
"Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman - ***
> Epigraph: "Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."....Blaise Pascal, "Pensees"
> "...there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy"
> "The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito."
> "As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd put it, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."
> :The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity."
> Freud> "In this new view, the mind was not simply equal to the conscious part we familiarly live with; rather it was like an iceberg, the majority of its mass hidden from sight."........and....."This sense of the vast presence below the surface led him to chew on the question of free will. He reasoned that if choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered."
> "A centipede was happy quite,Until a frog in fun, Said "Pray tell which leg comes after which?", This raised her mind to such a pitch, She lay distracted in the ditch, Not knowing how to run."
> "Man is a plant which bears thoughts, just as a rose-tree bears roses and an apple-tree bears apples." Antoine Fabre D'Olivet, "L'Histoire philosophique du genre humain"
> "Incredible the Lodging, But limited the Guest.", Emily Dickinson
> "In general, we're least of what our minds do best.", Marvin Minsky, "The Society of Mind"
> "Do I contradict myself>, Very well then I contrsdict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)", Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
> LibraryThing Review: Good treatise on the mysteries of the brain.
> "...there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy"
> "The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito."
> "As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd put it, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."
> :The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity."
> Freud> "In this new view, the mind was not simply equal to the conscious part we familiarly live with; rather it was like an iceberg, the majority of its mass hidden from sight."........and....."This sense of the vast presence below the surface led him to chew on the question of free will. He reasoned that if choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered."
> "A centipede was happy quite,Until a frog in fun, Said "Pray tell which leg comes after which?", This raised her mind to such a pitch, She lay distracted in the ditch, Not knowing how to run."
> "Man is a plant which bears thoughts, just as a rose-tree bears roses and an apple-tree bears apples." Antoine Fabre D'Olivet, "L'Histoire philosophique du genre humain"
> "Incredible the Lodging, But limited the Guest.", Emily Dickinson
> "In general, we're least of what our minds do best.", Marvin Minsky, "The Society of Mind"
> "Do I contradict myself>, Very well then I contrsdict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)", Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
> LibraryThing Review: Good treatise on the mysteries of the brain.
Monday, September 19, 2011
"Beware of Pity" by Stefan Zweig *****
> Summer Sub Club w/ Beth
> Austrian author, he and his wife committed suicide post WWII
>Author's Note: "The final criterion of an officer's behavior was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book."
> Epigraph: "There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness....; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond."
> p.xxvii..."'To him that hath, to him shall be given.' These words from the Scriptures the writer may safely restate as: 'To him that hath told much to him shall much be told.' .....To the person who has over and over again tried t trace human destinies, many tell their own story." - So is Zweig telling this or was this the beginning of the story,,,,,I enjoy stories told this way
> p.xxx..."One should not always let the wish be father to the thought." - WOW!
> p.xxxi..."Of course they were all against me, for, as is borne out by experience, the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuous laid supper was awaiting us in the net room." - Denial is a powerful defense mechanism...I assume narrator was referring to the brewing storm of WWII
> p.xxxii..." During the war practically the only courage I cm across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear..." - Fear seems to be the basis for so many of humans' bad choices, seems rather important to teach our children not to induce fear in others as it seems to "go viral" or expand exponentially so quickly
> Characters: Anton Hofmiller (narrator, Austrian cavalry officer who learns the bitter lessons of the danger of pity), Edith Kekesfalva (invalid), Ilona (her cousin), Dr. Condor(married the one patient he could not cure), Herr von Kekesfalva (swindled his way to his millions)
> Vocabulary: 1)paralipomena/things passed over but added as a supplement,political writings as obvious paralipomena done merely to make money 2)philippic:a discourse or declamation full of acrimonious invective, a philippic so withering that it roused a lethargic Senate 3) myrmidon: a follower or subordinate who unquestioningly or pitilessly executes orders
> p.1..."...but if you try to repair a watch in too much of a hurry, you're as likely as not to put the whole works out of order."....take your time
> His "ill-fated blunder"...asking a a crippled girl to dance, not knowing she was crippled......lead to pity
> p.34...."It all began with that sudden pull at the reins, which was, so to speak, the first symptom of the strange poisoning of my spirit by pity."
> p.42..."It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence."
> p.56..."For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone who identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom."
> p.67 - Edith's rant against pity from the invalid's perspective
> p.144 - "....but medicine has nothing to do with morals; every illness is in itself an anarchistic phenomenon, a revolt against Nature, and one must therefore employ every means to fight it, every means. No, no pity for the sick - the sick person places himself outside the law, he offends against law and order, and in order to restore law and order, to restore the sick person himself, one must, as in the case of every revolt, attack ruthlessly, employ every weapon at one's command, for goodness and truth have never yet succeeded in curing humanity or even a single human being." Dr. Condor's philosophy
> p.159 - "Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy' and to make a person happy could never be a crime."
> p.175 - "It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. ....Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give."
> p.175 - "...One has got to keep one's pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference, we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the law and pawnbrokers' if they were all to givw way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still....."
> p.175 - Two kinds of pity.....1)weak and sentimental which is "really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by tyhe sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another" 2) "...the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond....."
> p.178 - "Once you hold out even a straw of hope to one of those patients who are so cruelly called incurable he will immediately construct a plank out of it, and out of the plank a whole house."
> pp.183-184....Reference to Arabian Nights, the djinn who clamped down on the person who showed pity and made him a beast of burden
> p.185 - "For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world."
