Lea's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 02 Mar 2025 02:21:40 -0800 60 Lea's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place]]> 766674 208 Bjørn Lomborg 0521685710 Lea 0 to-read 3.37 How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place
author: Bjørn Lomborg
name: Lea
average rating: 3.37
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

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King Thrushbeard 23090990 36 Jacob Grimm 1620280884 Lea 5 4.04 1958 King Thrushbeard
author: Jacob Grimm
name: Lea
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/25
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: fantasy, fiction, mythology-fairy-tales-folk-tales, short-stories
review:

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<![CDATA[Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score]]> 14539948
Darwyn Cooke, Eisner-Award winning creator of DC: The New Frontier, continues adapting Richard Stark's genre-defining Parker novels with his signature pulp flair in this third installment. A hard-nosed thief, Parker is Richard Stark's most famous creation, and Stark, in turn, is the most famous pen name of Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Donald E. Westlake.]]>
160 Darwyn Cooke 1613772084 Lea 2 4.30 2012 Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score
author: Darwyn Cooke
name: Lea
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2022/08/10
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: fiction, graphic-novels-comics, mystery-thriller
review:

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<![CDATA[Around the World in Eighty Days]]> 54479 252 Jules Verne 014044906X Lea 5 Jules Verne's stories and I'm so grateful for that. It ignited my passion for reading a long time ago, as I learned for the first time that I can travel around the world through books and stories, laying in the warm room.

I can still remember the vivid images of my imagination that I had as a child listening to this story and feelings will never fade, I still felt quite emotional rereading this story and joining Mr. Fogg on his journey.

Thank you, dad, and that you Mr. Verne for introducing me to the magical world of literature.]]>
3.95 1872 Around the World in Eighty Days
author: Jules Verne
name: Lea
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 5
read at: 2017/11/20
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves: classic, fiction, owned, fantasy
review:
This book brings so much childhood memories back. My dad just to read aloud and retell over and over again Jules Verne's stories and I'm so grateful for that. It ignited my passion for reading a long time ago, as I learned for the first time that I can travel around the world through books and stories, laying in the warm room.

I can still remember the vivid images of my imagination that I had as a child listening to this story and feelings will never fade, I still felt quite emotional rereading this story and joining Mr. Fogg on his journey.

Thank you, dad, and that you Mr. Verne for introducing me to the magical world of literature.
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<![CDATA[To Green Angel Tower, Part 1 (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, #3; Part 1)]]> 795034 To Green Angel Tower is the momentous tour-de-force finale of a ground-breaking series. Replete with war, deception, adventure, sorcery, and romance, To Green Angel Tower brings to a stunning and surprising conclusion Tad Williams' monumental tale of a magical conflict which fractures the very fabric of time and space, turning both humans and Sithi against those of their own blood.

As the evil minions of the undead Sithi Storm King prepare for the kingdom-shattering culmination of their dark sorceries and King Elias is drawn ever deeper into their nightmarish, spell-spun world, the loyal allies of Prince Josua desperately struggle to rally their forces at The Stone of Farewell. And with time running out, the remaining members of the now-devastated League of the Scroll have also gathered there to unravel mysteries from the forgotten past. For if the League can reclaim these age-old secrets of magic long-buried beneath the dusts of time, they may be able to reveal to Josua and his army the only means of striking down the unslayable foe.

But whether or not the League is successful in its quest, the call of battle will lead the valiant followers of Josua Lackhand across storm tossed seas brimming with bloodthirsty kilpa...through forests swarming with those both mind- and soul-lost... through ancient caverns built by legendary Dwarrows...to the haunted halls of Asu'a itself—the Sithi's greatest stronghold!]]>
815 Tad Williams 0886775981 Lea 0 fiction, owned, fantasy 4.21 1993 To Green Angel Tower, Part 1 (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, #3; Part 1)
author: Tad Williams
name: Lea
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2019/08/02
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: fiction, owned, fantasy
review:

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A Haunted House 21411532 8 Virginia Woolf Lea 3 3.17 A Haunted House
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Lea
average rating: 3.17
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: fiction, literary-fiction, fantasy, short-stories, classic
review:

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How Wang-Fo Was Saved 205649743 Marguerite Yourcenar Lea 4 The world is nothing but a mass of muddled colours thrown into the void by an insane
painter, and smudged by our tears.

I have imagined a punishment for you, for you whose enchantment has given me the disgust
of everything I own, and the desire for everything I shall never possess.]]>
3.90 1936 How Wang-Fo Was Saved
author: Marguerite Yourcenar
name: Lea
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1936
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: short-stories, magic-realism, classic, fiction
review:
The world is nothing but a mass of muddled colours thrown into the void by an insane
painter, and smudged by our tears.

I have imagined a punishment for you, for you whose enchantment has given me the disgust
of everything I own, and the desire for everything I shall never possess.

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<![CDATA[Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving A Relationship with a Narcissist]]> 34466842 How do you know if you are in a relationship with a narcissist—and what can you do about it?Ěý

Narcissism is a modern epidemic—and it’s spreading rapidly. Narcissists tend to be pretty on the outside, but empty on the inside.ĚýWhile they are often successful, they are also controlling, manipulative, entitled, vain, and they have no empathy. If your significant other can be charismatic and charming one moment and leave you feeling disappointed, unsettled, and doubting yourself the next, you may be involved with a narcissist. This dangerous relationship can slowly ruin your sense of well-being and ultimately your psychological health.Ěý Sometimes leaving is the healthiest option.Ěý But sometimes it doesn’t feel like an option, and you may have powerful reasons for staying—for your children, financial security, religious beliefs, or simply because you are in love. Ěý

±ő˛ÔĚýShould I Stay or Should I Go?Ěý Dr. Ramani Durvasula gives you the tools to help you stop making the same mistakes.Ěý It shows you what to watch for and provides guidance on managing difficult situations. This honest survival manual is based on the real terrain of pathological narcissism and it provides a realistic roadmap of how to navigate this landscape and reclaim your true self, find healing and live an authentic and empowered life.Ěý Whether you stay—or go.Ěý]]>
288 Ramani Durvasula 168261333X Lea 0 4.59 2015 Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving A Relationship with a Narcissist
author: Ramani Durvasula
name: Lea
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: personal-development, psychology-psychotherapy, non-fiction, relationships
review:

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Wise Blood 337107 232 Flannery O'Connor 0374505845 Lea 0 to-read 3.83 1952 Wise Blood
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Lea
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

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White Nights 29610266
A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.]]>
128 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0241252083 Lea 4 4.02 1848 White Nights
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Lea
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1848
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: fiction, short-stories, romance, classic
review:

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<![CDATA[He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith]]> 22014628 He Leadeth Me is a deeply personal story of one man’s spiritual odyssey and the unflagging faith which enabled him to survive the ordeal that wrenched his body and spirit to near collapse.
Ěý
Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,� Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. He here recalls how it was only through an utter reliance on God’s will that he managed to endure. He tells of the courage he found in prayer—a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustration, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amidst the “arrogance of evil� that surrounded him. Learning to accept even the inhuman work of toiling in the infamous Siberian salt mines as a labor pleasing to God, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit.
Ěý
He Leadeth Me is a book to inspire all Christians to greater faith and trust in God—even in their darkest hour. For, as the author asks, “What can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will?�

Ěý

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210 Walter J. Ciszek 0307818721 Lea 0 4.73 1973 He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith
author: Walter J. Ciszek
name: Lea
average rating: 4.73
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: biography, faith-spirituality, war, history-historical, non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Your Blueprint for Pleasure: Discover the 5 Erotic Types to Awaken―and Fulfill―Your Desires]]> 152680054 Ěý
When it comes to sex, many of us have been sold on the idea that certain techniques and tools are surefire turn-ons. If those techniques don't work, and we don't connect with our partners or our own pleasure, then something is inherently wrong with us. But sexologist Jaiya has identified five erotic types � Energetic, Sensual, Sexual, Kinky, and Shapeshifter � that, like Gary Chapman's The 5 Love Languages , empower people with the understanding that we are each erotically gifted and that our differences are our strengths. Jaiya’s framework will help readers bridge the sexual incompatibility gap, become masters of their own sexual desire, and experience the deeper connection and sexual satisfaction that they crave.
Ěý
Based on Miss Jaiya’s wildly popular Erotic Blueprint Quiz, Your Blueprint for Pleasure will help readers explore and find themselves among the five erotic types identified in this program. Fans of Come As You Are, The Erotic Mind , or other books on human sexuality and how to have sex will find much to appreciate in this empowering intimacy book.]]>
304 Jaiya 145495003X Lea 3 3.88 Your Blueprint for Pleasure: Discover the 5 Erotic Types to Awaken―and Fulfill―Your Desires
author: Jaiya
name: Lea
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: non-fiction, psychology-psychotherapy, sexuality-eros, personal-development
review:

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The Tattooer 25041492
The story foreshadows many of the archetypes which reappear in many of Tanizaki's later works.]]>
116 Jun'ichirĹŤ Tanizaki Lea 4 3.90 1910 The Tattooer
author: Jun'ichirĹŤ Tanizaki
name: Lea
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1910
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, horror, sexuality-eros, death
review:

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Araby: Short Story 24444797 A young boy in love with his friend’s sister promises to bring her back a gift from the Araby bazaar when he learns she cannot go. It is only later that night that the boy is able to make it to the bazaar and by the time he arrives, most of the stalls are closed and only late night activities are taking place between young women and men.

Critically acclaimed author James Joyce’s Dubliners is a collection of short stories depicting middle-class life in Dublin in the early twentieth century. First published in 1914, the stories draw on themes relevant to the time such as nationalism and Ireland’s national identity, and cement Joyce’s reputation for brutally honest and revealing depictions of everyday Irish life.

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25 James Joyce Lea 5 3.31 1914 Araby: Short Story
author: James Joyce
name: Lea
average rating: 3.31
book published: 1914
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: fiction, literary-fiction, short-stories, coming-of-age, classic
review:

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The Dead 23289 100 James Joyce Lea 4 4.03 1914 The Dead
author: James Joyce
name: Lea
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1914
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: fiction, short-stories, literary-fiction, classic
review:

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Gimpel the Fool 41956994 Gimpel the Fool is a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It tells the story of Gimpel, a simple bread maker who is the butt of many of his town's jokes.]]> 10 Isaac Bashevis Singer Lea 4 3.60 1953 Gimpel the Fool
author: Isaac Bashevis Singer
name: Lea
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, nobel
review:

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Dead Men's Path 40227862 4 Chinua Achebe Lea 3 3.58 Dead Men's Path
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Lea
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic
review:

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<![CDATA[Lehrbuch der Logotherapie: Menschenbild und Methoden]]> 41458007
Inhalt: I. Das Menschenbild der Logotherapie; II. Die Gesprächsform der Logotherapie; III. Die Methoden der Logotherapie; IV. Weiterentwicklungen der Logotherapie ---]]>
Elisabeth Lukas Lea 4 4.00 Lehrbuch der Logotherapie: Menschenbild und Methoden
author: Elisabeth Lukas
name: Lea
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: non-fiction, psychology-psychotherapy
review:

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<![CDATA[Split Second and Other Stories]]> 7650251 256 Daphne du Maurier 0851191304 Lea 3 3.89 1952 Split Second and Other Stories
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Lea
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1952
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: short-stories, fiction, sci-fi-dystopia
review:

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Lord Mountdrago 3302673 Book by Maugham, W. Somerset 176 W. Somerset Maugham 3257203357 Lea 4 3.66 1939 Lord Mountdrago
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Lea
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/13
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, psychology-psychotherapy, death, dreams
review:

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Frritt-Flacc 30128739 Jules Verne, french novelist, poet, and playwright (1828-1905)

This ebook presents «Frritt-Flacc », from Jules Verne. A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
-01- ABOUT THIS BOOK
-02- FRRITT FLACC]]>
10 Jules Verne Lea 3 3.25 1884 Frritt-Flacc
author: Jules Verne
name: Lea
average rating: 3.25
book published: 1884
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: short-stories, horror, fiction, death
review:

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<![CDATA[The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar]]> 1406553
Librarian's note: this entry is for "The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar." Collections of short stories by the author can be found elsewhere on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ.]]>
24 Edgar Allan Poe 1594561788 Lea 2 3.72 1845 The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Lea
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1845
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: short-stories, fiction, classic, horror, magic-realism, death
review:

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August 25, 1983 25361946
En mi curioso ayer prevalecía la superstición de que entre cada tarde y cada mañana ocurren hechos que es una vergüenza ignorar. El planeta estaba poblado de espectros colectivos, el Canada, el Brasil, el Congo Suizo y el Mercado Común.
Casi nadie sabía la historia previa de esos entes platónicos, pero sí los más íntimos pormenores del último congreso de pedagogos, la inminente ruptura de relaciones y los mensajes que los presidentes mandaban, elaborados por el secretario del secretario con la prudente imprecisión que era propia del género. Todo esto se leía para el olvido, porque a las pocas horas lo borrarían otras trivialidades.

J.L.B.

Contenido

CUENTOS
- Veinticinco Agosto 1983
- La Rosa de Paracelso
- Tigres azules
- Utopia de un Hombre que está cansado

ENTREVISTA
- Borges igual a si mismo (María Esther Vázquez, Abril 1973)
-- Los primeros años
-- Adolecencia en Europa
-- La literatura alemana
-- Examen de la obra
-- Los temas borgianos
-- PolĂ­ticas, honores y aficiones
-- Las lenguas nĂłrdicas
-- La vida. Defectos y virtudes.
-- La mĂşsica. La pintura. La muerte.

°ä°ů´Ç˛Ô´Ç±ô´Ç˛µĂ­˛ą
µţľ±˛ú±ôľ±´Ç˛µ°ů˛ą´ÚĂ­˛ą
µţľ±´Ç˛µ°ů˛ą´ÚĂ­˛ą±Ő±Ő>
Jorge Luis Borges 1101222557 Lea 5 "Outside were other dreams, waiting for me."

"Blindness isn't darkness--it's a form of loneliness."

"Every writer ends by being his own least intelligent disciple."]]>
4.25 1980 August 25, 1983
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Lea
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: short-stories, magic-realism, fiction, classic, death, dreams
review:
"Outside were other dreams, waiting for me."

"Blindness isn't darkness--it's a form of loneliness."

"Every writer ends by being his own least intelligent disciple."

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Insomnia 199296601
"En el insomnio" fue escrito en 1946 y publicado en octubre de ese año por la revista "Anales de Buenos Aires" que dirigía Jorge Luis Borges. Posteriormente se incluyó en la compilación "Cuentos fríos" de 1956.]]>
Virgilio Piñera Lea 0 2.24 1946 Insomnia
author: Virgilio Piñera
name: Lea
average rating: 2.24
book published: 1946
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: short-stories, fiction, horror, death
review:

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Death and the Gardener 199296524 Jean Cocteau Lea 3 3.62 Death and the Gardener
author: Jean Cocteau
name: Lea
average rating: 3.62
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: short-stories, fiction, magic-realism, horror, death
review:

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<![CDATA[Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature]]> 53080
Fantastic literature Manguel writes in his introduction, makes use of our everyday world as a facade through which the undefinable appears, hinting at the half-forgotten dreams of our imagination. Unlike tales of fantasy, fantastic literature deals with what can be best defined as the impossible seeping into the possible, what Wallace Stevens calls black water breaking into reality. Fantastic literature never really explains everything, it thrives on surprise, on the unexpected logic that is born from its own rules.

Contents:

House taken over by Julio Cortázar
How love came to Professor Guildea by Robert S. Hichens
Climax for a ghost story by I.A. Ireland
The mysteries of the Joy Rio by Tennessee Williams
Pomegranate seed by Edith Wharton
Venetian masks by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The wish house by Rudyard Kipling
The playground by Ray Bradbury
Importance by Manuel Mujica Láinez
Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm
A visitor from down under by L.P. Hartley
Laura by Saki
An injustice revealed
A little place off the Edgware Road by Graham Greene
From "A School Story" by M.R. James
The signalman by Charles Dickens
The tall woman by Pedro Antonio de AlarcĂłn
A scent of mimosa by Francis King
Death and the gardener by Jean Cocteau
Lord Mountdrago by W. Somerset Maugham
The sick gentleman's last visit by Giovanni Papini
Insomnia by Virgilio Piñera
The storm by Jules Verne
A dream (from The Arabian Nights Entertainments)
The facts in the case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
Split second by Daphne du Maurier
August 25, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges
How Wang-Fo was saved by Marguerite Yourcenar
From "Peter and Rosa" by Isak Dinesen
Tattoo by Jun'ichirĹŤ Tanizaki
John Duffy's brother by Flann O'Brien
Lady into fox by David Garnett
Father's last escape by Bruno Schulz
A man by the name of Ziegler by Hermann Hesse
The Argentine ant by Italo Calvino
The lady on the grey by John Collier
The queen of spades by Alexander Pushkin
Of a promise kept by Lafcadio Hearn
The wizard postponed by Juan Manuel
The monkey's paw by W.W. Jacobs
The bottle imp by Robert Louis Stevenson
The rocking-horse winner by D.H. Lawrence
Certain distant suns by Joanne Greenburg
The third bank of the river by JoĂŁo GuimarĂŁes Rosa
Home by Hilaire Belloc
The door in the wall by H.G. Wells
The friends by Silvina Ocampo
Et in sempiternum pereant by Charles Williams
The captives of Longjumeau by LĂ©on Bloy
The visit to the museum by Vladimir Nabakov
Autumn Mountain by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
The sight by Brian Moore
Clorinda by André Pieyre de Mandiargues
The pagan rabbi by Cynthia Ozick
The fisherman and his soul by Oscar Wilde
The bureau d'echange de maux by Lord Dunsany
The ones who walk away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin
In the penal colony by Franz Kafka
A dog in Durer's etching "The Knight, Death and the Devil" by Marco Denevi
The large ant by Howard Fast
The lemmings by Alex Comfort
The grey ones by J.B. Priestley
The feather pillow by Horacio Quiroga
Seaton's aunt by Walter de la Mare
The friends of the friends by Henry James
The travelling companion by Hans Christian Andersen
The curfew tolls by Stephen Vincent Benet
The state of grace by Marcel Aymé
The story of a panic by E.M. Forster
An invitation to the hunt by George Hitchcock
From the "American Notebooks" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The dream by O. Henry]]>
967 Alberto Manguel 0517552698 Lea 0 4.35 1984 Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature
author: Alberto Manguel
name: Lea
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: currently-reading, short-stories, fiction, speculative-fiction, magic-realism, fantasy, horror
review:

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A Scent of Mimosa 199296509 Francis King Lea 2 short-stories, fiction 3.72 A Scent of Mimosa
author: Francis King
name: Lea
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/19
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: short-stories, fiction
review:

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Formule ljubavi 13448629 OVE KNJIGE MOŽE BITI JEDNA OD VAŠIH NAJBOLJIH INVESTICIJA U SEBE I SVOJU LJUBAVNU SUDBINU.
Ljubavni Ĺľivot vas povremeno zbunjuje? Ovo je prava knjiga za vas. Otkrijte svoju ili partnerovu formulu ljubavi.
Kako TO može biti ljubav? Svačije ljubavno ponašanje ima svoju logiku, formulu, a ova knjiga pomaže vam da otkrijete koja je vaša.
Što ljubav nije, a što jest? Knjiga vas vodi na put na
kojem ćete otkriti granice ljubavi i neljubavi.
Dosta vam je neproduktivnih svađa?
Razumijevanje partnerove formule ljubavi drastiÄŤno smanjuje
nesporazume. Govorite jezikom koji partner razumije.
VRHUNSKI AUTORITET VODI VAS KROZ RAZLIČITE MENTALNE MAPE LJUBAVI NA KOJE SE OSLANJAMO U SVOJIM ŽIVOTIMA. KULTNA KNJIGA ČIJE ČITANJE PREPORUČUJE VELIKI BROJ STRUČNJAKA.]]>
410 Zoran Milivojević 9531404550 Lea 5 4.31 1995 Formule ljubavi
author: Zoran Milivojević
name: Lea
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/19
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: non-fiction, owned, relationships, psychology-psychotherapy, sexuality-eros, recommended
review:

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<![CDATA[Learning Love: Build the Best Relationships of Your Life Using Integrated Attachment Theory]]> 201149043 Have you ever been in a relationship with someone and felt like you’re not on the same page? You say one thing, but your partner hears another? Or, after a big fight, you yearn for closeness but they want to withdraw? Or maybe it’s the other way around?These disconnects can be attributed to a difference in what are called “attachment styles.� Attachment styles refer to how childhood experiences shape our adult relationships and how these early bonds impact future connections. In the past, a person’s attachment style was considered unchangeable, but this is no longer the case.

You don’t have to feel as though relationships are impossible, with so many things left unsaid and misunderstood. You can heal your attachment style for good, changing the way you relate to everyone around you. In this revolutionary book, relationship expert Thais Gibson will help you discover how to build secure relationships in less than 90 days and transform your life from the inside out.

In Learning Love, you will learn the process of building fulfilling and fail-proof relationships that have you on the same page with the people you care most about. There is a better way to love―and be loved.

And it all starts with you.]]>
161 Thais Gibson Lea 5 4.50 Learning Love: Build the Best Relationships of Your Life Using Integrated Attachment Theory
author: Thais Gibson
name: Lea
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: non-fiction, kindle, relationships, psychology-psychotherapy, recommended, favourites
review:

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The Art of Loving 14142
Most people are unable to love on the only level that truly matters: love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge, and courage. As with every art, love demands practice and concentration, as well as genuine insight and understanding.

In his classic work, The Art of Loving, renowned psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm explores love in all its aspects—not only romantic love, steeped in false conceptions and lofty expectations, but also brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, the love of God, and the love of parents for their children.]]>
180 Erich Fromm 0061129739 Lea 5 4.05 1956 The Art of Loving
author: Erich Fromm
name: Lea
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: non-fiction, philosophy, psychology-psychotherapy, sociology, relationships, recommended
review:

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<![CDATA[The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert]]> 22889783 ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
This book is the culmination of his life's work: the seven principles that guide couples on the path toward a harmonious and long-lasting relationship. Straightforward in their approach, yet profound in their effect, these principles teach partners new and startling strategies for making their marriage work. Gottman helps couples focus on each other, on paying attention to the small day-to-day moments that, strung together, make up the heart and soul of any relationship. Being thoughtful about ordinary matters provides spouses with a solid foundation for resolving conflict when it does occur and finding strategies for living with those issues that cannot be resolved.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
Packed with questionnaires and exercises whose effectiveness has been proven in Dr. Gottman's workshops, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the definitive guide for anyone who wants their relationship to attain its highest potential.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the result of Dr. John Gottman's many years of closely observing thousands of marriages. This kind of longitudinal research has never been done before. Based on his findings, he has culled seven principles essential to the success of any marriage.
Maintain a love map.
Foster fondness and admiration.
Turn toward instead of away.
Accept influence.
Solve solvable conflicts.
Cope with conflicts you can't resolve.
Create shared meaning.

Dr. Gottman's unique questionnaires and exercises will guide couples on the road to revitalizing their marriage, or making a strong one even better.]]>
297 John M. Gottman 0553447718 Lea 5 4.45 1999 The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert
author: John M. Gottman
name: Lea
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: relationships, sexuality-eros, non-fiction, owned, psychology-psychotherapy, recommended
review:

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<![CDATA[Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples]]> 2439079

REVISED AND WITH A NEW FOREWORD

ARE YOU GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT?

Originally published in 1988, Getting the Love You Want has helped millions of couples attain more loving, supportive, and deeply satisfying relationships. The 20th anniversary edition contains extensive revisions to this groundbreaking book, with a new chapter, new exercises, and a foreword detailing Dr. Hendrix’s updated philosophy for eliminating all negativity from couples� daily interactions, allowing readers of the 2008 edition to benefit from his ongoing discoveries during his last two decades of work.

Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., in partnership with his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD., originated Imago Relationship Therapy, a unique healing process for couples, prospective couples, and parents. Together they have more than thirty years� experience as educators and therapists and their work has been translated into more than 50 languages, with Imago practiced by two thousand therapists worldwide. Harville and Helen have six children and live in New York and New Mexico.

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384 Harville Hendrix 0805087001 Lea 4 4.10 2005 Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
author: Harville Hendrix
name: Lea
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: non-fiction, owned, psychology-psychotherapy, relationships, recommended
review:

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<![CDATA[Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become]]> 15808839
Using research from her own lab, Fredrickson redefines love not as a stable behemoth, but as micro-moments of connection between people—even strangers. She demonstrates that our capacity for experiencing love can be measured and strengthened in ways that improve our health and longevity. Finally, she introduces us to informal and formal practices to unlock love in our lives, generate compassion, and even self-soothe.

Rare in its scope and ambitious in its message, Love 2.0 will reinvent how you look at and experience our most powerful emotion.]]>
256 Barbara L. Fredrickson 1594630992 Lea 3 3.76 2013 Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become
author: Barbara L. Fredrickson
name: Lea
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: personal-development, psychology-psychotherapy, relationships, non-fiction, owned, neuroscience
review:

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<![CDATA[Otrovna ljubav: kad odricanje previše boli]]> 61293162 Is it impossible to let go � despite the pain?

� Do you yearn for someone who is not physically or emotionally available to you?
� Do you believe that if you love him enough he will have to love you?
� When you feel insecure, does it drive you only to want her more?
� Do you find yourself phoning repeatedly or waiting long hours for the phone to ring?

Do you wish someone would let go of you?

� Does an ex-lover or ex-spouse refuse to believe that it’s over?
� Do you receive unwanted phone calls, letters, presents, or visits?
� Is this pursuit of you creating so much anxiety that it affects your physical or emotional well-being?

In this invaluable self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward presents vivid case histories as well as the real-life voices of men and women caught in the grip of obsessive passion.

Whether you’re an obsessive lover or the target of such an obsession, here is a proven, step-by-step program that shows you how to recognize the “connection compulsion,� what causes it, and how to break its hold on your life so that you can go on to build healthy, lasting, and pain-free relationships.

]]>
365 Susan Forward Lea 3 4.17 1991 Otrovna ljubav: kad odricanje previše boli
author: Susan Forward
name: Lea
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/31
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: non-fiction, owned, psychology-psychotherapy, relationships
review:

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House Taken Over 36430391 "Casa Tomada" (English: "House Taken Over") is a 1946 short story by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. It was originally published in Los anales de Buenos Aires, a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges, and later included in his volume of stories, Bestiario.

It tells the story of a brother and sister living together in their ancestral home which is being "taken over" by unknown entities. The mystery that revolves around what those entities are is largely left up to interpretation, allowing the genre of the story to vary from fantasy to psychological fiction to magic realism to political fiction, among others.]]>
9 Julio Cortázar Lea 3 3.47 1946 House Taken Over
author: Julio Cortázar
name: Lea
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1946
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2024/02/23
shelves: fiction, short-stories, horror, mystery-thriller
review:

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A Simple Heart 269894 A Simple Heart, also published as A Simple Soul.

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions.]]>
68 Gustave Flaubert 0811213188 Lea 3 3.60 1877 A Simple Heart
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Lea
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1877
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/27
date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: fiction, short-stories, literary-fiction, classic
review:

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<![CDATA[Kepler (Revolutions Trilogy Book 2)]]> 19729695 209 John Banville Lea 3 4.06 1981 Kepler (Revolutions Trilogy Book 2)
author: John Banville
name: Lea
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/29
date added: 2024/01/30
shelves: literary-fiction, history-historical, biography, fiction, science
review:

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Good Morning, Midnight 144073 176 Jean Rhys Lea 4 ”After the first week I made up my mind to kill myself- the usual whiff of chloroform. Next week, or next month, or next year I’ll kill myself...�

Some people have the ill fate of cycling in the storms of lover archetype all their lives, their existence defined by an unyielding and devastating trajectory where joy hinges precariously on the capricious whims of the Other.

Sasha, the protagonist of Good Morning, Midnight, incarnates the pathos of all forsaken lovers in the bleak narrative of the intimate experience of loss. And what is a better city to get lost in the disorientation of solitary abandonment than Paris? City of both love and desperation, perfect for a lover’s mindless hedonism and exuberant fatalism, as well as its ensuing void. The beauty, the glamour, and the romantic atmosphere mixed with decrepit, budget hotels where Sasha wants to drink herself to death. With frequent thoughts of suicide, she meanders Paris streets half-alive like an automaton, and even the mere arrangement of the passing of time becomes troublesome. In her dissociation and disconnection from everything - including herself - Sasha illuminates the deep suffering and the cold barrenness of internal desolation. The center of the novel is her fragmented subjective experience of the circumstances accompanied by pain so overbearing it is accompanied by deep disorientation - of who you are, where are you going, what are you supposed to do, and even the meaning of your life. Slowly falling to pieces, the aftermath of abandonment is an impoverished existence where there is nothing at all. A void of blankness and nihilism.

It is through this lens that we witness Sasha's world in 1930s Paris come to life, a vivid tableau of romantic suffering leading to an existential crisis.

”I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail trunks of the trees and the thin, frail ghosts in my room.�

A woman’s true love has a mark of endurance, selfless giving, and unwavering commitment. Rhys, donning the alter ego Sasha, stands as a testament to the profound love wielded by highly intellectual women. For reasons both elusive and indefinite, these women are drawn to lovers who possess the capacity to crush their very souls. But much like Frida Kahlo, they possess the remarkable ability to transfigure their pain into great art—a testament to the beautiful transfiguration of passion and pain into creation.

The madness in love extends beyond mere affection; it envelopes the obsession of being seen through the lens of one's lover. Without the penetrating gaze of a beloved, Sasha experiences a disconcerting sense of self-loss. It transcends the loss of a singular lover; it's a forfeiture of an entire version of reality and the self. Sasha's paranoia weaves a web around her, a fear of being perceived by others in any conceivable manner—a testament to the interplay of vulnerability and core identity in the realm of love. It is not that it is only the lover’s heart at stake - their whole essence and identity is.

“I’m such a fool. Please don’t take any notice of me. Just don’t take any notice and I’ll be all right�.

Sasha’s value goes through deflation in the horrific labyrinth of solitude and despair. The devastating definition of a woman’s value is dictated through distorting mirrors of the male gaze, where society often conditions the inherent value of women through a narrow prism of romantic and erotic desirability.

Which opens up a poignant question about women’s identity. What becomes of a woman when she is deemed undesirable? A woman who only serves forĚýexploitation and mistreatment grapples with a painful erosion of self-respect. The resultant brew of resentment and profound self-hatred extends not only towards her but also towards humanity. The unbearable weight of being perceived as worthless by a society that devalues her transforms Sasha into a cold-brewed misanthrope—hating any gaze, averse to humanity's reflection that renders her as nothing more than a vessel for disregard.

“And when I say afraid- that’s just a word I use. What I really mean is I hate them. I hate their voices, I hate their eyes, I hate the way they laugh�..I hate the whole bloody business. It’s cruel, it’s idiotic, it’s unspeakably horrible. I never had the guts to kill myself or I’d have got out of it a long time ago. So much the worse for me. Let’s leave it at that.�

In disillusionment, she loses faith in humanity, in herself, and in life. The dreams of youth and the aspirations for the future, once vibrant, now echo as distant, unattainable whispers in Sasha's attempt to relive them—a futile pursuit, as they can never be resurrected.

“I have no pride � no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad…�

The heart of the novel is the experience of loss and painful dwelling in it. One review skillfully highlights the contrast in how men and women navigate grief, drawing parallels with Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Miller, after leaving his wife, seeks refuge in Paris through prostitutes and self-importance, while Sasha, left by her husband, immerses herself in the suffocating embrace of despair. Men often turn to new experiences, storms of lust, or even suicide to escape emotional pain, whereas women emerge as heroes in enduring and withstanding such suffering. It's no coincidence that women stood tall at the cross—a symbolic representation of humanity's ultimate suffering.

Can one person go through the darkness of pain and come out? The novel is at least ambivalent. Reminiscing about the past can keep you stuck, or give you the freedom to move from it. The ultimate hurt and starting point of freedom is acceptingĚýthe absence of reciprocity of love.

“When I saw him looking up like that I knew that I loved him, and that it was for always. It was as if my heart turned over, and I knew that it was for always. It's a strange feeling - when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always.�

Sasha has to make amends with the fact it is over, and that the heart was given in the wrong place, to the wrong person. The hurt is so permeating and constant that there is no way to run away from it. Pain that transcended the limits of being able to return to the starting position. Cut so deep it can’t never heal. Observation of forever reaching its finitude while the whole fabric of reality falls apart.

“People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die.�

It is easy to continue the self-destructive pattern even when the affair is over just like Sasha with depressive alcoholism in the empty room, or in bed with incidental lovers. With little consolation, or none at all.
Sasha is all despondent lovers who are not hiding from their grief, but embracing it and seeing the world from it, no matter how hard it is.

Good Morning, Midnight is an epitaph of all the people who loved and lost and almost lost themselves in their pain. Deeps of suffering that can never be verbalized, only captured in words with disjointed fragments of the subjective realm, glimpses, and pale reflections of the unfathomable sadness.

In Rhys's words, ”life is too sad; it's quite impossible.”]]>
3.92 1939 Good Morning, Midnight
author: Jean Rhys
name: Lea
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves: classic, feminism, fiction, literary-fiction, sexuality-eros
review:
”After the first week I made up my mind to kill myself- the usual whiff of chloroform. Next week, or next month, or next year I’ll kill myself...�

Some people have the ill fate of cycling in the storms of lover archetype all their lives, their existence defined by an unyielding and devastating trajectory where joy hinges precariously on the capricious whims of the Other.

Sasha, the protagonist of Good Morning, Midnight, incarnates the pathos of all forsaken lovers in the bleak narrative of the intimate experience of loss. And what is a better city to get lost in the disorientation of solitary abandonment than Paris? City of both love and desperation, perfect for a lover’s mindless hedonism and exuberant fatalism, as well as its ensuing void. The beauty, the glamour, and the romantic atmosphere mixed with decrepit, budget hotels where Sasha wants to drink herself to death. With frequent thoughts of suicide, she meanders Paris streets half-alive like an automaton, and even the mere arrangement of the passing of time becomes troublesome. In her dissociation and disconnection from everything - including herself - Sasha illuminates the deep suffering and the cold barrenness of internal desolation. The center of the novel is her fragmented subjective experience of the circumstances accompanied by pain so overbearing it is accompanied by deep disorientation - of who you are, where are you going, what are you supposed to do, and even the meaning of your life. Slowly falling to pieces, the aftermath of abandonment is an impoverished existence where there is nothing at all. A void of blankness and nihilism.

It is through this lens that we witness Sasha's world in 1930s Paris come to life, a vivid tableau of romantic suffering leading to an existential crisis.

”I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail trunks of the trees and the thin, frail ghosts in my room.�

A woman’s true love has a mark of endurance, selfless giving, and unwavering commitment. Rhys, donning the alter ego Sasha, stands as a testament to the profound love wielded by highly intellectual women. For reasons both elusive and indefinite, these women are drawn to lovers who possess the capacity to crush their very souls. But much like Frida Kahlo, they possess the remarkable ability to transfigure their pain into great art—a testament to the beautiful transfiguration of passion and pain into creation.

The madness in love extends beyond mere affection; it envelopes the obsession of being seen through the lens of one's lover. Without the penetrating gaze of a beloved, Sasha experiences a disconcerting sense of self-loss. It transcends the loss of a singular lover; it's a forfeiture of an entire version of reality and the self. Sasha's paranoia weaves a web around her, a fear of being perceived by others in any conceivable manner—a testament to the interplay of vulnerability and core identity in the realm of love. It is not that it is only the lover’s heart at stake - their whole essence and identity is.

“I’m such a fool. Please don’t take any notice of me. Just don’t take any notice and I’ll be all right�.

Sasha’s value goes through deflation in the horrific labyrinth of solitude and despair. The devastating definition of a woman’s value is dictated through distorting mirrors of the male gaze, where society often conditions the inherent value of women through a narrow prism of romantic and erotic desirability.

Which opens up a poignant question about women’s identity. What becomes of a woman when she is deemed undesirable? A woman who only serves forĚýexploitation and mistreatment grapples with a painful erosion of self-respect. The resultant brew of resentment and profound self-hatred extends not only towards her but also towards humanity. The unbearable weight of being perceived as worthless by a society that devalues her transforms Sasha into a cold-brewed misanthrope—hating any gaze, averse to humanity's reflection that renders her as nothing more than a vessel for disregard.