> p.206 - Anton learns that cripples have normal passions
> p.217 - "It is not uncommon, indeed, for a state of subconscious nervous excitement to exist side by side with a paralysis of one's conscious mind....".
> p.234 - Anton learns of the power of "tactless pity" to wound
> p.265 - "...believe me, a doctor, of all people, seldom has a clear conscience. One knows how little one can really do to help; as an individual one can't cope with the infinite wretchedness that exists all around the world. One merely bales a few drops out of the unfathomable ocean of misery with a thimble, and those whom one imagines one has cured today have a new malady tomorrow."
> p.282 - "It is only the immeasurable the limitless, that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength."
> Acts coming from pity make the doer briefly feel Godlike
> p.310 - "I was no longer God, but a puny, pitiable human being, whose blackguardly weakness did nothing but harm, whose pity wrought nothing but havoc and misery."
> p.349 - "For I was convinced that through my weakness, my pity, that pity which alternately advanced and receded, I had murdered a human being, the only human being who love me passionately."
> p.351 - "Thousands upon thousands of those who went to the war with me did the same, with rifle, bayonet, hand-grenade, machine-gun, and naked fist, hundreds of thousands, millions of my generation, in France, in Russia and Germany - of what moment, then, was one murder more, what mattered private, personal guilt in the midst of this thousandfold, cosmic destruction and wrecking of human life, the most appalling holocaust history had ever known?"..........Zweig's own issues emerge here
> p.353 - "But ever since that moment I have realized afresh that no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.".....Hofmiller sees Dr. Condor at the opera after WWI and leaves in shame...closing line of the novel
>
>LibraryThing Review: Stefan Zweig's treatise on the dark nature of pity is a fantastic read for several reasons. The plot is a page turner with deeply developed characters such as the narrator, Anton Hofmiller, an Austrian cavalry officer who struggles with the inner voices of pity, honor, and self-indulgence. There is Edith von Kekesfalva the beautiful, tempestuous lame girl whose ambivalence about her plight is the cause of the undoing of multiple characters and Doctor Condor, the physician who espouses fascinating ideas about the medical profession in general and Edith in particular. Those are just three of the characters! The use of language is marvelous, which means that all three of my personal criteria for outstanding literature, plot, character, and language, have been met and then some! 350 pages flew by!
> Austrian author, he and his wife committed suicide post WWII
>Author's Note: "The final criterion of an officer's behavior was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book."
> Epigraph: "There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness....; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond."
> p.xxvii..."'To him that hath, to him shall be given.' These words from the Scriptures the writer may safely restate as: 'To him that hath told much to him shall much be told.' .....To the person who has over and over again tried t trace human destinies, many tell their own story." - So is Zweig telling this or was this the beginning of the story,,,,,I enjoy stories told this way
> p.xxx..."One should not always let the wish be father to the thought." - WOW!
> p.xxxi..."Of course they were all against me, for, as is borne out by experience, the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuous laid supper was awaiting us in the net room." - Denial is a powerful defense mechanism...I assume narrator was referring to the brewing storm of WWII
> p.xxxii..." During the war practically the only courage I cm across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear..." - Fear seems to be the basis for so many of humans' bad choices, seems rather important to teach our children not to induce fear in others as it seems to "go viral" or expand exponentially so quickly
> Characters: Anton Hofmiller (narrator, Austrian cavalry officer who learns the bitter lessons of the danger of pity), Edith Kekesfalva (invalid), Ilona (her cousin), Dr. Condor(married the one patient he could not cure), Herr von Kekesfalva (swindled his way to his millions)
> Vocabulary: 1)paralipomena/things passed over but added as a supplement,political writings as obvious paralipomena done merely to make money 2)philippic:a discourse or declamation full of acrimonious invective, a philippic so withering that it roused a lethargic Senate 3) myrmidon: a follower or subordinate who unquestioningly or pitilessly executes orders
> p.1..."...but if you try to repair a watch in too much of a hurry, you're as likely as not to put the whole works out of order."....take your time
> His "ill-fated blunder"...asking a a crippled girl to dance, not knowing she was crippled......lead to pity
> p.34...."It all began with that sudden pull at the reins, which was, so to speak, the first symptom of the strange poisoning of my spirit by pity."
> p.42..."It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence."
> p.56..."For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone who identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom."
> p.67 - Edith's rant against pity from the invalid's perspective
> p.144 - "....but medicine has nothing to do with morals; every illness is in itself an anarchistic phenomenon, a revolt against Nature, and one must therefore employ every means to fight it, every means. No, no pity for the sick - the sick person places himself outside the law, he offends against law and order, and in order to restore law and order, to restore the sick person himself, one must, as in the case of every revolt, attack ruthlessly, employ every weapon at one's command, for goodness and truth have never yet succeeded in curing humanity or even a single human being." Dr. Condor's philosophy
> p.159 - "Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy' and to make a person happy could never be a crime."
> p.175 - "It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. ....Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give."
> p.175 - "...One has got to keep one's pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference, we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the law and pawnbrokers' if they were all to givw way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still....."
> p.175 - Two kinds of pity.....1)weak and sentimental which is "really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by tyhe sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another" 2) "...the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond....."
> p.178 - "Once you hold out even a straw of hope to one of those patients who are so cruelly called incurable he will immediately construct a plank out of it, and out of the plank a whole house."
> pp.183-184....Reference to Arabian Nights, the djinn who clamped down on the person who showed pity and made him a beast of burden
> p.185 - "For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world."
> p.206 - Anton learns that cripples have normal passions
> p.217 - "It is not uncommon, indeed, for a state of subconscious nervous excitement to exist side by side with a paralysis of one's conscious mind....".
> p.234 - Anton learns of the power of "tactless pity" to wound
> p.265 - "...believe me, a doctor, of all people, seldom has a clear conscience. One knows how little one can really do to help; as an individual one can't cope with the infinite wretchedness that exists all around the world. One merely bales a few drops out of the unfathomable ocean of misery with a thimble, and those whom one imagines one has cured today have a new malady tomorrow."
> p.282 - "It is only the immeasurable the limitless, that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength."
> Acts coming from pity make the doer briefly feel Godlike
> p.310 - "I was no longer God, but a puny, pitiable human being, whose blackguardly weakness did nothing but harm, whose pity wrought nothing but havoc and misery."
> p.349 - "For I was convinced that through my weakness, my pity, that pity which alternately advanced and receded, I had murdered a human being, the only human being who love me passionately."
> p.351 - "Thousands upon thousands of those who went to the war with me did the same, with rifle, bayonet, hand-grenade, machine-gun, and naked fist, hundreds of thousands, millions of my generation, in France, in Russia and Germany - of what moment, then, was one murder more, what mattered private, personal guilt in the midst of this thousandfold, cosmic destruction and wrecking of human life, the most appalling holocaust history had ever known?"..........Zweig's own issues emerge here
> p.353 - "But ever since that moment I have realized afresh that no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.".....Hofmiller sees Dr. Condor at the opera after WWI and leaves in shame...closing line of the novel
>
>LibraryThing Review: Stefan Zweig's treatise on the dark nature of pity is a fantastic read for several reasons. The plot is a page turner with deeply developed characters such as the narrator, Anton Hofmiller, an Austrian cavalry officer who struggles with the inner voices of pity, honor, and self-indulgence. There is Edith von Kekesfalva the beautiful, tempestuous lame girl whose ambivalence about her plight is the cause of the undoing of multiple characters and Doctor Condor, the physician who espouses fascinating ideas about the medical profession in general and Edith in particular. Those are just three of the characters! The use of language is marvelous, which means that all three of my personal criteria for outstanding literature, plot, character, and language, have been met and then some! 350 pages flew by!
Friday, September 16, 2011
"A Trick of Light" by Louise Penny - ****
> Audiobook, listened to this while on a long weekend at Douglas Lake with Susie
> another wonderful Three Pines, Inspector Gamache mystery
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook..............Another wonderful visit to Three Pines! And this one included a fair amount of humor as well. The Three Pines characters are at their best and the ending leaves lots of unanswered questions, which I take to mean that there will be another installment soon!
> another wonderful Three Pines, Inspector Gamache mystery
> LibraryThing Review: Audiobook..............Another wonderful visit to Three Pines! And this one included a fair amount of humor as well. The Three Pines characters are at their best and the ending leaves lots of unanswered questions, which I take to mean that there will be another installment soon!
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
"Across Many Mountains: A Tibetan Family's Epic Journey From Oppression to Dreedom" by Yangzom Brauen- ****
> Early Review Edition from LibraryThing
>. Memoir
>. A Tibetan nun treks from Tibet to India to escape Chinese oppression with daughter, Sonam
> Sonam marries Swiss man and the three move to Swtzerland, then Yangzom is born and eventually all move to NYC
> how to maintain unique heritage in the face of so many cultural changes
The grandmother, kunsang, is fascinating inher acceptance filled with determination!
> LibraryThing Review: I thought this story of three generations of Tibetan women was fascinating. I was completely engrossed by the details of the grandmother's life as a Buddhist nun and her daughter's life. It is difficult for me to fathom how they managed to go from the incredibly simple life in the Tibetan mountains to India, then Swtzerland, and then New York. Their daring escape from Tibet seems surreal to me. I also found it very interesting to imagine the author's life ( she is the nun's granddaughter). How does one adapt across so many cultures and still try to hold onto one's unique heritage? Once again I find the power of the human spirit to be staggering!
>. Memoir
>. A Tibetan nun treks from Tibet to India to escape Chinese oppression with daughter, Sonam
> Sonam marries Swiss man and the three move to Swtzerland, then Yangzom is born and eventually all move to NYC
> how to maintain unique heritage in the face of so many cultural changes
The grandmother, kunsang, is fascinating inher acceptance filled with determination!
> LibraryThing Review: I thought this story of three generations of Tibetan women was fascinating. I was completely engrossed by the details of the grandmother's life as a Buddhist nun and her daughter's life. It is difficult for me to fathom how they managed to go from the incredibly simple life in the Tibetan mountains to India, then Swtzerland, and then New York. Their daring escape from Tibet seems surreal to me. I also found it very interesting to imagine the author's life ( she is the nun's granddaughter). How does one adapt across so many cultures and still try to hold onto one's unique heritage? Once again I find the power of the human spirit to be staggering!