“And when I say afraid- that’s just a word I use. What I really mean is I hate them. I hate their voices, I hate their eyes, I hate the way they laugh�..I hate the whole bloody business. It’s cruel, it’s idiotic, it’s unspeakably horrible. I never had the guts to kill myself or I’d have got out of it a long time ago. So much the worse for me. Let’s leave it at that.�

In disillusionment, she loses faith in humanity, in herself, and in life. The dreams of youth and the aspirations for the future, once vibrant, now echo as distant, unattainable whispers in Sasha's attempt to relive them—a futile pursuit, as they can never be resurrected.

“I have no pride � no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad…�

The heart of the novel is the experience of loss and painful dwelling in it. One review skillfully highlights the contrast in how men and women navigate grief, drawing parallels with Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Miller, after leaving his wife, seeks refuge in Paris through prostitutes and self-importance, while Sasha, left by her husband, immerses herself in the suffocating embrace of despair. Men often turn to new experiences, storms of lust, or even suicide to escape emotional pain, whereas women emerge as heroes in enduring and withstanding such suffering. It's no coincidence that women stood tall at the cross—a symbolic representation of humanity's ultimate suffering.

Can one person go through the darkness of pain and come out? The novel is at least ambivalent. Reminiscing about the past can keep you stuck, or give you the freedom to move from it. The ultimate hurt and starting point of freedom is acceptingĚýthe absence of reciprocity of love.

“When I saw him looking up like that I knew that I loved him, and that it was for always. It was as if my heart turned over, and I knew that it was for always. It's a strange feeling - when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always.�

Sasha has to make amends with the fact it is over, and that the heart was given in the wrong place, to the wrong person. The hurt is so permeating and constant that there is no way to run away from it. Pain that transcended the limits of being able to return to the starting position. Cut so deep it can’t never heal. Observation of forever reaching its finitude while the whole fabric of reality falls apart.

“People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die.�

It is easy to continue the self-destructive pattern even when the affair is over just like Sasha with depressive alcoholism in the empty room, or in bed with incidental lovers. With little consolation, or none at all.
Sasha is all despondent lovers who are not hiding from their grief, but embracing it and seeing the world from it, no matter how hard it is.

Good Morning, Midnight is an epitaph of all the people who loved and lost and almost lost themselves in their pain. Deeps of suffering that can never be verbalized, only captured in words with disjointed fragments of the subjective realm, glimpses, and pale reflections of the unfathomable sadness.

In Rhys's words, ”life is too sad; it's quite impossible.�
]]>
Eileen 27876745 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]>
260 Ottessa Moshfegh 0143128752 Lea 4 3.66 2015 Eileen
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Lea
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: literary-fiction, fiction, psychology-psychotherapy, recommended
review:

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The Vegetarian 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]>
188 Han Kang 0553448188 Lea 4 3.61 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Lea
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: fiction, literary-fiction, horror, psychiatry, psychology-psychotherapy, feminism
review:

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Too Loud a Solitude 87280 TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is a tender and funny story of HaĹĹĄa - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetrator.

But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship.

This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.

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112 Bohumil Hrabal 0349102627 Lea 4 4.17 1976 Too Loud a Solitude
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Lea
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/22
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: fiction, classic, recommended, literary-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[The Sick Gentleman's Last Visit]]> 199296596 Giovanni Papini Lea 4 4.00 1906 The Sick Gentleman's Last Visit
author: Giovanni Papini
name: Lea
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1906
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: fiction, short-stories, speculative-fiction
review:

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A Good Man is Hard to Find 41713578
Flannery O'Connor's famous fifties story evokes heat and dust, family and feuding, God and grace - and is utterly uncompromising in its brutality.]]>
48 Flannery O'Connor 0571351816 Lea 5 3.54 1949 A Good Man is Hard to Find
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Lea
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1949
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/15
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: short-stories, classic, death, faith-spirituality, recommended, fiction
review:

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Odour of Chrysanthemums 10518665 80 D.H. Lawrence 0141196084 Lea 3 short-stories, classic, death 3.56 1911 Odour of Chrysanthemums
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Lea
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1911
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/13
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: short-stories, classic, death
review:

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Seksualnost kroz povijest 17447082 1. Mladi
2. Par
3. Ljubav
4. Spolovi
5. Nasilje
6. Roditelji
Svakoj od navedenih tema autorica pristupa ponajprije kao povjesničar stare i najnovije francuske povijeti. Bez pretjeranih proširivanja materije, na zanimljiv način prikazuje kako su određene činjenice i pojave prihvaćene na različite načine, ovisno o povijesnom trenutku, društvenim okolnostima i prevladavajućem moralu.]]>
242 Yvonne Knibiehler 9531742308 Lea 3 3.50 2002 Seksualnost kroz povijest
author: Yvonne Knibiehler
name: Lea
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/13
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: owned, sexuality-eros, sociology, history-historical, feminism, non-fiction, philosophy
review:

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich 160374 The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face-to-face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was the artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction. A thoroughly absorbing and at times terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.]]>
113 Leo Tolstoy 0553210351 Lea 5 4.08 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilyich
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Lea
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1886
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, recommended, favourites, death
review:

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<![CDATA[Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love]]> 132413 � Edward O. Wilson

In Why We Love , renowned anthropologist Helen Fisher offers a new map of the phenomenon of love―from its origins in the brain to the thrilling havoc it creates in our bodies and behavior. Working with a team of scientists to scan the brains of people who had just fallen madly in love, Fisher proved what psychologists had until recently only suspected: when you fall in love, specific areas of the brain "light up" with increased blood flow. This sweeping new book uses this data to argue that romantic passion is hardwired into our brains by millions of years of evolution. It is not an emotion; it is a drive as powerful as hunger.

Provocative, enlightening, engaging, and persuasive, Why We Love offers radical new answers to age-old questions: what love is, who we love―and how to keep love alive.]]>
320 Helen Fisher 0805077960 Lea 4 3.78 2004 Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
author: Helen Fisher
name: Lea
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: non-fiction, sexuality-eros, psychology-psychotherapy, sociology, evolutionary-psychology, science, owned
review:

]]>
Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins 163889 Blackburn, author of such popular philosophy books as Think and Being Good, here offers a sharp-edged probe into the heart of lust, blending together insight from some of the world's greatest thinkers on sex, human nature, and our common cultural foibles. Blackburn takes a wide ranging, historical approach, discussing lust as viewed by Aristophanes and Plato, lust in the light of the Stoic mistrust of emotion, and the Christian fear of the flesh that catapulted lust to the level of deadly sin. He describes how philosophical pessimists like Schopenhauer and Sartre contributed to our thinking about lust and explores the false starts in understanding lust represented by Freud, Kinsey, and modern "evolutionary psychology." But most important, Blackburn reminds us that lust is also life-affirming, invigorating, fun. He points to the work of David Hume (Blackburn's favorite philosopher) who saw lust not only as a sensual delight but also "a joy of the mind."
Written by one of the most eminent living philosophers, attractively illustrated and colorfully packaged, Lust is a book that anyone would lust over.]]>
192 Simon Blackburn 0195312074 Lea 3 3.61 2003 Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins
author: Simon Blackburn
name: Lea
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: non-fiction, owned, philosophy, sociology, sexuality-eros
review:

]]>
A Small, Good Thing 13250964 A Small, Good Thing is an award winning short story by American author Raymond Carver. It was included in the story collection Cathedral, published in 1983.]]> 30 Raymond Carver Lea 4 short-stories, classic 4.01 1981 A Small, Good Thing
author: Raymond Carver
name: Lea
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: short-stories, classic
review:

]]>
Trust 123018721 WINNER of the Pulitzer Prize
The Sunday Times Bestseller
Best Books of 2022 pick - New York Times, Obama, TIME, Slate, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, LA Times, EW, Sarah Jessica Parker

Read by a full cast of narrators, Trust by Hernan Diaz is a sweeping, unpredictable novel about power, wealth and truth, set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York. Perfect for fans of Succession.

Can one person change the course of history?


A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story - of greed, love and betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp.

Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.

'One of the great puzzle-box novels, it’s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner' � Telegraph

'Genius' � Lauren Groff, author of Matrix]]>
416 Hernan Diaz 0593420322 Lea 3 ”One’s reality is another’s delusion.�

In the complexities of human perception, one's reality often serves as the elusive counterpart to another's delusion. We all grapple with the fine balance between subjectivity and the quest for objective truth, assuming one believes in its existence.
”Trust� is an interesting experimental novel that endeavors to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of perception, trying to echo the works of literary greats in the process. Diaz boldly embarks on an ambitious quest to weave a postmodern tapestry within the traditional fabric of the American novel, and sometimes disappointingly falls flat in the process.

Rooted in the opulence and fervor of 1920s New York, his narrative is evidently inspired by Wharton and Fitzgerald, immersing itself in the quintessential American dream—an ethos of egoistical capitalism and individualism espoused by the enigmatic and highly controversial Ayn Rand. Rand is often hated for openly verbalizing the core beliefs that drive the modern world.
Within this milieu, status and purpose are found in the Gatsbyan pursuit of wealth, a narrative where money, in its irrational accumulation, makes the very fabric of reality.
If you are enough entrenched in self-serving maxims, you too can live the American dream and be the ideal of a “self-made� man.

The central figures of the novel, Andrew and Helen Bevel, a New York financier and his wife, stand as the embodiment of this ethos possessing wealth surpassing the GDP of entire nations. Money, in Diaz's narrative, transcends its material constraints, evolving into a numinous force that purchases not only worldly goods but the respect and heroic stature coveted by society. It purchases a new version of reality, a promise of a new version of self.

In a philosophical reverie, Diaz contemplates the metaphysical underpinnings of money and its entanglement with the power structures of finance, connecting its ontology to considerations about inequality and other real-life issues. Money often deemed the most intimate and private of subjects, becomes the focal point of introspection.

“Money. What is money?� he would mutter to himself. “Commodities in a purely fantastic form.�

What is the thing that makes money rule all and what makes it create such mythical creatures as Musk, Bezos, Gates, or anyone who accumulates wealth above all measure?
The possession of substantial wealth transcends mere affluence; it constitutes a multidimensional state that extends beyond material opulence. In the modern world, rich people become saints of capitalism on whose altar many will bow their knees in restless pursuit of the obsession of more. An insatiable hunger lurks beneath the veneer of ambition. We crave more—more recognition, more possessions, more moments of fleeting ecstasy. It's the ceaseless pursuit of the 'I,' the insistent tug of a selfhood hungry for validation in a marketplace teeming with competing egos.
The novel's thematic core delves into the symbiotic relationship between money and fiction, unveiling the role of wealth and power in ”bending and aligning reality itself� to one’s will. In the labyrinth of egoistic capitalism, the appetite for more is not merely a preference; it's a manifesto, a declaration of existence in a world that measures worth in quantifiable increments. We navigate this societal bazaar with a shopping cart of desires, each acquisition a testament to our standing in the grand bazaar of self-importance.

Yet, in this relentless pursuit, we may find ourselves ensnared in the paradox of plenty—amidst abundance, a gnawing emptiness persists. The 'more' we accumulate becomes a fleeting mirage, dissipating just as we approach its shimmering allure.

”Trust� delves into the trap of the human spirit that money represents—a modern-day holy grail, a philosopher's stone, that fails to deliver to promise of ecstasy and transfiguration. The narrative prods readers to ponder the transformative power of immense fortune and its potential to shape any future one wants, or thinks they want. The illusion of wealth becomes shattered in rich man's dystopian future as a poignant reflection on the isolation it begets—a lonely existence where the blanket of one's public image serves as the sole comfort, rendering the individual a mere projection of society's idea of success and freedom, without the person's grasp of the true essence of those values.

”So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That's what all those criminals trade in: fictions... Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously.�

The tragic narrative arc of Andrew Bevel, reminiscent of Gatsby's ill-fated pursuit, unfolds as a pursuit of his own ghostly image. Wealth begets the power to construct false narratives that offer a semblance of freedom from the judgments of others. Yet, like Gatsby, the wealth fails to liberate him from the shackles of self-deception and a reluctance to confront the fundamental truths of his existence. Yes, as Bevel and Gatsby, one can have all the worldly power and wealth, and still be overwhelmed and riddled with shame, desperately clinging to other people's perception of themselves to the point of addiction. The more accolades amassed, the more self-hate seems to gather in the shadowy recesses of the psyche, a paradoxical companion to the glitz and glamour.

They, adorned in the regalia of influence, find themselves desperately clutching to the perceptions of others as if they were a lifeline. It's an addiction, an insidious yearning for external validation to stave off the encroaching tide of self-doubt. The more eyes applaud, the more hollow the applause seems to ring. In the pursuit of worldly triumphs, the corridors of power become a labyrinth of self-deception.

As the narrative unfolds in a Rashomonian structure, Diaz probes the essential question: Whose narrative should we Trust?

In the metafictional legacy of Borges and Calvino, the novel fragments into four different parts with distinct narratives and voices that are in communication with each other. Each part interrogates the reliability of the other, creating a literary kaleidoscope that challenges the reader's perception. The narrators of almost all parts either are or could be considered unreliable with unpure motives.

There is also a shift in literary style, the first part being a self-proclaimed hommage to Warthon, Henry James and Fitzgerald, but in reality, landing more closely to the style of Taylor Jenkins Raid than the literary titans.

The second part is meant to be informative and dry, written by Ida, Bevel's ghostwriter, a fabricated reality of what our protagonist wanted to be the truth about him and his wife’s life, inspired by the autobiographical style of great men of American history that Bevel wholeheartedly wants to be remembered as.

In the third part, a memoir by Ida, Bevel’s ghostwriter, more truth is presumingly revealed, and in Ida’s memoir, the writing style becomes more modern, philosophical and reflective. Marx is mentioned as Diaz’s influence and this section gives a commentary on capitalism and its leftist critique in the voice of Ida's anarchist father.

Here the other fundamental idea of a novel is revealed - the greatness of women hidden in history written by men. The bending of a woman’s character to fit into the myth the man in her life needed for himself. Complicated search for the truth of women’s lives and their own voices in men male-dominated world. But Ida has many motives for being unreliable, emotionally involved, and appalled by male narratives that dominate the world. Her writing is inspired by detective fiction she adored in youth, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers: “These women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world.� They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: The reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted.�

The grand finale of the book is a disjointed narrative of dying Mildred Bevel's morphine-addled diary, which serves as the crescendo of revelation—her nonlinear perspective where past, present, and future coalesce in a feverish dreamscape.
Influenced by feminist literary giants such as Woolf, Rhys and Lessing, this section unveils the untold stories of women relegated to the shadows of history—a secret creative force behind the lives of men.

“Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future.�

In the tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s �The Yellow Wallpaper this section plays in the idea of women locked behind doors which is the generative power of men’s lives. The genius women whose voices were marginalized, silenced, made appear mad like a woman in the attic through history - voices of women we may only hear distorted - through the stories of their successful husbands or in no way at all. The genius of women who rule from the shadows, often unclaimed and unrecognized by the collective, still contains the intellectual fuel for men. Helen’s voice brings the unnamed and untold stories buried beneath American financial power.
Here achievement and money are not essential - being is.

In the metanarrative of the novel, the same question is posed again and again, whose narrative do we Trust?
From what I gathered, all the readers seem to consider the last part of the novel it great reveal - a reveal of the truth so concealed in previous voices. But I can’t help but wonder why.
Because the last two sections are written by women? Because they are written in a more appealing, literary, postmodern style? Because the last part was written by a dying woman? We often forget that women also have their own mythologies of their identities - sometimes containing inflation of their own. They can also be threatened by the power of men and create their own grandiose narrative of themselves. Marriages are complex and our perceptions of ourselves as partners are full of fallacies.

Reader's reactions seem to attest that we can be inclined to put the subjectivity of women at the altar of truth, equalizing it with objective reality. The marginalization of certain narratives in history doesn't inherently imbue them with an infallible veracity. The authoritative gaze of men has long shaped history, yet what contemporary forces dictate our narrative preferences, tethering us to one story over another? Is our embrace of fiction marked by an unsettling ease, a tendency to accept without due scrutiny? The fallacy in our convictions, whether about heroes, victims, or the truth we hold, demands a painful awareness—a call for unwavering critical examination.

We seem to be in our own inner conflict of wanting to believe the powerful but also, especially in recent eras, being inclined to take a side of those marginalized, traumatized, the underdogs, those who are sick and suffer even when our logic tells us they hold important, but only one piece of the puzzle of reality, equally locked in their own subjective experience.

It is important to bring the validity of the plurality of narratives that chart the complexity of truth, in history much as in the present day. While reading this book you can also observe how easily it is to discard the narrative of the person you don’t like, the person who has what you don’t have, the authoritarian person of wealth and power. We often too easily trash the objectives of people and groups we have something against as our hidden jealousy conceals our own drive to power - forgetting that we are discarding sometimes the vital fragments of reality - the truth we don’t like or the truth we don’t want to be the truth because the different narrative is more appealing to us. It is more enticing to consider that all of Andrew's wealth is a product of Helen’s wit, not his own, isn’t it? But as always, objective truth itself glides through our fingers.

In the end, we all like narratives that serve us psychological purposes even if that is one of those altruistic ones, being on the side of the disadvantaged and somewhat, oppressed.
In this kaleidoscopic exploration of narratives, Diaz prompts readers to ponder the acceptance of fiction and the ease with which certain narratives supersede others.
The plurality of perspectives emerges as a vital force, unveiling the intricate complexity of truth and challenging our propensity to discard narratives that diverge from our preconceived notions.

However, despite the brilliance of Diaz's conceptual framework, a lingering sense of unrealized potential permeates the novel for me. The author, like a literary chameleon, mimics diverse writing voices, replicating styles with varying degrees of success. The novel, no matter the interesting metaphysical ideas, at times feels like a literary exercise, a mosaic of styles awaiting the unearthing of Diaz's distinct narrative voice. He has yet to find his own reality and his own voice.
But considering the Pulitzer prize is already on his shelf at this stage of his writing, he does not need to sweat.
"Trust" stands as a testament to his literary prowess, an interesting exploration of narratives that transcend temporal boundaries, inviting readers into a realm where reality dances with the elusive delusions of powerful and rich, and disenfranchised.]]>
3.84 2022 Trust
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Lea
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/17
date added: 2024/01/13
shelves: fiction, owned, history-historical, literary-fiction
review:
”One’s reality is another’s delusion.�

In the complexities of human perception, one's reality often serves as the elusive counterpart to another's delusion. We all grapple with the fine balance between subjectivity and the quest for objective truth, assuming one believes in its existence.
”Trust� is an interesting experimental novel that endeavors to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of perception, trying to echo the works of literary greats in the process. Diaz boldly embarks on an ambitious quest to weave a postmodern tapestry within the traditional fabric of the American novel, and sometimes disappointingly falls flat in the process.

Rooted in the opulence and fervor of 1920s New York, his narrative is evidently inspired by Wharton and Fitzgerald, immersing itself in the quintessential American dream—an ethos of egoistical capitalism and individualism espoused by the enigmatic and highly controversial Ayn Rand. Rand is often hated for openly verbalizing the core beliefs that drive the modern world.
Within this milieu, status and purpose are found in the Gatsbyan pursuit of wealth, a narrative where money, in its irrational accumulation, makes the very fabric of reality.
If you are enough entrenched in self-serving maxims, you too can live the American dream and be the ideal of a “self-made� man.

The central figures of the novel, Andrew and Helen Bevel, a New York financier and his wife, stand as the embodiment of this ethos possessing wealth surpassing the GDP of entire nations. Money, in Diaz's narrative, transcends its material constraints, evolving into a numinous force that purchases not only worldly goods but the respect and heroic stature coveted by society. It purchases a new version of reality, a promise of a new version of self.

In a philosophical reverie, Diaz contemplates the metaphysical underpinnings of money and its entanglement with the power structures of finance, connecting its ontology to considerations about inequality and other real-life issues. Money often deemed the most intimate and private of subjects, becomes the focal point of introspection.

“Money. What is money?� he would mutter to himself. “Commodities in a purely fantastic form.�

What is the thing that makes money rule all and what makes it create such mythical creatures as Musk, Bezos, Gates, or anyone who accumulates wealth above all measure?
The possession of substantial wealth transcends mere affluence; it constitutes a multidimensional state that extends beyond material opulence. In the modern world, rich people become saints of capitalism on whose altar many will bow their knees in restless pursuit of the obsession of more. An insatiable hunger lurks beneath the veneer of ambition. We crave more—more recognition, more possessions, more moments of fleeting ecstasy. It's the ceaseless pursuit of the 'I,' the insistent tug of a selfhood hungry for validation in a marketplace teeming with competing egos.
The novel's thematic core delves into the symbiotic relationship between money and fiction, unveiling the role of wealth and power in ”bending and aligning reality itself� to one’s will. In the labyrinth of egoistic capitalism, the appetite for more is not merely a preference; it's a manifesto, a declaration of existence in a world that measures worth in quantifiable increments. We navigate this societal bazaar with a shopping cart of desires, each acquisition a testament to our standing in the grand bazaar of self-importance.

Yet, in this relentless pursuit, we may find ourselves ensnared in the paradox of plenty—amidst abundance, a gnawing emptiness persists. The 'more' we accumulate becomes a fleeting mirage, dissipating just as we approach its shimmering allure.

”Trust� delves into the trap of the human spirit that money represents—a modern-day holy grail, a philosopher's stone, that fails to deliver to promise of ecstasy and transfiguration. The narrative prods readers to ponder the transformative power of immense fortune and its potential to shape any future one wants, or thinks they want. The illusion of wealth becomes shattered in rich man's dystopian future as a poignant reflection on the isolation it begets—a lonely existence where the blanket of one's public image serves as the sole comfort, rendering the individual a mere projection of society's idea of success and freedom, without the person's grasp of the true essence of those values.

”So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That's what all those criminals trade in: fictions... Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously.�

The tragic narrative arc of Andrew Bevel, reminiscent of Gatsby's ill-fated pursuit, unfolds as a pursuit of his own ghostly image. Wealth begets the power to construct false narratives that offer a semblance of freedom from the judgments of others. Yet, like Gatsby, the wealth fails to liberate him from the shackles of self-deception and a reluctance to confront the fundamental truths of his existence. Yes, as Bevel and Gatsby, one can have all the worldly power and wealth, and still be overwhelmed and riddled with shame, desperately clinging to other people's perception of themselves to the point of addiction. The more accolades amassed, the more self-hate seems to gather in the shadowy recesses of the psyche, a paradoxical companion to the glitz and glamour.

They, adorned in the regalia of influence, find themselves desperately clutching to the perceptions of others as if they were a lifeline. It's an addiction, an insidious yearning for external validation to stave off the encroaching tide of self-doubt. The more eyes applaud, the more hollow the applause seems to ring. In the pursuit of worldly triumphs, the corridors of power become a labyrinth of self-deception.

As the narrative unfolds in a Rashomonian structure, Diaz probes the essential question: Whose narrative should we Trust?

In the metafictional legacy of Borges and Calvino, the novel fragments into four different parts with distinct narratives and voices that are in communication with each other. Each part interrogates the reliability of the other, creating a literary kaleidoscope that challenges the reader's perception. The narrators of almost all parts either are or could be considered unreliable with unpure motives.

There is also a shift in literary style, the first part being a self-proclaimed hommage to Warthon, Henry James and Fitzgerald, but in reality, landing more closely to the style of Taylor Jenkins Raid than the literary titans.

The second part is meant to be informative and dry, written by Ida, Bevel's ghostwriter, a fabricated reality of what our protagonist wanted to be the truth about him and his wife’s life, inspired by the autobiographical style of great men of American history that Bevel wholeheartedly wants to be remembered as.

In the third part, a memoir by Ida, Bevel’s ghostwriter, more truth is presumingly revealed, and in Ida’s memoir, the writing style becomes more modern, philosophical and reflective. Marx is mentioned as Diaz’s influence and this section gives a commentary on capitalism and its leftist critique in the voice of Ida's anarchist father.

Here the other fundamental idea of a novel is revealed - the greatness of women hidden in history written by men. The bending of a woman’s character to fit into the myth the man in her life needed for himself. Complicated search for the truth of women’s lives and their own voices in men male-dominated world. But Ida has many motives for being unreliable, emotionally involved, and appalled by male narratives that dominate the world. Her writing is inspired by detective fiction she adored in youth, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers: “These women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world.� They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: The reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted.�

The grand finale of the book is a disjointed narrative of dying Mildred Bevel's morphine-addled diary, which serves as the crescendo of revelation—her nonlinear perspective where past, present, and future coalesce in a feverish dreamscape.
Influenced by feminist literary giants such as Woolf, Rhys and Lessing, this section unveils the untold stories of women relegated to the shadows of history—a secret creative force behind the lives of men.

“Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future.�

In the tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s �The Yellow Wallpaper this section plays in the idea of women locked behind doors which is the generative power of men’s lives. The genius women whose voices were marginalized, silenced, made appear mad like a woman in the attic through history - voices of women we may only hear distorted - through the stories of their successful husbands or in no way at all. The genius of women who rule from the shadows, often unclaimed and unrecognized by the collective, still contains the intellectual fuel for men. Helen’s voice brings the unnamed and untold stories buried beneath American financial power.
Here achievement and money are not essential - being is.

In the metanarrative of the novel, the same question is posed again and again, whose narrative do we Trust?
From what I gathered, all the readers seem to consider the last part of the novel it great reveal - a reveal of the truth so concealed in previous voices. But I can’t help but wonder why.
Because the last two sections are written by women? Because they are written in a more appealing, literary, postmodern style? Because the last part was written by a dying woman? We often forget that women also have their own mythologies of their identities - sometimes containing inflation of their own. They can also be threatened by the power of men and create their own grandiose narrative of themselves. Marriages are complex and our perceptions of ourselves as partners are full of fallacies.

Reader's reactions seem to attest that we can be inclined to put the subjectivity of women at the altar of truth, equalizing it with objective reality. The marginalization of certain narratives in history doesn't inherently imbue them with an infallible veracity. The authoritative gaze of men has long shaped history, yet what contemporary forces dictate our narrative preferences, tethering us to one story over another? Is our embrace of fiction marked by an unsettling ease, a tendency to accept without due scrutiny? The fallacy in our convictions, whether about heroes, victims, or the truth we hold, demands a painful awareness—a call for unwavering critical examination.

We seem to be in our own inner conflict of wanting to believe the powerful but also, especially in recent eras, being inclined to take a side of those marginalized, traumatized, the underdogs, those who are sick and suffer even when our logic tells us they hold important, but only one piece of the puzzle of reality, equally locked in their own subjective experience.

It is important to bring the validity of the plurality of narratives that chart the complexity of truth, in history much as in the present day. While reading this book you can also observe how easily it is to discard the narrative of the person you don’t like, the person who has what you don’t have, the authoritarian person of wealth and power. We often too easily trash the objectives of people and groups we have something against as our hidden jealousy conceals our own drive to power - forgetting that we are discarding sometimes the vital fragments of reality - the truth we don’t like or the truth we don’t want to be the truth because the different narrative is more appealing to us. It is more enticing to consider that all of Andrew's wealth is a product of Helen’s wit, not his own, isn’t it? But as always, objective truth itself glides through our fingers.

In the end, we all like narratives that serve us psychological purposes even if that is one of those altruistic ones, being on the side of the disadvantaged and somewhat, oppressed.
In this kaleidoscopic exploration of narratives, Diaz prompts readers to ponder the acceptance of fiction and the ease with which certain narratives supersede others.
The plurality of perspectives emerges as a vital force, unveiling the intricate complexity of truth and challenging our propensity to discard narratives that diverge from our preconceived notions.

However, despite the brilliance of Diaz's conceptual framework, a lingering sense of unrealized potential permeates the novel for me. The author, like a literary chameleon, mimics diverse writing voices, replicating styles with varying degrees of success. The novel, no matter the interesting metaphysical ideas, at times feels like a literary exercise, a mosaic of styles awaiting the unearthing of Diaz's distinct narrative voice. He has yet to find his own reality and his own voice.
But considering the Pulitzer prize is already on his shelf at this stage of his writing, he does not need to sweat.
"Trust" stands as a testament to his literary prowess, an interesting exploration of narratives that transcend temporal boundaries, inviting readers into a realm where reality dances with the elusive delusions of powerful and rich, and disenfranchised.
]]>
<![CDATA[The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1)]]> 18148202
Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free.

Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. Marvelous and compulsively readable, Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.]]>
484 Helene Wecker 0062110845 Lea 0 to-read 4.20 2013 The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1)
author: Helene Wecker
name: Lea
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>
Patriotism 62795 One of the most powerful short stories ever written: Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece about the erotics of patriotism and honor, love and suicide.

By now, Yukio Mishima’s (1925-1970) dramatic demise through an act of seppuku after an inflammatory public speech has become the stuff of literary legend. With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel. A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple’s seppuku that follows.]]>
64 Yukio Mishima 0811213129 Lea 5 4.11 1961 Patriotism
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Lea
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/25
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: literary-fiction, short-stories, recommended, sexuality-eros, owned, classic, death
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism]]> 30351044 From the fiery intellectual provocateur: a brilliant essay collection that both celebrates and challenges modern feminism from motherhood to Madonna, football to Friedan, stilettos to Steinem.
When Camille Paglia first burst onto the scene with her best-selling Sexual Personae, she established herself as a smart, fearless, and often dissenting voice among feminists. Now, for the first time, her best essays on the subject are gathered together in one concise volume. Whether she is declaring Madonna the future of feminism, asking if men are obsolete, calling for equal opportunity for American women years before the founding of N.O.W., or urging all women to love football, Paglia can always be counted on to get a discussion started. The rock-solid intellectual foundation beneath her fiery words assures her timeless relevance."]]>
315 Camille Paglia 0375424776 Lea 4
That being said, this collection of essays is quite uneven, and at times repetitive, even more for me having seen most of her speeches. By far the best part of the book is the first part, excepts from Sexual Persona, her capital work that I've been meaning to read for quite some time. In my opinion, this is Paglia at her peak, in full display of her brilliancy.

Her view and analysis of sexuality are the most fascinating. “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.�
Paglia rejects Rousseau's ideas in the spirit of Locke, of non-existent original sin and man's innate goodness that is corrupted by society, that assumes that aggression, violence, crime and other distorted behavior come from social deprivation, and takes the point of view of Sade influenced by Hobbes, that aggression comes from nature, as rape and sadism have been evident throughout history and in all cultures. Society does not create criminals, society is the force that keeps crime in check, our fair barrier that protects weak against human nature, often vile and destructive. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth.
"Rape is the sexual expression of the will-to-power, which nature plants in all of us and which civilization rose to contain. Therefore the rapist is a man with too little socialization rather than too much. Worldwide evidence is overwhelming that whenever social controls are weakened, as in war or mob rule, even civilized men behave in uncivilized ways, among which is the barbarity of rape."
Rape has always been and always will be condemned by honorable men, it goes all the way back through history, and punishment for rape was often death.

Society is one that keeps the dark forces of sexuality at bay. Paglia stands with Freud, Nietzsche and Sade and their views of the amorality of instinctual life, mirrored in aggression and eroticism deeply intertwined.
“Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted. Behaviorist sex therapies believe guiltless, no-fault sex is possible. But sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. I called it an intersection. This intersection is the uncanny crossroads of Hecate, where all things return in the night. Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.�

Paglia is also a passionate defender of pornography. Every attempt of oppression of sexual drive is setting oneself against nature.
"The imagination cannot and must not be policed. Pornography shows us nature’s daemonic heart, those eternal forces at work beneath and beyond social convention. Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism has admitted. Geoffrey Hartman rightly says, “Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.�

She has especially interesting thoughts regarding individualism, identity and freedom in relation to sex. In the vein of Nietzche's will-to-power and Freud's notion that identity is conflict, Paglia reaffirms that is impossible to drive power relations from sex. Sex is by nature a power play and we are creatures of hierarchy. "Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first." There never was and never will be sexual harmony. So in times of greater sexual freedoms and sexual liberation, practices like sadomasochism will rise, a punitive hierarchical structure that can be symbolically seen as religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Men are more free, but find freedom intolerable and always seek new ways to enslave themselves, through technology, money or drugs.

Paglia also points out the hypocrisy of modern liberalism, in condemning the social orders as oppressive, but at the same time, expecting from government greater protection and provision of goods for all, a feat manageable only by the expansion of state authority. "...liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother."

She also has a problem with second-wave feminism in male-bashing and victim mentality that promotes women's damsel-in-distress fragility and requires special protection of women. By putting a burden on the government or institutions to create a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offense and hurt is to paradoxically strengthen the intrusion of paternalistic authority figures.
Paglia is more prone to idealizing the high achieving bold personalities of 1920 feminism - like Katharine Hepburn, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Hellman... Women of independence, self-reliance and unapologetic ambition who were demanding a fair chance to prove that women could accomplish as much as men or surpass it. But every woman with ambition, who is striving to achieve something notable will admire the greats among her male peers. Self-awareness and personal responsibility are qualities a strong woman should have.

Paglia is also adamant that men have a right to claim credit for vast achievement in conceiving and constructing the framework of civilization. Modern women should be strong enough to give credit where credit is due. Rightfully, she defends the large groups of men that are impugned by moderns feminists, that stoically go and do the most dangerous, dirty and thankless work in modern society.
In the modern world, where women and men work side by side, mutual incompatibility and creative tension may have to be tolerated. But, women and society do not gain by weakening men.
"An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong women and strong men."
As a great admirer of men's thoughts, legacy and accomplishments I could not agree more. Men are the crucial element in both the social and psychological progress of women and vice versa.

Paglia identifies as a libertarian feminist, which takes the best from liberalism and conservatism but decidedly neither, put places the freedom of thought and speech above all ideology. She is a passionate truth-seeker.
"This is what I stand for: “The mind’s true liberation.�
To finish off with Paglia's words;
"You read major figures not because everything they say is the gospel truth but because they expand your imagination, they expand your IQ, okay, they open up brain cells you didn’t even know you have."]]>
3.76 2017 Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
author: Camille Paglia
name: Lea
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/11
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, philosophy, art, politics, psychology-psychotherapy, kindle, sexuality-eros, feminism, essays
review:
Camille Paglia is one of the most prominent, original and interesting thinkers of our time, whether you agree with her strong standpoints or not. I'm certainly not on board with all of her opinions but I love the core of her principles. Paglia is most famous for the critique of today's feminism and poststructuralism as well as modern college education. This is a brilliant, sharp, intelligent woman that is deeply grounded in the western canon, and has profound knowledge of literature, history, art, sociology and psychology. She is standing on the shoulders of giant thinkers of the past while retaining her own distinctive and passionate voice that reflects on the world and social changes, which makes her for me, very inspiring.

That being said, this collection of essays is quite uneven, and at times repetitive, even more for me having seen most of her speeches. By far the best part of the book is the first part, excepts from Sexual Persona, her capital work that I've been meaning to read for quite some time. In my opinion, this is Paglia at her peak, in full display of her brilliancy.

Her view and analysis of sexuality are the most fascinating. “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.�
Paglia rejects Rousseau's ideas in the spirit of Locke, of non-existent original sin and man's innate goodness that is corrupted by society, that assumes that aggression, violence, crime and other distorted behavior come from social deprivation, and takes the point of view of Sade influenced by Hobbes, that aggression comes from nature, as rape and sadism have been evident throughout history and in all cultures. Society does not create criminals, society is the force that keeps crime in check, our fair barrier that protects weak against human nature, often vile and destructive. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth.
"Rape is the sexual expression of the will-to-power, which nature plants in all of us and which civilization rose to contain. Therefore the rapist is a man with too little socialization rather than too much. Worldwide evidence is overwhelming that whenever social controls are weakened, as in war or mob rule, even civilized men behave in uncivilized ways, among which is the barbarity of rape."
Rape has always been and always will be condemned by honorable men, it goes all the way back through history, and punishment for rape was often death.