Sunday, August 21, 2011
"Can You Forgive Her?" by Anthony Trollope ****
>. 1st in Palliser series
> my first Trollope
> Audiobook
> Setting: mid 1800s, England
> Characters: Alice Vaversall, her cousin, Kate (wants her to marry her brother, George), John Hay (Alice's perfect fiance who she breaks up with), Alice's aunt (widowed wife of elderly wealthy man, manipulates all sorts of men)
> marital maneuvering
> pressure on women to marry appropriately regardless of love
> Alice is going to spend time with Pallisers, a high ranking family into which her other cousin, Cora, married
> Midway through the book, the narrator breaks in to ask, "can you forgive her?"........Alice has now twice become engaged to men ...the first, John Gray....she wants independence and breaks it off.....the second, George Vavasor, she realizes she abhors.......now John Gray is trying to save her from her errors,......what is Trollope saying? Women are fools? Men are heroes and their guardians?
>. LibraryThing Review: Audiobook.......Phew....28 hours of audio! Why would someone stick with this? Because it was wonderful! Anthony Trollope wrote this novel which is set in England in the mid 1800s. His protagonists are all women with relationship dilemmas which are fiercely controlled by the social mores of the time. Do these women need forgiveness? Can they forgive one another? Can they forgive themselves? Does the reader think they need forgiveness? Can you forgive them? Read the book and judge as you will!
> my first Trollope
> Audiobook
> Setting: mid 1800s, England
> Characters: Alice Vaversall, her cousin, Kate (wants her to marry her brother, George), John Hay (Alice's perfect fiance who she breaks up with), Alice's aunt (widowed wife of elderly wealthy man, manipulates all sorts of men)
> marital maneuvering
> pressure on women to marry appropriately regardless of love
> Alice is going to spend time with Pallisers, a high ranking family into which her other cousin, Cora, married
> Midway through the book, the narrator breaks in to ask, "can you forgive her?"........Alice has now twice become engaged to men ...the first, John Gray....she wants independence and breaks it off.....the second, George Vavasor, she realizes she abhors.......now John Gray is trying to save her from her errors,......what is Trollope saying? Women are fools? Men are heroes and their guardians?
>. LibraryThing Review: Audiobook.......Phew....28 hours of audio! Why would someone stick with this? Because it was wonderful! Anthony Trollope wrote this novel which is set in England in the mid 1800s. His protagonists are all women with relationship dilemmas which are fiercely controlled by the social mores of the time. Do these women need forgiveness? Can they forgive one another? Can they forgive themselves? Does the reader think they need forgiveness? Can you forgive them? Read the book and judge as you will!
Friday, August 12, 2011
"Then Came The Evening" by Brian Hart ***
> An Early Reviewer book for LibraryThing
> Debut novel
> Setting: Rural Idaho, a town in transition from rural to resort
> "Miner mansions".....cabins moved to various property from closed down mining areas
> p.17 "These new prisons were worse than the old ones, the raw light and plastic, the lack of history. Spaceman prisons, his cellmate called them. Lunar lockups.".....interesting
> p.28 "Tracy fit into an empty place in the couple's life like kindling in stacked cordwood.".....I like that
> p.34...."He thought they were of a breed, like dogs are of a breed: men who seep a low kind of terror at the corner of their eyes as they watch for weakness."........starts at a young age, in my opinion
> p.36..."He'd been getting stronger working all the time and he wondered if strength always came with a little vanity, wondered if it were possible to have one and not the other."...interesting insight
> p.175..."He understood why he was flawed but was helpless to change it: Rivers refused dams, wilderness refused roads. In the end you give up. You realize nothing can be avoided and nothing is.".....moral of the entire tale
> LibraryThing Review: I always enjoy reading debut novels, and this was no exception. I think Brian Hart has tremendous potential. Some of his phrasing was absolutely lovely. The plot, while very engaging, was a little choppy in an effort to cover large periods of time and then slow down for a while, then speed up again. This novel is a gritty, down-to-earth story of life, with all of its unpredictability, its unlikely pairings, and I really like that the ending is not fairy tale and not too dark.....just full of possibility. If the plot were less choppy, this would definitely be a 4 star read!
> Debut novel
> Setting: Rural Idaho, a town in transition from rural to resort
> "Miner mansions".....cabins moved to various property from closed down mining areas
> p.17 "These new prisons were worse than the old ones, the raw light and plastic, the lack of history. Spaceman prisons, his cellmate called them. Lunar lockups.".....interesting
> p.28 "Tracy fit into an empty place in the couple's life like kindling in stacked cordwood.".....I like that
> p.34...."He thought they were of a breed, like dogs are of a breed: men who seep a low kind of terror at the corner of their eyes as they watch for weakness."........starts at a young age, in my opinion
> p.36..."He'd been getting stronger working all the time and he wondered if strength always came with a little vanity, wondered if it were possible to have one and not the other."...interesting insight
> p.175..."He understood why he was flawed but was helpless to change it: Rivers refused dams, wilderness refused roads. In the end you give up. You realize nothing can be avoided and nothing is.".....moral of the entire tale
> LibraryThing Review: I always enjoy reading debut novels, and this was no exception. I think Brian Hart has tremendous potential. Some of his phrasing was absolutely lovely. The plot, while very engaging, was a little choppy in an effort to cover large periods of time and then slow down for a while, then speed up again. This novel is a gritty, down-to-earth story of life, with all of its unpredictability, its unlikely pairings, and I really like that the ending is not fairy tale and not too dark.....just full of possibility. If the plot were less choppy, this would definitely be a 4 star read!
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
"Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie *****
>Allegory about the value of storytelling and its role in survival as a human being
> Opening line: "There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. it stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue."
>Characters: Rashid/Haroun's father, storyteller, the Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions......Haroun/Rashid's son....fears that there is no point to stories that are not true.....many other fantasy characters....they are great
> Rashid...."who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available".....I feel like a kindred spirit!
> Miss Oneeta....."Cause is located in his pussy-collar-jee"...meaning psychology, LOL
> p.26..."They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees"
> I liked the "Moody Land" where the mood of the people determined the weather
> p.63..."To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it--well, that's a way of bringing the said thing into being."
> p.72..."...the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest libraryt in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up the other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive."
> UFOs are really folks from Kahani coming to Earth for "tasty and wicked luxury items"....snacks
> p.119.."But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedonm of Speech, declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?".......spoken in defense of soldiers voicing the aspects of their leaders which they do not like..........most political statement of the book
> poison cooling down the Ocean of Stories...."No longer did the waters give off that soft, subtle steam that could fill a person with fantastic dreams; here they were cool to the touch and clammy to boot." p.122
> p.125..."...because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of the light."
> p.129...character babbles, "Gogogol" and "kafkafka"...LOL
> p.131..."He has become disgusted with the growing cruelty and fanaticism of the Cult of the tongueless..."
> p. 146..."The oldest stories ever made, and look at them now. We let them rot, we abandoned them, long before this poisoning. We lost touch with our beginnings, with our roots, our Wellspring, our Source. Boring, we said, not in demand, surplus to requirements. And now, look, just look! No colour, no life, no nothing. Spoilt!"...referring to loss of oral traditions?
> mother returns in the end....realization that there is usefulness to storytelling
> LibraryThing Review: What could possibly bring about the end of storytelling? Poisoning of the Ocean of the Streams of Stories would definitely do it. Who would save the day Haroun! Salman Rushdie created a rollicking, beautiful, witty allegory for those of us who appreciate the tremendous value that storytelling has in our lives and in the lives of all humanity! Just read this wonderful story......and watch out for Princess Batcheat's horrible singing and Miss Blabbermouth's courage!
> Opening line: "There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. it stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue."
>Characters: Rashid/Haroun's father, storyteller, the Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions......Haroun/Rashid's son....fears that there is no point to stories that are not true.....many other fantasy characters....they are great
> Rashid...."who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available".....I feel like a kindred spirit!
> Miss Oneeta....."Cause is located in his pussy-collar-jee"...meaning psychology, LOL
> p.26..."They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees"
> I liked the "Moody Land" where the mood of the people determined the weather
> p.63..."To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it--well, that's a way of bringing the said thing into being."
> p.72..."...the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest libraryt in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up the other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive."
> UFOs are really folks from Kahani coming to Earth for "tasty and wicked luxury items"....snacks
> p.119.."But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedonm of Speech, declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?".......spoken in defense of soldiers voicing the aspects of their leaders which they do not like..........most political statement of the book
> poison cooling down the Ocean of Stories...."No longer did the waters give off that soft, subtle steam that could fill a person with fantastic dreams; here they were cool to the touch and clammy to boot." p.122
> p.125..."...because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of the light."
> p.129...character babbles, "Gogogol" and "kafkafka"...LOL
> p.131..."He has become disgusted with the growing cruelty and fanaticism of the Cult of the tongueless..."
> p. 146..."The oldest stories ever made, and look at them now. We let them rot, we abandoned them, long before this poisoning. We lost touch with our beginnings, with our roots, our Wellspring, our Source. Boring, we said, not in demand, surplus to requirements. And now, look, just look! No colour, no life, no nothing. Spoilt!"...referring to loss of oral traditions?
> mother returns in the end....realization that there is usefulness to storytelling
> LibraryThing Review: What could possibly bring about the end of storytelling? Poisoning of the Ocean of the Streams of Stories would definitely do it. Who would save the day Haroun! Salman Rushdie created a rollicking, beautiful, witty allegory for those of us who appreciate the tremendous value that storytelling has in our lives and in the lives of all humanity! Just read this wonderful story......and watch out for Princess Batcheat's horrible singing and Miss Blabbermouth's courage!
Saturday, August 6, 2011
"The Snowman" by Jo Nesbo. ****
> Audiobook
>. Set in Oslo
>. Serial killer suspense novel
LibraryThing Review: This was a very satisfying thriller. The plot was complex, but not in a gratuitous sense. The pschological aspect was excellent! I look forward to reading more of Nesbo's books.
>. Set in Oslo
>. Serial killer suspense novel
LibraryThing Review: This was a very satisfying thriller. The plot was complex, but not in a gratuitous sense. The pschological aspect was excellent! I look forward to reading more of Nesbo's books.
Friday, August 5, 2011
"Nemesis" by Philip Roth. *****
> Audiobook
> 1944, fictional polio outbreak, in Newark modeled after outbreak of 1918
> highly congested areas of immigrants most hard hit
> theme of fear and what it brings
LibraryThing Review: I thought this historically imagined tale of a polio outbreak in Newark, New Jersey was outstanding. Polio and its insidious spread is the metaphor for things which make us fear and from which it is difficult to protect oneself. Roth's insight into the workings of the human mind and heart are brilliant. The ultimate questions are what kind of God would create such a disease, what kind of God would allow small children to suffer, die, or move into adulthood permanently maimed? Yet.......there is the beauty of the protahonist's javelin throw......go figure! Great read!