Society is one that keeps the dark forces of sexuality at bay. Paglia stands with Freud, Nietzsche and Sade and their views of the amorality of instinctual life, mirrored in aggression and eroticism deeply intertwined.
“Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted. Behaviorist sex therapies believe guiltless, no-fault sex is possible. But sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. I called it an intersection. This intersection is the uncanny crossroads of Hecate, where all things return in the night. Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.�

Paglia is also a passionate defender of pornography. Every attempt of oppression of sexual drive is setting oneself against nature.
"The imagination cannot and must not be policed. Pornography shows us nature’s daemonic heart, those eternal forces at work beneath and beyond social convention. Pornography cannot be separated from art; the two interpenetrate each other, far more than humanistic criticism has admitted. Geoffrey Hartman rightly says, “Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.�

She has especially interesting thoughts regarding individualism, identity and freedom in relation to sex. In the vein of Nietzche's will-to-power and Freud's notion that identity is conflict, Paglia reaffirms that is impossible to drive power relations from sex. Sex is by nature a power play and we are creatures of hierarchy. "Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first." There never was and never will be sexual harmony. So in times of greater sexual freedoms and sexual liberation, practices like sadomasochism will rise, a punitive hierarchical structure that can be symbolically seen as religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Men are more free, but find freedom intolerable and always seek new ways to enslave themselves, through technology, money or drugs.

Paglia also points out the hypocrisy of modern liberalism, in condemning the social orders as oppressive, but at the same time, expecting from government greater protection and provision of goods for all, a feat manageable only by the expansion of state authority. "...liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother."

She also has a problem with second-wave feminism in male-bashing and victim mentality that promotes women's damsel-in-distress fragility and requires special protection of women. By putting a burden on the government or institutions to create a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offense and hurt is to paradoxically strengthen the intrusion of paternalistic authority figures.
Paglia is more prone to idealizing the high achieving bold personalities of 1920 feminism - like Katharine Hepburn, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Hellman... Women of independence, self-reliance and unapologetic ambition who were demanding a fair chance to prove that women could accomplish as much as men or surpass it. But every woman with ambition, who is striving to achieve something notable will admire the greats among her male peers. Self-awareness and personal responsibility are qualities a strong woman should have.

Paglia is also adamant that men have a right to claim credit for vast achievement in conceiving and constructing the framework of civilization. Modern women should be strong enough to give credit where credit is due. Rightfully, she defends the large groups of men that are impugned by moderns feminists, that stoically go and do the most dangerous, dirty and thankless work in modern society.
In the modern world, where women and men work side by side, mutual incompatibility and creative tension may have to be tolerated. But, women and society do not gain by weakening men.
"An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong women and strong men."
As a great admirer of men's thoughts, legacy and accomplishments I could not agree more. Men are the crucial element in both the social and psychological progress of women and vice versa.

Paglia identifies as a libertarian feminist, which takes the best from liberalism and conservatism but decidedly neither, put places the freedom of thought and speech above all ideology. She is a passionate truth-seeker.
"This is what I stand for: “The mind’s true liberation.�
To finish off with Paglia's words;
"You read major figures not because everything they say is the gospel truth but because they expand your imagination, they expand your IQ, okay, they open up brain cells you didn’t even know you have."
]]>
How to Think More About Sex 13696016 144 Alain de Botton 1447202279 Lea 4 3.45 2012 How to Think More About Sex
author: Alain de Botton
name: Lea
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/20
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: psychology-psychotherapy, recommended, kindle, non-fiction, philosophy, sexuality-eros, essays
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History]]> 18942728
This new edition features a corrected text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.]]>
139 Isaiah Berlin 1400846633 Lea 5
Berlin divides thinkers and writers into two categories; foxes, ones that know many things (Shakespeare, Goethe, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Montaigne, Erasmus, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce), and hedgehogs, ones that know one big thing (Dante, Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust, Dostoevsky, Henry James). Hedgehogs are the ones who relate everything to a single central vision, one coherent and articulate system in which they understand, think and feel, a universal organizing principle, unitary unchanging inner vision. Foxes, on the other side, pursue many ends, sometimes even unrelated and contradictory, related to no governing aesthetic or moral principle, connected only through some psychological or physiological cause. Their thought can be scattered or diffused, moving on many levels and seizing upon the essence of the vast variety of objects and experiences. The main point he makes about Tolstoy is that he is a fox by nature, pluralist of many visions, one of the most brilliant, gifted and genius foxes that ever existed, but wants to be a hedgehog and vivisect himself into one, longing for a single substance.

“The celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person in his world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were: never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an impressionistic representation; nor yet calling for, and dependent on, some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space � an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated. Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level.�

Tolstoy's has an immense gift that enables him to see all the details and finesses that makes things individual and unique, creating "marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences â€� the â€oscillationsâ€� of feeling â€� in favour of what is common to them all". That leads to his genius both microscopic and macroscopic view of the course of history. Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. The interest was not nearly in past things as such, but in history as a means to an end to understand how and why things happen, and to penetrate the first cause, to get to the root of every matter. He had a great love for empirical, concrete, verifiable, among with disbelief in abstract, metaphysical, impalpable, supernatural. In Tolstoy's eyes, history can provide the ”hardâ€� facts he was looking for, one that could be grasped by the intellect and uncorrupted by theories divorced from tangible reality, as the answers served by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd. But history is not absurd, it is a sum of truths, empirically discoverable data, the sum of the actual experience of men and women in the relation to one another and physical environment - that is material from this genuine answers can arise, as history holds the key to mysteries of universe.

“He is obsessed by the thought that philosophical principles can be understood only in their concrete expression in history.â€To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.â€�

As we can see in Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace, experience, not knowledge, generate wisdom, as theories only give corrupt answers to main life's questions. Patient empirical observation leads to wisdom and simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation is less clouded by empty theories. That lead to his heroes, idealization of "simple people" close to "universal truth" in their folk wisdom, who go with the flow of life, accepting the circumstance, rather than trying to change the course of events in the illusion of its possibility.
In the genius of his instinctive judgment, he is painfully aware of how much we don't know about the cause of all things, but in his deeply metaphysical conviction, he is desperate to believe in a unique system to which we must belong. The strain and conflict of conviction opposite of his judgment, from which he could not liberate himself, his gifts and opinions, causes him to vigorously discredit all the flawed systems of beliefs, illusions of laws that govern everything, falsely made by humans.

“Tolstoy was the least superficial of men: he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below; and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that; he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his appalling, destructive sense of what was false frustrated this final effort at self-deception as it did all the earlier ones; and he died in agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there is with what there ought to be.�

Going deeper and wider than anyone before in vivisection of both individual and collective history, in a complex web of event, object, characteristics, connected and divided by innumerable unidentifiable links - Tolstoy is painfully aware that we can only know a neglige portion of causes and laws that govern everything. His view on reality makes all logical and clear constructions ineffective as means of description or analysis of life.

� ....we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.�

So he passionately rejects both the liberal theory of history and scientific sociology, the scientists and historians who explain history by their own theories and are lying and deceiving in the process, as well as the concepts they use â€� â€causeâ€�, â€accidentâ€�, â€geniusâ€� â€� that explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. â€� Tolstoy was also furious that some historians attribute events to actions of individuals. He was exceptionally passionate to strip the "great men" of history from the imaginary power we attach to them.

â€�...there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them â€great menâ€�. What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.â€�

Tolstoy is set to expose the lie and the great illusion that individuals can, by their own resources understand and control the course of events.

"And side by side with these public faces � these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths � side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.�

To attach history to one cause of things and to look at events only through your own lens of theories is a saturated explanation that Tolstoy despised and rejects as a cowardly escape from the vastness of causes of the unknown and our irrelevance. Tolstoy also believed that the history written as it is, is more than flawed, representing â€perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoplesâ€�. In War and Peace Tolstoy makes his stance and take on history, one in which collective and individual are of equal importance, as political and public events are not greater than the spiritual, inner events, that are largely forgotten in all other written histories. Tolstoy emphasized the inner world, as the human experience of both individuals and communities contains more truth than big events of history, usually shallowly glorified by political historians. In brilliant passages of War and Peace, he compares the actual course of events side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanation, inflated with a sense of the importance of the will of one man. That is a real texture of life with its treasures, in juxtaposition to the often distorted, "unreal" picture of great events painted by historians, the tension between reality described and reality that occurred. In War and Peace Tolstoy put on himself what he perceived as the ultimate historian's task - to describe the subjective experience, personal lives lived by men, ”the â€thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hate, passionsâ€� of which, for Tolstoy, â€realâ€� life is compounded.â€� Tolstoy clings to historical determinism, undermining the importance of free will. Freedom is real but confined and relevant only in trivial acts. The individual is free when he alone is involved, but once he is in a relationship with another, he is no longer free, but part of an inexorable stream.

“True, man is at once an atom living its own conscious life â€for itselfâ€�, and at the same time the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such elements.â€�

Tolstoy made an impeccable case for protesting to the view of history which attributed the power to make things happen to abstract entities such as heroes, ideas, nationalism. He rejected the political reform because he believed that the ultimate revolution will come from within and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people. But man must learn how little even the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, and how much of perceived is meaningless chaos - reflected in an intense degree in war.

”Tolstoy can say only what it is not. His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can only attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not � namely all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is not � above all, not anything that art, or science or civilisation or rational criticism, can achieve.�

That is a tragic, genius and beautiful philosophy of Tolstoy, one he couldn't be at peace at. Tolstoy was always at war, more than anything with himself because he could "close his eyes, but never be rid of the awareness that his eyes were closed."]]>
4.11 1953 The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
author: Isaiah Berlin
name: Lea
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/30
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: kindle, history-historical, non-fiction, philosophy, recommended, essays
review:
A brilliant essay by the late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin about Tolstoy's philosophy and view of history. Recommended to be accompanied read to War and Peace (on which I'm attempting to write a review for 3 months), especially to the parts of Tolstoy's essay about history.

Berlin divides thinkers and writers into two categories; foxes, ones that know many things (Shakespeare, Goethe, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Montaigne, Erasmus, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce), and hedgehogs, ones that know one big thing (Dante, Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust, Dostoevsky, Henry James). Hedgehogs are the ones who relate everything to a single central vision, one coherent and articulate system in which they understand, think and feel, a universal organizing principle, unitary unchanging inner vision. Foxes, on the other side, pursue many ends, sometimes even unrelated and contradictory, related to no governing aesthetic or moral principle, connected only through some psychological or physiological cause. Their thought can be scattered or diffused, moving on many levels and seizing upon the essence of the vast variety of objects and experiences. The main point he makes about Tolstoy is that he is a fox by nature, pluralist of many visions, one of the most brilliant, gifted and genius foxes that ever existed, but wants to be a hedgehog and vivisect himself into one, longing for a single substance.

“The celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person in his world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were: never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an impressionistic representation; nor yet calling for, and dependent on, some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space � an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated. Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level.�

Tolstoy's has an immense gift that enables him to see all the details and finesses that makes things individual and unique, creating "marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences â€� the â€oscillationsâ€� of feeling â€� in favour of what is common to them all". That leads to his genius both microscopic and macroscopic view of the course of history. Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. The interest was not nearly in past things as such, but in history as a means to an end to understand how and why things happen, and to penetrate the first cause, to get to the root of every matter. He had a great love for empirical, concrete, verifiable, among with disbelief in abstract, metaphysical, impalpable, supernatural. In Tolstoy's eyes, history can provide the ”hardâ€� facts he was looking for, one that could be grasped by the intellect and uncorrupted by theories divorced from tangible reality, as the answers served by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd. But history is not absurd, it is a sum of truths, empirically discoverable data, the sum of the actual experience of men and women in the relation to one another and physical environment - that is material from this genuine answers can arise, as history holds the key to mysteries of universe.

“He is obsessed by the thought that philosophical principles can be understood only in their concrete expression in history.â€To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.â€�

As we can see in Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace, experience, not knowledge, generate wisdom, as theories only give corrupt answers to main life's questions. Patient empirical observation leads to wisdom and simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation is less clouded by empty theories. That lead to his heroes, idealization of "simple people" close to "universal truth" in their folk wisdom, who go with the flow of life, accepting the circumstance, rather than trying to change the course of events in the illusion of its possibility.
In the genius of his instinctive judgment, he is painfully aware of how much we don't know about the cause of all things, but in his deeply metaphysical conviction, he is desperate to believe in a unique system to which we must belong. The strain and conflict of conviction opposite of his judgment, from which he could not liberate himself, his gifts and opinions, causes him to vigorously discredit all the flawed systems of beliefs, illusions of laws that govern everything, falsely made by humans.

“Tolstoy was the least superficial of men: he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below; and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that; he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his appalling, destructive sense of what was false frustrated this final effort at self-deception as it did all the earlier ones; and he died in agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there is with what there ought to be.�

Going deeper and wider than anyone before in vivisection of both individual and collective history, in a complex web of event, object, characteristics, connected and divided by innumerable unidentifiable links - Tolstoy is painfully aware that we can only know a neglige portion of causes and laws that govern everything. His view on reality makes all logical and clear constructions ineffective as means of description or analysis of life.

� ....we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.�

So he passionately rejects both the liberal theory of history and scientific sociology, the scientists and historians who explain history by their own theories and are lying and deceiving in the process, as well as the concepts they use â€� â€causeâ€�, â€accidentâ€�, â€geniusâ€� â€� that explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. â€� Tolstoy was also furious that some historians attribute events to actions of individuals. He was exceptionally passionate to strip the "great men" of history from the imaginary power we attach to them.

â€�...there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them â€great menâ€�. What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.â€�

Tolstoy is set to expose the lie and the great illusion that individuals can, by their own resources understand and control the course of events.

"And side by side with these public faces � these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths � side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.�

To attach history to one cause of things and to look at events only through your own lens of theories is a saturated explanation that Tolstoy despised and rejects as a cowardly escape from the vastness of causes of the unknown and our irrelevance. Tolstoy also believed that the history written as it is, is more than flawed, representing â€perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoplesâ€�. In War and Peace Tolstoy makes his stance and take on history, one in which collective and individual are of equal importance, as political and public events are not greater than the spiritual, inner events, that are largely forgotten in all other written histories. Tolstoy emphasized the inner world, as the human experience of both individuals and communities contains more truth than big events of history, usually shallowly glorified by political historians. In brilliant passages of War and Peace, he compares the actual course of events side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanation, inflated with a sense of the importance of the will of one man. That is a real texture of life with its treasures, in juxtaposition to the often distorted, "unreal" picture of great events painted by historians, the tension between reality described and reality that occurred. In War and Peace Tolstoy put on himself what he perceived as the ultimate historian's task - to describe the subjective experience, personal lives lived by men, ”the â€thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hate, passionsâ€� of which, for Tolstoy, â€realâ€� life is compounded.â€� Tolstoy clings to historical determinism, undermining the importance of free will. Freedom is real but confined and relevant only in trivial acts. The individual is free when he alone is involved, but once he is in a relationship with another, he is no longer free, but part of an inexorable stream.

“True, man is at once an atom living its own conscious life â€for itselfâ€�, and at the same time the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such elements.â€�

Tolstoy made an impeccable case for protesting to the view of history which attributed the power to make things happen to abstract entities such as heroes, ideas, nationalism. He rejected the political reform because he believed that the ultimate revolution will come from within and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people. But man must learn how little even the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, and how much of perceived is meaningless chaos - reflected in an intense degree in war.

”Tolstoy can say only what it is not. His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can only attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not � namely all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is not � above all, not anything that art, or science or civilisation or rational criticism, can achieve.�

That is a tragic, genius and beautiful philosophy of Tolstoy, one he couldn't be at peace at. Tolstoy was always at war, more than anything with himself because he could "close his eyes, but never be rid of the awareness that his eyes were closed."
]]>
Reflections on War and Death 35555327
First
REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND DEATH
REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND DEATH

By PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D.

Authorized English Translation By

DR. A. A. BRILL and ALFRED B. KUTTNER

[ colophon]

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY NEW YORK 1918

Copyright, 1918, by MOFFAT, YARD, AND COMPANY

This book is offered to the American public at the present time in the hope that it may contribute something to the cause of international understanding and good will which has become the hope of the world.

THE TRANSLATORS.

REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND DEATH

I

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF WAR

Caught in the whirlwind of these war times, without any real information or any perspective upon the great changes that have already occurred or are about to be enacted, lacking all premonition of the future, it is small wonder that we ourselves become confused as to the meaning of impressions which crowd in upon us or of the value of the judgments we are forming. It would seem as though no event had ever destroyed so much of the precious heritage of mankind, confused so many of the clearest intellects or so thoroughly debased what is highest.]]>
67 Sigmund Freud Lea 5 ”Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want to preserve peace, arm for war.
Si vis vitam, para mortem.
If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.�


Reflections on War and Death is one of the most accessible, and stylistically elegant works of Freud I’ve read so far. I would highly recommend this essay for the general public and someone wanting to get better acquainted with the works of Freud, as it perfectly shows the way he forms the argument and it also gives the flare of his core ideas. The essay is divided into two sections, the first is called The disillusionment of the war, and the second is called Our attitude towards death. The essay was written in 1915, during WWI.

I THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE WAR

In the first section, Freud tackles the fact that the war brought great disbelief and disappointment to the men of his time, as they considered humankind to be evolved, to be too civilized to wage war in such a brutal manner again, even more cruel and deadly due to advance in technology and weapons.

“Two things in this war have aroused our sense of disillusionment: the low morality shown externally by states which in their internal relations pose as the guardians of moral standards, and the brutality shown by individuals whom, as participants in the highest human civilization, one would not have thought capable of such behaviour.�

Freud lays out his criticism of this disillusionment as he considers war to be illusion-shattering. The illusion in which we all live in, due to the fact that the truth is too painful to grasp, is that all men have evil passions they continuously suppress in order to integrate into civilized society.
Contrary to Rousseau’s idea of man’s innate goodness being corrupted by society, Freud lays out the central idea of psychoanalysis, that the deepest essence of human nature consists of amoral instinctual impulses which are similar in all men, and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal need - and some of these impulses are selfish, aggressive and cruel ones, the impulses that society usually condemns as evil. The development process of human life and socializing consists of eradicating these evil human tendencies, and under the influence of education and a civilized environment, replacing them with good ones. These primitive urges are strictly forbidden and undergo and lengthy process of transformation before being allowed to become active in adult. “They are inhibited, directed towards other aims and fields, become commingled, alter their objects and are to some extent turned back upon their possessor.� In reaction-formation, they sometimes appear in the pair of opposites - so egoism can be changed in altruism and cruelty into pity. That is why each individual has “ambivalence of feeling�, as intense love and intense hatred are often found together in the same person, sometimes even directed towards the same object, for example, of desire. Being adequately socialized oftentimes means repressing the big part of human nature, the primal and primitive urges of sexuality and aggression, which are always lingering in the background. For Freud, that makes us all hypocrites in some sense, and civilization favors the production of this form of hypocrisy.