> 1944, fictional polio outbreak, in Newark modeled after outbreak of 1918
> highly congested areas of immigrants most hard hit
> theme of fear and what it brings
LibraryThing Review: I thought this historically imagined tale of a polio outbreak in Newark, New Jersey was outstanding. Polio and its insidious spread is the metaphor for things which make us fear and from which it is difficult to protect oneself. Roth's insight into the workings of the human mind and heart are brilliant. The ultimate questions are what kind of God would create such a disease, what kind of God would allow small children to suffer, die, or move into adulthood permanently maimed? Yet.......there is the beauty of the protahonist's javelin throw......go figure! Great read!
Saturday, July 16, 2011
"Lotus Eaters" by Tatjana Soli **
> Audiobook
>Austrian author
> Listening while cross stitching on cottage front porch with Sall
> Setting: Saigon, as Americans are evacuating and the North is about to take power
> Characters: Helen (photojournalist), Linh (lover, wounded by gunshot)
> Epigraph/Title: The name pretty much says it all. The Lotus Eaters eat the Lotus. Oh, and forget about their lives, homes, families, dreams, and aspirations after doing so. We almost forgot that part.....reference to Homer's "Odyssey".
> How to get "the big story" without falling into a dangerous situation during
transition of power
> Sounds like what is happening in the Middle East....the tragedy of regime change
> LibraryThing Review: The book dragged very slowly in terms of plot, and there were significant gaps in information. I was listening with a friend and we both got fed up after four hours....threw in the towel!
>Austrian author
> Listening while cross stitching on cottage front porch with Sall
> Setting: Saigon, as Americans are evacuating and the North is about to take power
> Characters: Helen (photojournalist), Linh (lover, wounded by gunshot)
> Epigraph/Title: The name pretty much says it all. The Lotus Eaters eat the Lotus. Oh, and forget about their lives, homes, families, dreams, and aspirations after doing so. We almost forgot that part.....reference to Homer's "Odyssey".
> How to get "the big story" without falling into a dangerous situation during
transition of power
> Sounds like what is happening in the Middle East....the tragedy of regime change
> LibraryThing Review: The book dragged very slowly in terms of plot, and there were significant gaps in information. I was listening with a friend and we both got fed up after four hours....threw in the towel!
"Pale King" by David Foster Wallace *****
> Summer Read with Beth
> Amazing right from the start....
> Stream of consciousness of young man flying to Peoria, transferring to an IRS office there, needing to pass the CPA exam,and random observations of people around him
> Epigraph: "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."...Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"
> Opening line: "Past the flannel plains and backtop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: .........(list of plants) all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother;s soft hand on your cheek."
> p.11..."...like some type of omen of death or crushing failure on the CPA exam, which two things had collapsed in Sylvanshine's psyche to a single image of his silently, expressionlessly pushing a wide industrial mop down a corridor lined with frosted-glass doors bearing other men's names.
> p.12..."Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will. Most of what others esteemed or valued in him was unwilled, simply given, like a person's height or facial symmetry."
> p.14..."What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"......was this how Foster Wallace felt?
> p.15..."Surely fear is a type of stress. Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe."
> p.17..."He doesn't realize something's ALWAYS wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing."
>p.24...Thought Stopping: on the tarmac...."trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited onlty by the horizon, wh......an oceanic impresison so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cas or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it."...........Autobiographical?
Vocabulary: 1) lemniscate: a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ 2)rodential: interesting word, can guess it means rodent-like 3)anfractuous:full of windings and intricate turnings : tortuous 4) prolixly: unduly prolonged or drawn out, too long 5) imbrication: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) 6) semions: ? 7)parenchyma: the essential and distinctive tissue of an organ or an abnormal growth as distinguished from its supportive framework 8)hortation: urge or yearning 9)peplum: a short skirtlike section usually attached to the waistline of a blouse, jacket, dress, and made usually with a flared, pleated, or ruffled design 10) inedia: couldn't find definition 11)algesia: sensitiveness to pain 12) defilade: to arrange (fortifications) so as to protect the lines from frontal or enfilading fire and the interior of the works from plunging or reverse fire 13) trilby:a soft felt hat with indented crown
> Laughed out loud at the IRS worker found dead at his desk after four days. His supervisor said, "Frederick was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to himself."
> Leonard Stecyk: obsessively politically correct child.....hysterically funny chapter...#5
> p.41..."..a real vision of hell. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing eachc other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle...the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therin something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."
> p.52..."...he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic...creatures just did what they did." - I like this
> p.55.."After Houston her favorite doll had been the mere head of a doll, its hair prolixly done and the head's hople threaded to meet a neck's own thread; she had been eight when the body was lost and it lay now forever supine and unknowing in weeds while its head lived on." - classic projective art symbol of being a victim of sexual abuse is to draw a self portrait only of a head without a body....
> p.70..." 'The Pale King'is, in other words, a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a bureaucracy.....".
> p.73..."Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b)....protective legal devises."
> The foreword was fascinating in terms of content as well as placement in the novel...
> p.75.....he was trying to anticipate "debilitating post-grad debt" when he conducted his business of writing papers for other students, only discovered because other students plagiarized his papers....followed by tirade on the elite schools and their priorities
> the college was "a veritable temple of Mammon"...god of wealth and greed
> p.81..."One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either."
> ..."The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-call 'brothers', coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set."
>p. 82.."If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine his whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of human life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity."
> p.83..."Distilled to its essence, the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a for-profit business."
> p. 83....He first introduces the notion that the government does not need to lie about what it does.....easier just to be "massively, spectacularly dull."
> p.85..."This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down."
p. 85..."The memoir relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.
> Why don't people discuss the dull? "Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull...only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it...as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."
> p.86..."....characterization of a government bureaucracy as 'the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists',' the truth is that such a bureaucracy is really much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause."
....the crucial part of the analogy is that the elaborate system'[s operator is not himself uncaused. The bureaucracy is not a closed system; it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing."
> p.93...Leonard's sweat problems..."For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat."...not unlike hot flashes
> p.96..."That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird."
> p.96..."Similarly, 'primed' became his inner code word for the state of hair-trigger fear and dread that could cause him to have an attack at almost any time in public".
> I like that he points out that "there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous four-up and someone's going to be in a living hell." ---kind of like my view of fundamentalist religion
> p.116..."being in a stare"....trancelike.....I know exactly how this feels....staring but really being miles away in your mind
> p.118..."fact psychic" or "data mystic"....is this real?
> p.aa9...like the notion of irrelevant intuitions or foresights....this is why I am hesitant to ever see a psychic
> desk names? never heard of this
> p.130..."As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens' freedom to cede their autonomy we're now taking away their autonomy. It's a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them." - Powerful notion
> p.134 - "But it's something very odd. That they could have been so prescient and farsighted about erecting checks against the accumulation of power in any one branch of government, their healthy fear of government, and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.".....depressing
> p.136..."Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites." --I hope this is not completely true!
> p.136.."I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations." - Unfortunately, I agree
> p.141..."...so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man's civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms."
> p.141....from de Tocqueville...."he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers."
> p.143..."Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose........Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly......."---how true!
> p.144..."The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."
> p.144..."...the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generations.......Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that's when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing."
> p.147..."...I don't think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent--that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony."
> Reagan set up the IRS to be the Big Brother everyone hates
> p.149..."A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified......and whose terror opf not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt."....not sure I buy this....do you, Beth?
> p.183..."doubling"...the ability to feel something and also be aware of feeling something
> p.193..."Real freedom is the freedom to obey the law."....?????
> p.193....definition of a tax.....the amount of tax is equal to the product of the tax base and tax rate (T=B x R)
> progressive v. flat tax....progressive taxes consumption, trying to to put undue hardship on the poor
> p.209...It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God." I laughed out loud when I read this
> p.229 - "Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested." -----interesting!
> p.231 - "Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui--these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
> p.238...His mother's mental health issues....bird gazing, etc.....
> p.240..."I think part of what was so galvanizing was the substitute's diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info."
> p.253.."Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood."....Wallace's own experience?
> p.293..."Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread--and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.".....Saw this repeatedly in my private practice over the years
> Entire chapter of people in library turning pages.....very funny
> The notion that "Phantom" visits...a "particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom"...loved it!
> What about the boy who was obsessed with his lips touching every inch of his body?
> Stecyk's lifesaving in Home Ec when teacher cut off thumb.....
> p. 417..."...the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence."
> A good administrator is genuinely liked, without trying to be or appearing to try
> p.437..."....life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump."
> p.438.."The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life., if you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."...quite a concept!
LibraryThing Review: I think David Foster Wallace was absolutely brilliant. You might wonder how I could possibly give 5 stars to a work which was unfinished at the time of the author's suicide. Well.....read it. In some ways, as the editor says at the beginning, it is almost a collection of character studies....and what characters! Or, it is a treatise on the ability to immerse oneself in a boring set of repetitive tasks and to emerge successful and sane! Or, it is a commentary on the manner in which the American people have abdicated their responsibility to take responsibility for the running of their country! It is partially all of the above. The writing is witty, insightful, dark....who could ask for more? I cannot imagine what the novel would have been in its completed form. What a tragedy that Wallace suffered so that ending his life became a viable option! A loss to his family, the world of literature and humanity in general!
> Amazing right from the start....
> Stream of consciousness of young man flying to Peoria, transferring to an IRS office there, needing to pass the CPA exam,and random observations of people around him
> Epigraph: "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."...Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"
> Opening line: "Past the flannel plains and backtop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: .........(list of plants) all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother;s soft hand on your cheek."
> p.11..."...like some type of omen of death or crushing failure on the CPA exam, which two things had collapsed in Sylvanshine's psyche to a single image of his silently, expressionlessly pushing a wide industrial mop down a corridor lined with frosted-glass doors bearing other men's names.
> p.12..."Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will. Most of what others esteemed or valued in him was unwilled, simply given, like a person's height or facial symmetry."
> p.14..."What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"......was this how Foster Wallace felt?
> p.15..."Surely fear is a type of stress. Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe."
> p.17..."He doesn't realize something's ALWAYS wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing."
>p.24...Thought Stopping: on the tarmac...."trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited onlty by the horizon, wh......an oceanic impresison so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cas or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it."...........Autobiographical?
Vocabulary: 1) lemniscate: a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ 2)rodential: interesting word, can guess it means rodent-like 3)anfractuous:full of windings and intricate turnings : tortuous 4) prolixly: unduly prolonged or drawn out, too long 5) imbrication: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) 6) semions: ? 7)parenchyma: the essential and distinctive tissue of an organ or an abnormal growth as distinguished from its supportive framework 8)hortation: urge or yearning 9)peplum: a short skirtlike section usually attached to the waistline of a blouse, jacket, dress, and made usually with a flared, pleated, or ruffled design 10) inedia: couldn't find definition 11)algesia: sensitiveness to pain 12) defilade: to arrange (fortifications) so as to protect the lines from frontal or enfilading fire and the interior of the works from plunging or reverse fire 13) trilby:a soft felt hat with indented crown
> Laughed out loud at the IRS worker found dead at his desk after four days. His supervisor said, "Frederick was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to himself."