“Anyone thus compelled to act continually in accordance with precepts which are not the expression of his instinctual inclinations, is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means, and may objectively be described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly aware of the incongruity or not.

Thus there are very many more cultural hypocrites than truly civilized men. But the transformation of instinct, on which our susceptibility to culture is based, may be undone by the impacts of life. That is why in war, when the community no longer raises objection to evil deeds, men perpetrate acts of cruelty, treachery, rape, and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one would have thought them impossible.

”In reality, there is no such thing as â€eradicatingâ€� evil.â€�

What is Freud's suggestion for enforcing these uncomfortable ideas? Freud thinks that honesty and truthfulness about our individual and collective human nature can perpetuate the transformation needed for maintaining the state of peace in the nations, at least as long as we can.

“It is, to be sure, a mystery why the collective individuals should in fact despise, hate and detest one another - every nation against every other - and even in times of peace. I cannot tell why that is so. It is just as though when it becomes a question of a number of people, not to say millions, all individual moral acquisitions are obliterated, and only the most primitive, the oldest, the crudest mental attitudes are left. It may be that only later stages in development will be able to make some change in this regrettable state of affairs. But a little more truthfulness and honesty on all sides - in the relations of men to one another and between them and their rulers - should also smooth the way for this transformation.�

II OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH

”â€Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.â€� (â€It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.â€�)â€�

War also brings out one of the most important topics of life, constantly ignored in mundane days - that death is the necessary outcome of life, the natural, unavoidable and undeniable. But contrary to the fact of death, we are accustomed to behaving otherwise as we show an unmistakable tendency to put death on the side, to eliminate it from life. Psychoanalytic school ventures on the assertion that it is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and that unconsciously every one of us is convinced of his immortality. At the bottom, no one believes in his own death. That is probably a necessity for our psychological health, as the real realization of the fact of the death of ourselves and our loved ones would trigger paralyzing anxiety.
Here Freud lays out the beautiful idea about literature and theatre being compensation for what we have to lose in life. In art, we find people who “know how to die�.

”In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.�

Our attitude towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Freud argues that without, at least partial, realization of death, our lives become shallow and empty, impoverished, “it loses in interest, where the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked.� “The tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions.�

But at war, our conventional treatment of death is swept away. Death can no longer be denied, war forces us to believe in it. Death is no longer a chance event as thousands die, sometimes in a single day. Man can no longer keep death at distance, as he can be hit by it at chance every day. But the closeness of death can also evoke eros, love, and passion for life. Life can, indeed, become interesting again, recover its full content. Paradoxically, death makes us feel alive, and that is a part of the reason war cannot be abolished. Here Freud repeats the notion he laid out in the first part of the essay - that it is essential for us the live our life truthfully, to leave nothing unexamined, not even our unconscious attitudes towards death.

“But war cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not rather turn back and recognize the truth? Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed?�

Freud is also conscious of the fact that many will not find his, somewhat pessimistic ideas comforting nor even valuable. He concludes his essay in this manner:

“This hardly seems an advance to higher achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step - a regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again.
To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us.�
]]>
4.14 1915 Reflections on War and Death
author: Sigmund Freud
name: Lea
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/19
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: favourites, non-fiction, philosophy, psychology-psychotherapy, recommended, audiobook, war, death, essays
review:
”Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want to preserve peace, arm for war.
Si vis vitam, para mortem.
If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.�


Reflections on War and Death is one of the most accessible, and stylistically elegant works of Freud I’ve read so far. I would highly recommend this essay for the general public and someone wanting to get better acquainted with the works of Freud, as it perfectly shows the way he forms the argument and it also gives the flare of his core ideas. The essay is divided into two sections, the first is called The disillusionment of the war, and the second is called Our attitude towards death. The essay was written in 1915, during WWI.

I THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE WAR

In the first section, Freud tackles the fact that the war brought great disbelief and disappointment to the men of his time, as they considered humankind to be evolved, to be too civilized to wage war in such a brutal manner again, even more cruel and deadly due to advance in technology and weapons.

“Two things in this war have aroused our sense of disillusionment: the low morality shown externally by states which in their internal relations pose as the guardians of moral standards, and the brutality shown by individuals whom, as participants in the highest human civilization, one would not have thought capable of such behaviour.�

Freud lays out his criticism of this disillusionment as he considers war to be illusion-shattering. The illusion in which we all live in, due to the fact that the truth is too painful to grasp, is that all men have evil passions they continuously suppress in order to integrate into civilized society.
Contrary to Rousseau’s idea of man’s innate goodness being corrupted by society, Freud lays out the central idea of psychoanalysis, that the deepest essence of human nature consists of amoral instinctual impulses which are similar in all men, and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal need - and some of these impulses are selfish, aggressive and cruel ones, the impulses that society usually condemns as evil. The development process of human life and socializing consists of eradicating these evil human tendencies, and under the influence of education and a civilized environment, replacing them with good ones. These primitive urges are strictly forbidden and undergo and lengthy process of transformation before being allowed to become active in adult. “They are inhibited, directed towards other aims and fields, become commingled, alter their objects and are to some extent turned back upon their possessor.� In reaction-formation, they sometimes appear in the pair of opposites - so egoism can be changed in altruism and cruelty into pity. That is why each individual has “ambivalence of feeling�, as intense love and intense hatred are often found together in the same person, sometimes even directed towards the same object, for example, of desire. Being adequately socialized oftentimes means repressing the big part of human nature, the primal and primitive urges of sexuality and aggression, which are always lingering in the background. For Freud, that makes us all hypocrites in some sense, and civilization favors the production of this form of hypocrisy.

“Anyone thus compelled to act continually in accordance with precepts which are not the expression of his instinctual inclinations, is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means, and may objectively be described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly aware of the incongruity or not.

Thus there are very many more cultural hypocrites than truly civilized men. But the transformation of instinct, on which our susceptibility to culture is based, may be undone by the impacts of life. That is why in war, when the community no longer raises objection to evil deeds, men perpetrate acts of cruelty, treachery, rape, and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one would have thought them impossible.

”In reality, there is no such thing as â€eradicatingâ€� evil.â€�

What is Freud's suggestion for enforcing these uncomfortable ideas? Freud thinks that honesty and truthfulness about our individual and collective human nature can perpetuate the transformation needed for maintaining the state of peace in the nations, at least as long as we can.

“It is, to be sure, a mystery why the collective individuals should in fact despise, hate and detest one another - every nation against every other - and even in times of peace. I cannot tell why that is so. It is just as though when it becomes a question of a number of people, not to say millions, all individual moral acquisitions are obliterated, and only the most primitive, the oldest, the crudest mental attitudes are left. It may be that only later stages in development will be able to make some change in this regrettable state of affairs. But a little more truthfulness and honesty on all sides - in the relations of men to one another and between them and their rulers - should also smooth the way for this transformation.�

II OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH

”â€Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.â€� (â€It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.â€�)â€�

War also brings out one of the most important topics of life, constantly ignored in mundane days - that death is the necessary outcome of life, the natural, unavoidable and undeniable. But contrary to the fact of death, we are accustomed to behaving otherwise as we show an unmistakable tendency to put death on the side, to eliminate it from life. Psychoanalytic school ventures on the assertion that it is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and that unconsciously every one of us is convinced of his immortality. At the bottom, no one believes in his own death. That is probably a necessity for our psychological health, as the real realization of the fact of the death of ourselves and our loved ones would trigger paralyzing anxiety.
Here Freud lays out the beautiful idea about literature and theatre being compensation for what we have to lose in life. In art, we find people who “know how to die�.

”In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.�

Our attitude towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Freud argues that without, at least partial, realization of death, our lives become shallow and empty, impoverished, “it loses in interest, where the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked.� “The tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions.�

But at war, our conventional treatment of death is swept away. Death can no longer be denied, war forces us to believe in it. Death is no longer a chance event as thousands die, sometimes in a single day. Man can no longer keep death at distance, as he can be hit by it at chance every day. But the closeness of death can also evoke eros, love, and passion for life. Life can, indeed, become interesting again, recover its full content. Paradoxically, death makes us feel alive, and that is a part of the reason war cannot be abolished. Here Freud repeats the notion he laid out in the first part of the essay - that it is essential for us the live our life truthfully, to leave nothing unexamined, not even our unconscious attitudes towards death.

“But war cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not rather turn back and recognize the truth? Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed?�

Freud is also conscious of the fact that many will not find his, somewhat pessimistic ideas comforting nor even valuable. He concludes his essay in this manner:

“This hardly seems an advance to higher achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step - a regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again.
To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us.�

]]>
Naše sretno vrijeme 58991334
Naše sretno vrijeme proslavljeni je roman Ji-young Gong, šokantan i uznemirujuć s jedne strane, ali i melankoličan i topao s druge. Preispitujući zločin i kaznu, život i smrt, krivnju i oprost autorica je, paradoksalno, uspjela ispisati poetičnu posvetu ljubavi i suosjećanju. Prošaran religijskim tonom roman ponire duboko u ljudsku dušu razapetu traumom, krivnjom i iskupljenjem, i odašilje snažnu kritiku društvu čije se promjene tragično prelamaju na pojedincu.]]>
232 Gong Jiyoung 953259339X Lea 5 4.48 2005 Naše sretno vrijeme
author: Gong Jiyoung
name: Lea
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, recommended, death, literary-fiction
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories]]> 49011 126 Angela Carter 014017821X Lea 3 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories are indeed heaven for psychoanalysts, as they contain a lot of mythical symbols of subconscious conflicts and are dealing with Eros and Thantos that are, according to Freud, two most powerful driving forces for humans, and in Carter's imaginative world of fairy tales characters are driven by pursue for (sometimes sadistic, more-often sexual) pleasure.

Angela Carter made clear, "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories."

And she did it using imagery and beautifully poetic and lyrical language to describe inner liberation of social conventions, prejudges and stereotypes that disable us to build strong character, become ourselves and fulfill our potential as women (and men). Carter challenges our views on male and female sexuality, relationships, marriage and traditional roles. In a subtle way, she devours the hypocrisy of traditional male-dominated society view of women as objects, helpless beautiful princesses in submissive passive roles of wives of powerful men. The lead female characters often start as poor, innocent, helpless girls that are bound in some way to man, and in time they become engaged, active, experienced, and adventurous characters. They become not only beauties but also beasts, they too are strong and begin to claim their (sexual) desires. When it comes to sexual liberation it often takes killing an authoritative man (or sacrificing their own virginity) to become fully free (a metaphor for killing the patriarchal stereotypes that society imposters on women). Themes of innocence, virginity, sexuality, and death are ongoing motives in the stories. Society idea of female perfection, "good, loyal, and submissive" is a death sentence for female protagonists in the stories. Classic male-female roles are reversed, and we can argue about the idea of masculinity and femininity, as the characters show that to be a complete mature person, you have to be both "masculine" and "feminine" to live an authentic and fulfilled existence. The femininity is tied up with inexperience and purity, and masculinity with experience and corruption.

Sex and sexual desire are the catalysts for the heroine's transformation into a beast. We can discuss the beast component of every character as coming in the touch of deep subconscious driving forces that become more clear and visible to themselves and the world. They had to accept the animal nature in themselves and in each other so that they can be free of the human world with its moral rules and social constructions, and connect to their true self.

The sense of freedom is also crucial in these romantic relationships and the loving, caring and satisfying relationships are advocated, where motives are pure and partners connect to each other’s true bare self. â€Yet even these relationships it acknowledges are a matter of choice; as Puss expresses by saying, "your wives, if you need them," and "your husbands, if you want them." â€�

The subtle display of society’s issue of putting woman against each other is present in "The Snow Child" and "The Werewolf", noting that women are often portrayed as they can coexist only as rivals, in envy and competition for male attention (eye roll).

I would say that some of the stories deeply affected me and it was very atmospheric and haunting read, reminded me of Poe’s stories which I infinitely adore, but some stories were in my opinion much stronger than others and were for me personally lacing some substance. I think she painted a beautiful picture of some aspects of human nature, but maybe not in a wide and deep enough way for my taste. I did some training in psychoanalysis and Freud gave absolutely remarkable knowledge to psychiatry, but I think that pursuit of pleasure and sexual liberation can only be starting points in the journey of psychological and spiritual maturity, not an ending as this book suggests. Even though the stories touch on a pursuit of power (self-psychology), power over oneself and life is often just a consequence of establishing a romantic relationship or losing virginity and that is something I can't agree with. I would be far more interested in the pursuit of meaning and purpose as I think that is an ultimate empowerment for both women and men.

To finish off with hope in Angela Carter’s quote I really admire:

"I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself."]]>
3.96 1979 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
author: Angela Carter
name: Lea
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2017/11/04
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, fantasy, mythology-fairy-tales-folk-tales, sexuality-eros, short-stories, feminism
review:
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories are indeed heaven for psychoanalysts, as they contain a lot of mythical symbols of subconscious conflicts and are dealing with Eros and Thantos that are, according to Freud, two most powerful driving forces for humans, and in Carter's imaginative world of fairy tales characters are driven by pursue for (sometimes sadistic, more-often sexual) pleasure.

Angela Carter made clear, "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories."

And she did it using imagery and beautifully poetic and lyrical language to describe inner liberation of social conventions, prejudges and stereotypes that disable us to build strong character, become ourselves and fulfill our potential as women (and men). Carter challenges our views on male and female sexuality, relationships, marriage and traditional roles. In a subtle way, she devours the hypocrisy of traditional male-dominated society view of women as objects, helpless beautiful princesses in submissive passive roles of wives of powerful men. The lead female characters often start as poor, innocent, helpless girls that are bound in some way to man, and in time they become engaged, active, experienced, and adventurous characters. They become not only beauties but also beasts, they too are strong and begin to claim their (sexual) desires. When it comes to sexual liberation it often takes killing an authoritative man (or sacrificing their own virginity) to become fully free (a metaphor for killing the patriarchal stereotypes that society imposters on women). Themes of innocence, virginity, sexuality, and death are ongoing motives in the stories. Society idea of female perfection, "good, loyal, and submissive" is a death sentence for female protagonists in the stories. Classic male-female roles are reversed, and we can argue about the idea of masculinity and femininity, as the characters show that to be a complete mature person, you have to be both "masculine" and "feminine" to live an authentic and fulfilled existence. The femininity is tied up with inexperience and purity, and masculinity with experience and corruption.

Sex and sexual desire are the catalysts for the heroine's transformation into a beast. We can discuss the beast component of every character as coming in the touch of deep subconscious driving forces that become more clear and visible to themselves and the world. They had to accept the animal nature in themselves and in each other so that they can be free of the human world with its moral rules and social constructions, and connect to their true self.

The sense of freedom is also crucial in these romantic relationships and the loving, caring and satisfying relationships are advocated, where motives are pure and partners connect to each other’s true bare self. â€Yet even these relationships it acknowledges are a matter of choice; as Puss expresses by saying, "your wives, if you need them," and "your husbands, if you want them." â€�

The subtle display of society’s issue of putting woman against each other is present in "The Snow Child" and "The Werewolf", noting that women are often portrayed as they can coexist only as rivals, in envy and competition for male attention (eye roll).

I would say that some of the stories deeply affected me and it was very atmospheric and haunting read, reminded me of Poe’s stories which I infinitely adore, but some stories were in my opinion much stronger than others and were for me personally lacing some substance. I think she painted a beautiful picture of some aspects of human nature, but maybe not in a wide and deep enough way for my taste. I did some training in psychoanalysis and Freud gave absolutely remarkable knowledge to psychiatry, but I think that pursuit of pleasure and sexual liberation can only be starting points in the journey of psychological and spiritual maturity, not an ending as this book suggests. Even though the stories touch on a pursuit of power (self-psychology), power over oneself and life is often just a consequence of establishing a romantic relationship or losing virginity and that is something I can't agree with. I would be far more interested in the pursuit of meaning and purpose as I think that is an ultimate empowerment for both women and men.

To finish off with hope in Angela Carter’s quote I really admire:

"I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself."
]]>
<![CDATA[Žene koje trče s vukovima : mitovi i priče o arhetipu divlje žene]]> 33818013 C. P. Estes, poznata znanstvenica i jungovska psihoanalitičara u ovoj nam izuzetnoj knjizi koja dvije godine nije silazila s NYT liste bestsellera, predstavlja nju, Divlju ženu, koja čini samu bit ženine instinktivne prirode. Ona se i danas bori za opstanak jer nas društvo svojim nastojanjima da nas "civilizira" i ukalupi u različite krute uloge, od nje otuđuje i zamagljuje duboke, životodajne poruke iz naših duša. U ovoj snažnoj, strasnoj knjizi autorica nas vraća starim, interkulturalnim, arhetipskim pričama poput one o Modrobradome, Vasilisi Premudroj, Zlatokosi, o Djevojčici sa šibicama, ili predivnoj afričkoj priči o Manaweeju - kako bismo kroz njih proniknule naše vlastito ljekovito Divlje ženstvo, neizmjerno mudro i bogato, te kako bismo svladale sva poglavlja pred koja nas život stavlja: ulazak u svijet žena, jedinstvo s Mužjakom, osamljenost i traganje, osjećaj otpadništva, prijateljstvo s vlastitim tijelom, preživljavanje, bijes i praštanje, seksualnost, sklad s vlastitim unutarnjim bićem, njegovanje stvaralačkoga života...]]> 575 Clarissa Pinkola Estés 9532201483 Lea 4
The writing style is more in line with books of popular psychology/self-help books than more “serious� books about analytical psychology, which explain the way was more appealing to the general public than some better quality, more significant books in a similar niche, but sadly, less appealing to me.
I think it is always hard to rate books that cover topics you've already read a fair amount about, in this case, analysis of fairy tales and myths and the path of development of the female psyche. But this book unarguably carries a lot of unique wisdom and gave me greater comprehension from which I will benefit both personally (in reconnecting to parts of self) and professionally (in helping others do the same). Because of that, it deserves a higher rating as I value more the change of perspective than a writing style and literary accomplishment (especially in non-fiction). But if you decide to read this book, be prepared that it is painfully uneven and somewhat repetitive, and would benefit greatly from a good editor.