> Leonard Stecyk: obsessively politically correct child.....hysterically funny chapter...#5
> p.41..."..a real vision of hell. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing eachc other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle...the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therin something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."
> p.52..."...he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic...creatures just did what they did." - I like this
> p.55.."After Houston her favorite doll had been the mere head of a doll, its hair prolixly done and the head's hople threaded to meet a neck's own thread; she had been eight when the body was lost and it lay now forever supine and unknowing in weeds while its head lived on." - classic projective art symbol of being a victim of sexual abuse is to draw a self portrait only of a head without a body....
> p.70..." 'The Pale King'is, in other words, a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a bureaucracy.....".
> p.73..."Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b)....protective legal devises."
> The foreword was fascinating in terms of content as well as placement in the novel...
> p.75.....he was trying to anticipate "debilitating post-grad debt" when he conducted his business of writing papers for other students, only discovered because other students plagiarized his papers....followed by tirade on the elite schools and their priorities
> the college was "a veritable temple of Mammon"...god of wealth and greed
> p.81..."One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either."
> ..."The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-call 'brothers', coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set."
>p. 82.."If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine his whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of human life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity."
> p.83..."Distilled to its essence, the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a for-profit business."
> p. 83....He first introduces the notion that the government does not need to lie about what it does.....easier just to be "massively, spectacularly dull."
> p.85..."This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down."
p. 85..."The memoir relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.
> Why don't people discuss the dull? "Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull...only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it...as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."
> p.86..."....characterization of a government bureaucracy as 'the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists',' the truth is that such a bureaucracy is really much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause."
....the crucial part of the analogy is that the elaborate system'[s operator is not himself uncaused. The bureaucracy is not a closed system; it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing."
> p.93...Leonard's sweat problems..."For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat."...not unlike hot flashes
> p.96..."That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird."
> p.96..."Similarly, 'primed' became his inner code word for the state of hair-trigger fear and dread that could cause him to have an attack at almost any time in public".
> I like that he points out that "there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous four-up and someone's going to be in a living hell." ---kind of like my view of fundamentalist religion
> p.116..."being in a stare"....trancelike.....I know exactly how this feels....staring but really being miles away in your mind
> p.118..."fact psychic" or "data mystic"....is this real?
> p.aa9...like the notion of irrelevant intuitions or foresights....this is why I am hesitant to ever see a psychic
> desk names? never heard of this
> p.130..."As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens' freedom to cede their autonomy we're now taking away their autonomy. It's a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them." - Powerful notion
> p.134 - "But it's something very odd. That they could have been so prescient and farsighted about erecting checks against the accumulation of power in any one branch of government, their healthy fear of government, and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.".....depressing
> p.136..."Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites." --I hope this is not completely true!
> p.136.."I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations." - Unfortunately, I agree
> p.141..."...so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man's civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms."
> p.141....from de Tocqueville...."he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers."
> p.143..."Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose........Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly......."---how true!
> p.144..."The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."
> p.144..."...the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generations.......Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that's when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing."
> p.147..."...I don't think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent--that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony."
> Reagan set up the IRS to be the Big Brother everyone hates
> p.149..."A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified......and whose terror opf not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt."....not sure I buy this....do you, Beth?
> p.183..."doubling"...the ability to feel something and also be aware of feeling something
> p.193..."Real freedom is the freedom to obey the law."....?????
> p.193....definition of a tax.....the amount of tax is equal to the product of the tax base and tax rate (T=B x R)
> progressive v. flat tax....progressive taxes consumption, trying to to put undue hardship on the poor
> p.209...It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God." I laughed out loud when I read this
> p.229 - "Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested." -----interesting!
> p.231 - "Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui--these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
> p.238...His mother's mental health issues....bird gazing, etc.....
> p.240..."I think part of what was so galvanizing was the substitute's diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info."
> p.253.."Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood."....Wallace's own experience?
> p.293..."Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread--and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.".....Saw this repeatedly in my private practice over the years
> Entire chapter of people in library turning pages.....very funny
> The notion that "Phantom" visits...a "particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom"...loved it!
> What about the boy who was obsessed with his lips touching every inch of his body?
> Stecyk's lifesaving in Home Ec when teacher cut off thumb.....
> p. 417..."...the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence."
> A good administrator is genuinely liked, without trying to be or appearing to try
> p.437..."....life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump."
> p.438.."The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life., if you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."...quite a concept!
LibraryThing Review: I think David Foster Wallace was absolutely brilliant. You might wonder how I could possibly give 5 stars to a work which was unfinished at the time of the author's suicide. Well.....read it. In some ways, as the editor says at the beginning, it is almost a collection of character studies....and what characters! Or, it is a treatise on the ability to immerse oneself in a boring set of repetitive tasks and to emerge successful and sane! Or, it is a commentary on the manner in which the American people have abdicated their responsibility to take responsibility for the running of their country! It is partially all of the above. The writing is witty, insightful, dark....who could ask for more? I cannot imagine what the novel would have been in its completed form. What a tragedy that Wallace suffered so that ending his life became a viable option! A loss to his family, the world of literature and humanity in general!
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