Folk tales, fairy tales and myths carry deep knowledge and collective wisdom about sex, love, marriage, birth, motherhood, death and transformation.
The strongest analysis I adored were; Bluebeard, Vasalisa the Wise, The Ugly Duckling, The Red Shoes and The Little Match Girl, really worth reading even without reading the whole book.

If you are into the archetypal, creative, cyclic, intuitive, erotic, passionate, authentic, and FEMININE side of life you will certainly enjoy this book.
If you feel depressed, dried out, weak, powerless, silenced, confused, and unexcited about life, you could benefit from this book, as well if you want to nurture, heal or just explore yourself further.

If you liked this book and what to dive deeper in the topics of female development as well interpretation of fairy tales I would recommend: Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine and Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity, for path of female individuation, and The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales and The Interpretation of Fairy Tales for a psychodynamic approach to fairy tales. ]]>
3.50 1992 Žene koje trče s vukovima : mitovi i priče o arhetipu divlje žene
author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
name: Lea
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/08
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, personal-development, psychology-psychotherapy, owned, mythology-fairy-tales-folk-tales, sexuality-eros, short-stories, feminism
review:
Written from the perspective of a Jungian analyst, the book is covering the interpretation of myths, fairy tales, folk tales and stories from different cultures aimed at exploring the Wild Woman archetype of feminine psyche. Pinkola Estés argues that the archetype of the Wild Woman is an essential archetype for a female path of individuation.

The writing style is more in line with books of popular psychology/self-help books than more “serious� books about analytical psychology, which explain the way was more appealing to the general public than some better quality, more significant books in a similar niche, but sadly, less appealing to me.
I think it is always hard to rate books that cover topics you've already read a fair amount about, in this case, analysis of fairy tales and myths and the path of development of the female psyche. But this book unarguably carries a lot of unique wisdom and gave me greater comprehension from which I will benefit both personally (in reconnecting to parts of self) and professionally (in helping others do the same). Because of that, it deserves a higher rating as I value more the change of perspective than a writing style and literary accomplishment (especially in non-fiction). But if you decide to read this book, be prepared that it is painfully uneven and somewhat repetitive, and would benefit greatly from a good editor.

Folk tales, fairy tales and myths carry deep knowledge and collective wisdom about sex, love, marriage, birth, motherhood, death and transformation.
The strongest analysis I adored were; Bluebeard, Vasalisa the Wise, The Ugly Duckling, The Red Shoes and The Little Match Girl, really worth reading even without reading the whole book.

If you are into the archetypal, creative, cyclic, intuitive, erotic, passionate, authentic, and FEMININE side of life you will certainly enjoy this book.
If you feel depressed, dried out, weak, powerless, silenced, confused, and unexcited about life, you could benefit from this book, as well if you want to nurture, heal or just explore yourself further.

If you liked this book and what to dive deeper in the topics of female development as well interpretation of fairy tales I would recommend: Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine and Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity, for path of female individuation, and The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales and The Interpretation of Fairy Tales for a psychodynamic approach to fairy tales.
]]>
<![CDATA[The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living]]> 57432032 288 Hillary McBride 1443465283 Lea 5 4.29 2021 The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living
author: Hillary McBride
name: Lea
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, psychology-psychotherapy, personal-development, feminism, sociology
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems]]> 166177788
“These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence. I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins. My freedom lives in these pages, and I hope that my words can inspire others to take back their happiness and their identity by using their voice to illuminate what’s been buried, but not forgotten, in the darkness,� says Fox.

Pretty Boys Are Poisonous marks the powerful debut from one of the most well-known women of our time. Turn the page, bite the apple, and sink your teeth into the most deliciously compelling and addictive books you’ll read all year.]]>
176 Megan Fox 1668050412 Lea 3 3.71 2023 Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems
author: Megan Fox
name: Lea
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/14
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: poetry, biography, non-fiction, feminism
review:

]]>
Beartown (Beartown, #1) 33413128
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]>
432 Fredrik Backman Lea 5 4.27 2016 Beartown (Beartown, #1)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Lea
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/14
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, recommended, kindle, contemporary, coming-of-age
review:
What a beautiful and well round up coming of age story. Backman is a gifted storyteller, he knows how to convey emotion perfectly. I would even say he is better with emotion than with words (his writing style isn't mindblowing), but I think that the emotion-stirring makes him a such popular writer. He is just a bit melodramatic at times, but that didn't bother me. This book deals with a lot of heavy topics, such as sexual and physical abuse, poverty, addiction, in a very realistic way, that is complex to achieve, not overbearing, and at the same time not shallow. Backman also has a gift of describing simple everydayness - hockey training, going to school, work and family life, engagingly and interestingly. Psychological characterization is done completely through scenes of day-to-day life making this book an embodiment of show, don't tell writers mantra. I was completely immersed in the story and wanted to stay as long as possible in Beartown. Backman does a fascinating job at describing suffering that is inevitable in ordinary life, no matter your age, gender, social class. Through his writing, he describes the difficulties of the bully as well as the bullied, in a well-balanced, empathy-evoking way, without justification or judgment, and you can connect to the story of every single character. That is a quality I always admire in a writer, not to make characters black and white but to take time to show the vulnerable and wounded parts of those who are considered to be villains. It is admirable what a writer approaches issues of gender or social inequality without being blind to the greater picture of all-consuming suffering that is inherent to all humans, no matter the injustice imposed by society. No privilege makes you immune to pain. Great work!
]]>
<![CDATA[The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation (Modern Library Classics)]]> 36959638 From the author of Letters to a Young Poet, one of the greatest letter collections of all time, comes a new selection of the great poet's writings to bereaved friends and acquaintances, reflecting on death and dying, providing comfort in a time of grief.

Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated correspondence, this book collects the poet's best writings on grief and loss in one place for the first time. The result is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives, as well as a compilation of sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence. Following the format of Rilke's classic, Letters to a Young Poet, this volume arranges a series of letters to Rilke's mourning friends, composed into a continuous, uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of Rilke's thoughts on finding meaning and, perhaps, some form of comfort in the process of grieving.]]>
128 Rainer Maria Rilke 0525509844 Lea 5 4.18 2018 The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation (Modern Library Classics)
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Lea
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/29
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: favourites, non-fiction, recommended, kindle, death
review:

]]>
<![CDATA[The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)]]> 38447
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.]]>
311 Margaret Atwood 038549081X Lea 4
This incredibly reductionistic view of women, interestingly and horrifyingly, Atwood did not invent from scratch. The restrictions are not new, but borrowed and merged from the history of different societies, creating a world of Handmaid's tale, too dreadful to think about. The stories of contraception being outlawed in Romania being one of Atwood's inspirations as well as reported fundamentalist sect in New Jersey in which wives were called “handmaidens�. I love what Atwood did in taking that hateful fragments of ideas and showing us where some even commonly encountered reductionistic thoughts can take us when being played out in the real-world to the extreme (“Women should stay in their place�, “Sole purpose of women is to make children�). Playing out ideas on a great scale shows us the true essence of them and exposes their malevolence. That is the purpose of good dystopia, to show us signpost pointing toward disaster and consequences of social and political change, also to remind us of the resilience of humanity.
What do we do what there is no expected progress of civilization, but regression? Restoration is not found in the fantasy of glorified past values that have already been partially discarded or transformed to serve more to the prosperity of the whole society, as there is grave danger in reestablishment of fundamentalist ideology.
What is so frightening in this book, is the retrospective shift from modern society that is liberated and individualized to a society of tyranny where traditional and other religious values are distorted and used for manipulation and destruction of freedom, dignity and life itself.

The rationalization of the created system is also brilliant, as almost no evil is done in this world before being justified and infused with good intentions. The oppression is explained as a form of protecting the women who were exposed to sexual attacks, rape (in Gilead the penalty for rape is painful death by brutal lynch) and the burden of being both businesswomen and mothers. This shows that the true quest for women empowerment is stepping out of the traditional frame of fragility where women have to be protected because institutional protection often means control. As Camille Paglia states; feminism in her time in collage fought against different rules for male and female dormant residents, and was on a quest to set women free of the imposed rules by college, giving them the freedom even to “risk rape�.

As I said in my essay on Eco's Ur-fascism, all fascist and oppressive systems based on inequality repress at the same time both women and men. Men in Gilead are also forced into celibacy, they are not allowed to have pornography, or to estalish relationships with women if they are not of the highest status. There is a reductionistic view on men as they mainly just provide sperm for procreation; pleasure in sexuality is shamed, forbidden and punished for men as well as it is for women.

Also, in every society, there are both some men and women that have more privilege, power and authority. Even in a world where women have no official power there is a well-established power structure among women, and some women are way more powerful than ordinary men (Aunts, Commander's wives). More frighteningly, there is a subculture of women that will perpetuate and stand with and want the system of destructive patriarchy. Aunt Lydia is indeed the cruelest character and her example demonstrates that toxic aspects of patriarchy and symbolical tyrannical Mother really do go hand in hand, as destructive patriarchy is, paradoxically, sometimes more alluring to women than men. Interestingly, there is no individual male character that is cruel and inhumane, only female characters are dangerous and vicious. In feminism, there is often confusion in the identification of destructive principles of patriarchy with masculinity as a whole, acted out in hatred towards innocent individual males. Atwood shows that evil governing principles of society are not meant to and cannot be pin pointed at the individual person of the male gender. As Martin Luther King said, we are fighting against vile ideas and principles, not individuals!

Atwood also cleverly reveals that even being at the top of both male and female hierarchy in the repressive system, means suffering. Tyranny does not bring peace and joy to anybody, and symbolical tyrannical kings and queens often suffer from the same oppression that they impose on others, living in the gloomy internal world of paranoia, torture and persecution of vivid and joyful parts of life. A short glance at truly miserable lives of Hilter and Stalin confirms that. In Handmaid's Tale, the Commanders are the ones who are secretly violating rules they imposed on others (Fred playing scrabble with Offred, keeping prohibited books, and going to forbidden sex clubs), confirming that a drive for sexuality, aliveness, playfulness, connectedness and freedom are indestructible and that rules they are trying to impose are inauthentic and irreconcilable with human experience and therefore doomed, on both personal and collective scales.
That is why in the course of history every system resembling dystopian ones was ultimately destroyed, from the inside or outside, as the pathological system that goes against human nature can not prevail in the long run.

The resilience and heroism of humanity shines and rises even more in the horrors of an oppressive society, as the emphasis on forbidden true values rises for men and women that will not cling to the evil regime, no matter the scope of oppression and constant monitoring. The human spirit ultimately can not be restrained and tamed.
We see that in the character of Moira, and even more in Offred. Offred's empathy stayed consistent through all horrors, in ceremonies of copulating and public executions she was succumbed to, and she retained her eccentricity, individualism and humanity. Offred has no real name, her name Offred is a derivative of the term “of Fred�, which symbolizes her status of male possession. Gilead is a society in which woman loses individuality, uniqueness, dignity, and respect attached to that. Identity is connected to name, and usage of the name Offred is dehumanizing, Offred only being allowed to be identified as a handmaid - a role that wants to falsely substitute for true identity.

But Offred, despite her circumstances, in a society that devalues femininity, nourishes her voice and tells her story from her unique point of view as a woman, and the story flourished in typically feminine values of openness, compassion and sensuality. Her perspective is focused on bodily experiences by cataloging physical sensations and inner emotional responses in relatedness and connectedness to herself, others and the world.

“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future. Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droppings of the flesh, these are signs, these are things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst, and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Each month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transmits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming toward me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again.�

Her capability to connect to observing ego function and see herself through the eyes of others and both describe sensation from within, and see and understand deeper driving motivations of others is one of manifestations of her openness. Sinking into her body opens a space for her that is inaccessible to others, more real than reality, vast, neverending, her own territory. She asserts her existence by telling her story, and her storytelling is her coping mechanism, survival technique, establishing humanity in the culture that keeps denying it.

As in the final chapter of 1984, historical notes at the end assures us that the dystopian regime will eventually be over, but even in the healthier society in which we live, the labyrinths of oppressive principles are never completely dismantled. Let us not take our rights for granted, as freedom is fragile and we have to watch over the ever-rising principles of enslavement and continue to build our resilience.

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.�]]>
4.15 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Lea
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/22
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, kindle, recommended, sci-fi-dystopia, feminism
review:
Atwood created an intriguing post-modernism dystopia describing a tyranny based on convert traditional values and ideas, in a reproductively challenged society called Gilead. Atwood wanted to write from a female point of view and in her dystopian world women are repressed and restricted in their freedom, they can't own property, work for pay, get an education, and they have to do whatever they are told. There is a specific class of women our protagonist Offred is a part of, called Handmaids. Their sole purpose is to reproduce and carry out children for powerful high-class couples, Commanders and their wives, making them basically baby-making sex slaves.

This incredibly reductionistic view of women, interestingly and horrifyingly, Atwood did not invent from scratch. The restrictions are not new, but borrowed and merged from the history of different societies, creating a world of Handmaid's tale, too dreadful to think about. The stories of contraception being outlawed in Romania being one of Atwood's inspirations as well as reported fundamentalist sect in New Jersey in which wives were called “handmaidens�. I love what Atwood did in taking that hateful fragments of ideas and showing us where some even commonly encountered reductionistic thoughts can take us when being played out in the real-world to the extreme (“Women should stay in their place�, “Sole purpose of women is to make children�). Playing out ideas on a great scale shows us the true essence of them and exposes their malevolence. That is the purpose of good dystopia, to show us signpost pointing toward disaster and consequences of social and political change, also to remind us of the resilience of humanity.
What do we do what there is no expected progress of civilization, but regression? Restoration is not found in the fantasy of glorified past values that have already been partially discarded or transformed to serve more to the prosperity of the whole society, as there is grave danger in reestablishment of fundamentalist ideology.
What is so frightening in this book, is the retrospective shift from modern society that is liberated and individualized to a society of tyranny where traditional and other religious values are distorted and used for manipulation and destruction of freedom, dignity and life itself.

The rationalization of the created system is also brilliant, as almost no evil is done in this world before being justified and infused with good intentions. The oppression is explained as a form of protecting the women who were exposed to sexual attacks, rape (in Gilead the penalty for rape is painful death by brutal lynch) and the burden of being both businesswomen and mothers. This shows that the true quest for women empowerment is stepping out of the traditional frame of fragility where women have to be protected because institutional protection often means control. As Camille Paglia states; feminism in her time in collage fought against different rules for male and female dormant residents, and was on a quest to set women free of the imposed rules by college, giving them the freedom even to “risk rape�.

As I said in my essay on Eco's Ur-fascism, all fascist and oppressive systems based on inequality repress at the same time both women and men. Men in Gilead are also forced into celibacy, they are not allowed to have pornography, or to estalish relationships with women if they are not of the highest status. There is a reductionistic view on men as they mainly just provide sperm for procreation; pleasure in sexuality is shamed, forbidden and punished for men as well as it is for women.

Also, in every society, there are both some men and women that have more privilege, power and authority. Even in a world where women have no official power there is a well-established power structure among women, and some women are way more powerful than ordinary men (Aunts, Commander's wives). More frighteningly, there is a subculture of women that will perpetuate and stand with and want the system of destructive patriarchy. Aunt Lydia is indeed the cruelest character and her example demonstrates that toxic aspects of patriarchy and symbolical tyrannical Mother really do go hand in hand, as destructive patriarchy is, paradoxically, sometimes more alluring to women than men. Interestingly, there is no individual male character that is cruel and inhumane, only female characters are dangerous and vicious. In feminism, there is often confusion in the identification of destructive principles of patriarchy with masculinity as a whole, acted out in hatred towards innocent individual males. Atwood shows that evil governing principles of society are not meant to and cannot be pin pointed at the individual person of the male gender. As Martin Luther King said, we are fighting against vile ideas and principles, not individuals!

Atwood also cleverly reveals that even being at the top of both male and female hierarchy in the repressive system, means suffering. Tyranny does not bring peace and joy to anybody, and symbolical tyrannical kings and queens often suffer from the same oppression that they impose on others, living in the gloomy internal world of paranoia, torture and persecution of vivid and joyful parts of life. A short glance at truly miserable lives of Hilter and Stalin confirms that. In Handmaid's Tale, the Commanders are the ones who are secretly violating rules they imposed on others (Fred playing scrabble with Offred, keeping prohibited books, and going to forbidden sex clubs), confirming that a drive for sexuality, aliveness, playfulness, connectedness and freedom are indestructible and that rules they are trying to impose are inauthentic and irreconcilable with human experience and therefore doomed, on both personal and collective scales.
That is why in the course of history every system resembling dystopian ones was ultimately destroyed, from the inside or outside, as the pathological system that goes against human nature can not prevail in the long run.

The resilience and heroism of humanity shines and rises even more in the horrors of an oppressive society, as the emphasis on forbidden true values rises for men and women that will not cling to the evil regime, no matter the scope of oppression and constant monitoring. The human spirit ultimately can not be restrained and tamed.
We see that in the character of Moira, and even more in Offred. Offred's empathy stayed consistent through all horrors, in ceremonies of copulating and public executions she was succumbed to, and she retained her eccentricity, individualism and humanity. Offred has no real name, her name Offred is a derivative of the term “of Fred�, which symbolizes her status of male possession. Gilead is a society in which woman loses individuality, uniqueness, dignity, and respect attached to that. Identity is connected to name, and usage of the name Offred is dehumanizing, Offred only being allowed to be identified as a handmaid - a role that wants to falsely substitute for true identity.

But Offred, despite her circumstances, in a society that devalues femininity, nourishes her voice and tells her story from her unique point of view as a woman, and the story flourished in typically feminine values of openness, compassion and sensuality. Her perspective is focused on bodily experiences by cataloging physical sensations and inner emotional responses in relatedness and connectedness to herself, others and the world.

“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future. Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droppings of the flesh, these are signs, these are things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst, and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Each month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transmits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming toward me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again.�

Her capability to connect to observing ego function and see herself through the eyes of others and both describe sensation from within, and see and understand deeper driving motivations of others is one of manifestations of her openness. Sinking into her body opens a space for her that is inaccessible to others, more real than reality, vast, neverending, her own territory. She asserts her existence by telling her story, and her storytelling is her coping mechanism, survival technique, establishing humanity in the culture that keeps denying it.

As in the final chapter of 1984, historical notes at the end assures us that the dystopian regime will eventually be over, but even in the healthier society in which we live, the labyrinths of oppressive principles are never completely dismantled. Let us not take our rights for granted, as freedom is fragile and we have to watch over the ever-rising principles of enslavement and continue to build our resilience.

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.�
]]>
<![CDATA[The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century]]> 59852733
The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy.

Right? Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book.

Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain.

The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn - where anything goes and only consent matters - are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust.

While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint. This countercultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultraliberal era.]]>
200 Louise Perry 1509549994 Lea 5 4.23 2022 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
author: Louise Perry
name: Lea
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/22
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, politics, sexuality-eros, philosophy, recommended, kindle, feminism
review:

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Oneiricon 199911527
Protagonist ovog provokativnog romana, profesor s Umjetničke akademije i stručnjak za suvremenu konceptualnu umjetnost, gonjen nezadrživim spolnim nagonom siluje svoju studenticu nakon čega se suočava s nizom nepredvidivih, katkad potpuno iracionalnih situacija, kao posljedicama svoje panovske nesposobnosti da se suzdrži. Naslov romana izveden je iz starogrčke riječi óneiros („san�), pa bi se mogao tumačiti kao „sanovnik�, a u tome „sanovniku� u kojemu snovi postaju zbilja a zbilja snovi, sve je moguće�

Svojim novim romanom Omer Rak pokazao je da je jedan od rijetkih pisaca u našoj suvremenoj književnosti koji s lakoćom uspijeva suobličiti fikciju i zbilju, pomiriti kontroverze te spojiti naizgled nespojivo kako bi ostvario zaokruženu čudesnu romanesknu cjelinu trajne vrijednosti.]]>
277 Omer Rak 9535204394 Lea 4 4.00 Oneiricon
author: Omer Rak
name: Lea
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/18
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, fantasy, literary-fiction, mystery-thriller, recommended, croatian, magic-realism, speculative-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement]]> 57411192
Drawing from her psychological expertise and her work as the creator of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, I Had a Miscarriage is a heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and validating book about navigating these liminal spaces and the vitality of truth telling—an urgent reminder of the power of speaking openly and unapologetically about the complexities of our lives.

Jessica Zucker weaves her own experience and other women's stories into a compassionate and compelling exploration of grief as a necessary, nuanced personal and communal process. She inspires her readers to speak their truth and, in turn, to ignite transformative change within themselves and in our culture.]]>
241 Jessica Zucker 1558612890 Lea 4 4.68 2021 I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement
author: Jessica Zucker
name: Lea
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/28
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, biography, psychology-psychotherapy, personal-development, feminism
review:

]]>
My Love Story!!, Vol. 3 24316080 A trip to the mountains means unexpected surprises and adventure for Takeo and Yamato—especially when they get lost! As night falls, will they spend the evening together alone? More importantly, who will be the first one to make a move?!

]]>
191 Kazune Kawahara 1421581884 Lea 4 4.55 2013 My Love Story!!, Vol. 3
author: Kazune Kawahara
name: Lea
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, romance, graphic-novels-comics, ya-childrens, coming-of-age
review:

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<![CDATA[Unexpecting: Real Talk on Pregnancy Loss]]> 58746537 What to Expect When You're No Longer Expecting When your baby dies, you find yourself in a life you never expected. And even though pregnancy and infant loss are common, they're not commonĚýto you. Instead, you feel like a stranger in your own body, surrounded by well-meaning people who often don't know how to support you.What you need during this time is not a book offering easy answers. You need a safe place to help you navigate what comes next, such Ěý· Coping with a postpartum body without a baby in your arms.· Facing social isolation and grief invalidation.· Wrestling with faith when you feel let down by God.· Dealing with the overwhelming process of making everyday decisions.· Learning to move forward after loss.· Creating a legacy for your child.Ěý±ő˛ÔĚýUnexpecting, bereaved mom Rachel Lewis is the friend you never knew you'd need, walking you through the unique grief of baby loss. When nothing about life after loss makes sense .Ěý.Ěý. this book will."The guide that all parents experiencing pregnancy loss need when leaving the hospital grief-stricken, without a baby in their arms."--LINDSEY M. HENKE, founder of Pregnancy After Loss Support]]> 248 Rachel Lewis 1493433350 Lea 5 4.69 Unexpecting: Real Talk on Pregnancy Loss
author: Rachel Lewis
name: Lea
average rating: 4.69
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, kindle, psychology-psychotherapy, faith-spirituality, death
review:

]]>
My Love Story!!, Vol. 1 23952424
Too bad the girls don’t want him! (They want his good-looking best friend, Sunakawa.)

Used to being on the sidelines, Takeo simply stands tall and accepts his fate. But one day when he saves a girl named Yamato from a harasser on the train, his (love!) life suddenly takes an incredible turn!

Takeo can hardly believe it when he crosses paths with Yamato again, and he finds himself falling in love with her... But with handsome Sunakawa around, does Takeo even stand a chance?]]>
177 Kazune Kawahara 1421578395 Lea 5 4.52 2012 My Love Story!!, Vol. 1
author: Kazune Kawahara
name: Lea
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: graphic-novels-comics, fiction, romance, coming-of-age, ya-childrens
review:

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My Love Story!!, Vol. 2 24021232 New at love, Takeo and Yamato excitedly begin their romantic relationship…but between friends who badmouth Takeo and a judo tournament that will separate the two for a month, are they going to survive as a couple beyond the honeymoon stage?

]]>
185 Kazune Kawahara 1421580632 Lea 4 4.52 2012 My Love Story!!, Vol. 2
author: Kazune Kawahara
name: Lea
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: graphic-novels-comics, romance, fiction, coming-of-age, ya-childrens
review:

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<![CDATA[When You're The One Who Cheats: Ten Things You Need To Know]]> 44006737 173 Tammy Nelson 1999481011 Lea 3 4.02 When You're The One Who Cheats: Ten Things You Need To Know
author: Tammy Nelson
name: Lea
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/27
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: kindle, non-fiction, psychology-psychotherapy, personal-development, sexuality-eros
review:

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The Steppenwolf 61089494 Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, "Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other".]]> 227 Hermann Hesse 1324036818 Lea 5 4.13 1927 The Steppenwolf
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Lea
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, owned, literary-fiction, philosophy, psychology-psychotherapy, recommended, favourites, classic
review:

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<![CDATA[Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)]]> 37586799 Alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780007550227
For all editions see here

Betrayed by his family and left for dead, prince Yarvi, reluctant heir to a divided kingdom, has vowed to reclaim a throne he never wanted. But first he must survive cruelty, chains and the bitter waters of the shattered sea itself - all with only one good hand. Born a weakling in the eyes of a hard, cold world, he cannot grip a shield or swing an axe, so has sharpened his mind to a deadly edge. Gathering a strange fellowship of the outcast, he finds they can help him more than any noble could. Even so, Yarvi's path may end as it began - in twists, traps and tragedy.]]>
416 Joe Abercrombie 0007550227 Lea 3 3.93 2014 Half a King (Shattered Sea, #1)
author: Joe Abercrombie
name: Lea
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/26
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fantasy, ya-childrens, coming-of-age, owned
review:

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A Christmas Carol 5326
Introduction and Afterword by Joe Wheeler
To bitter, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas is just another day. But all that changes when the ghost of his long-dead business partner appears, warning Scrooge to change his ways before it's too late.

Part of the Focus on the Family Great Stories collection, this abridged edition features an in-depth introduction and discussion questions by Joe Wheeler to provide greater understanding for today's reader. "A Christmas Carol" captures the heart of the holidays like no other novel.]]>
184 Charles Dickens 1561797464 Lea 5 4.06 1843 A Christmas Carol
author: Charles Dickens
name: Lea
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1843
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/26
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: classic, short-stories, fantasy, kindle
review:

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<![CDATA[The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton]]> 28325334 28 Charles Dickens 152273869X Lea 3 3.26 2009 The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton
author: Charles Dickens
name: Lea
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, kindle, fantasy, magic-realism
review:

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<![CDATA[La Mujer Alta / The Tall Woman]]> 18931764
You instantly understand the context, because the text fragments are only 120 characters long on average. Your reading flow is not interrupted; atmosphere of the original work is preserved.

We offer other innovative bilingual titles. Search for “Doppeltext� to find our books.]]>
50 Pedro Antonio de AlarcĂłn Lea 3 3.18 1882 La Mujer Alta / The Tall Woman
author: Pedro Antonio de AlarcĂłn
name: Lea
average rating: 3.18
book published: 1882
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, short-stories, mystery-thriller, horror, magic-realism, fantasy
review:

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The Signalman 9968921 56 Charles Dickens 0929605926 Lea 2 3.71 1866 The Signalman
author: Charles Dickens
name: Lea
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1866
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, classic, short-stories, kindle, horror, mystery-thriller, magic-realism
review:

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An Injustice Revealed 199296400 Anonymous Lea 2 3.32 -500 An Injustice Revealed
author: Anonymous
name: Lea
average rating: 3.32
book published: -500
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, short-stories, history-historical, magic-realism, death
review:

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Laura 52966200 “They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and drove two sitting hens off their nests, besides running all over the flower beds. You know how devoted he is to his poultry and garden.�
“Anyhow, he needn’t have gone on about it for the entire evening and then have said, â€Let’s say no more about itâ€� just when I was beginning to enjoy the discussion. That’s where one of my petty vindictive revenges came in,â€� added Laura with an unrepentant(...)".]]>
12 Saki Lea 3 short-stories, death 2.75 Laura
author: Saki
name: Lea
average rating: 2.75
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: short-stories, death
review:

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Meant to Be 58932963 368 Emily Giffin 0385689764 Lea 2 3.99 2022 Meant to Be
author: Emily Giffin
name: Lea
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: romance, history-historical, contemporary, owned
review:

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Berlin 50403509
"The magic in Berlin is in the way Lutes conjures, out of old newspapers and photographs, a city so remote from him in time and space... [ Berlin has] an ending so electrifying that I gasped."� New York Times Book Review

During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age . Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism.

Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens―Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters� lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.

The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes� masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.]]>
580 Jason Lutes 1770464069 Lea 4 4.37 2018 Berlin
author: Jason Lutes
name: Lea
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, graphic-novels-comics, history-historical, owned
review:

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A Visitor from Down Under 57937978 L.P. Hartley Lea 2 3.00 1926 A Visitor from Down Under
author: L.P. Hartley
name: Lea
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1926
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, short-stories, mystery-thriller, horror
review:

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<![CDATA[Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It]]> 59250641 A Journey Toward Understanding, Active Treatment, and Societal Prevention of Trauma
Ěý
Imagine, if you will, a disease—one that has only subtle outward symptoms but can hijack your entire body without notice, one that transfers easily between parent and child, one that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to Dr. Paul Conti, this is exactly how society should conceptualize as an out-of-control epidemic with a potentially fatal prognosis.
Ěý
In The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti examines the most recent research, clinical best practices, and dozens of real-life stories to present a deeper and more urgent view of trauma. Not only does Dr. Conti explain how trauma affects the body and mind, he also demonstrates that trauma is transmissible among close family and friends, as well as across generations and within vast demographic groups.
Ěý
With all this in mind, The Invisible Epidemic proposes a course of treatment for the seemingly untreatable. Here, Dr. Conti traces a step-by-step series of concrete changes that we can make both as individuals and as a society to alleviate trauma’s effects and prevent further traumatization in the future.
Ěý
You will The different post-trauma syndromes, how they are classified, and their common symptomsAn examination of how for-profit health care systems can inhibit diagnosis and treatment of traumaHow social crises and political turmoil encourage the spread of group traumaMethods for confronting and managing your fears as they arise in the momentHow trauma disrupts mental processes such as memory, emotional regulation, and logical decision-makingThe argument for a renewed humanist social commitment to mental health and wellness It’s only when we understand how a disease spreads and is sustained that we are able to create its ultimate cure. With The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti reveals that what we once considered a lifelong, unbeatable mental illness is both treatable and preventable.]]>
202 Paul Conti 168364736X Lea 3 4.16 2021 Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It
author: Paul Conti
name: Lea
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: non-fiction, psychiatry, psychology-psychotherapy, kindle
review:

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Axiomatic 13352263 349 Greg Egan 0575105402 Lea 4 4.34 1995 Axiomatic
author: Greg Egan
name: Lea
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, kindle, sci-fi-dystopia, short-stories, speculative-fiction, philosophy
review:

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A Man Called Ove 20492604 here.

At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can't reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d'etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents' Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets.

But isn't it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so?

In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible . . .]]>
353 Fredrik Backman Lea 3 4.50 2012 A Man Called Ove
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Lea
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, contemporary, death, kindle
review:

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<![CDATA[A School Story by M. R. James - Classic Ghost Short Story]]> 31625199 A School Story was first published in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911). Written for the King's College Choir School in or before 1906.]]> 21 M.R. James Lea 2 3.31 1911 A School Story by M. R. James - Classic Ghost Short Story
author: M.R. James
name: Lea
average rating: 3.31
book published: 1911
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/11
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, short-stories, mystery-thriller, magic-realism
review:

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<![CDATA[The Red-Haired Woman (Vintage International)]]> 37508402 From the Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author of Snow and My Name Is Red, a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them.

On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a well digger and his young apprentice--a boy fleeing the confines of his middle class home--are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. But when the boy catches the eye of a stunning red-haired woman who seems as fascinated by him as he is by her, the events that ensue change the young man's life forever and haunt him for the next thirty years. A tale of family and romance, of youth and old age, of tradition and modernity, The Red-Haired Woman is a beguiling mystery from one of the great storytellers of our time.]]>
272 Orhan Pamuk 1101974230 Lea 4 3.74 2016 The Red-Haired Woman (Vintage International)
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Lea
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, owned, literary-fiction, sexuality-eros, psychology-psychotherapy
review:

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The Garden of Forking Paths 36436070 'Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous.'

Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]>
64 Jorge Luis Borges Lea 3 3.89 1941 The Garden of Forking Paths
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Lea
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1941
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, magic-realism, literary-fiction
review:

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Shiloh 162821009 0 Bobbie Ann Mason Lea 3 short-stories, fiction 3.00 1982 Shiloh
author: Bobbie Ann Mason
name: Lea
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: short-stories, fiction
review:

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Miss Brill 25038585 64 Katherine Mansfield 0141398663 Lea 4 3.58 1920 Miss Brill
author: Katherine Mansfield
name: Lea
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1920
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, classic, literary-fiction, audiobook
review:

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Paul's Case 5518954 56 Willa Cather 089598749X Lea 2 3.73 1905 Paul's Case
author: Willa Cather
name: Lea
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1905
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, literary-fiction, coming-of-age, audiobook
review:

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Enoch Soames 50905869 80 Max Beerbohm 8417346732 Lea 4 4.04 1916 Enoch Soames
author: Max Beerbohm
name: Lea
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1916
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/07
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, kindle, fantasy, sci-fi-dystopia, speculative-fiction
review:

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The Egg 61109028 4 Andy Weir Lea 3 3.73 2009 The Egg
author: Andy Weir
name: Lea
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/07
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, sci-fi-dystopia, philosophy, faith-spirituality
review:

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Happy Endings 13250990 3 Margaret Atwood Lea 3 3.96 1983 Happy Endings
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Lea
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, romance, literary-fiction
review:

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Babylon Revisited 10392644 But it hadn't been given for nothing. It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that he would now always remember.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories defined the 1920s 'Jazz Age' generation, with their glittering dreams and tarnished hopes. In these three tales of a fragile recovery, a cut-glass bowl and a life lost, Fitzgerald portrays, in exquisite prose and with deep human sympathy, the idealism of youth and the ravages of success. This book includes Babylon Revisited, The Cut-Glass Bowl and The Lost Decade.]]>
112 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0141195967 Lea 3 3.73 1931 Babylon Revisited
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Lea
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1931
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, classic, short-stories
review:

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<![CDATA[A Little Place off the Edgware Road]]> 52692682 Graham Greene Lea 4 3.30 1939 A Little Place off the Edgware Road
author: Graham Greene
name: Lea
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, horror, classic, literary-fiction
review:

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Importance 193372290 Manuel Mujica Lainez Lea 4 short-stories, fantasy 3.88 Importance
author: Manuel Mujica Lainez
name: Lea
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: short-stories, fantasy
review:

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<![CDATA[The Rocking-Horse Winner (Tale Blazers)]]> 2399018 43 D.H. Lawrence 0895987619 Lea 0 3.36 1926 The Rocking-Horse Winner (Tale Blazers)
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Lea
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1926
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, classic, short-stories, psychology-psychotherapy, audiobook
review:

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The Playground: A Short Story 44436219 From the iconic science fiction author of Fahrenheit 451, a chilling dystopian short story that became a classic episode of TV’s Ray Bradbury Theater.
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The Playground, first published in the hardcover edition of Bradbury’s legendary work Fahrenheit 451, tells the story of Charles Underhill, a widower who must protect his young son, Jim, from the horrors of the playground. Passing the playground on their daily walk brings Charles back the anguish of his own childhood—a nightmare of vulnerability and suffering. He will do anything to spare his sensitive son from the same torment.
Ěý
Charles’s sister, Carol, who has moved in to help raise the young boy, feels differently. The playground, she believes, is preparation for life, and Jim will be more equipped to deal with the rigor and obligation of adult existence by facing it.
Ěý
Paralyzed by his own fear and his sister’s invocation of reason, Charles learns of a way that Jim can be spared the playground. But it will come at a great costĚý.Ěý.Ěý. perhaps more than he can pay.]]>
30 Ray Bradbury 0795339445 Lea 5 3.94 1953 The Playground: A Short Story
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Lea
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, short-stories, fantasy, sci-fi-dystopia, horror
review:

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