en-US Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:25:11 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 84748 310 C.S. Forester J 4 4.15 1950
author: C.S. Forester
name: J
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1950
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves:
review:
While not as witty, humorous, or clever as Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series, Hornblower is undoubtedly its wise old ancestor.
]]> 13530981
Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.

While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory - the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.]]> 336 Alice Munro 0771064861 J 2
Reading other reviews, it seems folks try hard to like her. "She doesn't do anything remarkable," or the something similar is a common refrain. "But her stories are still _____..."

"Mediocre" is the logical answer. Somehow, that answer doesn't seem appropriate. But why?

She won the Nobel Prize for literature.

So did Bob Dylan.

"If dogs run free, then why can't we?"]]> 3.74 2011
author: Alice Munro
name: J
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2020/02/12
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves:
review:
Mediocre stories told in mediocre prose.

Reading other reviews, it seems folks try hard to like her. "She doesn't do anything remarkable," or the something similar is a common refrain. "But her stories are still _____..."

"Mediocre" is the logical answer. Somehow, that answer doesn't seem appropriate. But why?

She won the Nobel Prize for literature.

So did Bob Dylan.

"If dogs run free, then why can't we?"
]]> 37903770 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780393356182

Neil Gaiman, long inspired by ancient mythology in creating the fantastical realms of his fiction, presents a bravura rendition of the Norse gods and their world from their origin though their upheaval in Ragnarok.

In Norse Mythology, Gaiman stays true to the myths in envisioning the major Norse pantheon: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin’s son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki—son of a giant—blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator.

Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that begins with the genesis of the legendary nine worlds and delves into the exploits of deities, dwarfs, and giants. Through Gaiman’s deft and witty prose, these gods emerge with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, making these long-ago myths breathe pungent life again.]]> 301 Neil Gaiman J 0 currently-reading 4.11 2017
author: Neil Gaiman
name: J
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 588138
Myth, according to Campbell, is the projection of a culture's dreams onto a large screen; Campbell's book, like Star Wars, the film it helped inspire, is an exploration of the big-picture moments from the stage that is our world. It is a must-have resource for both experienced students of mythology and the explorer just beginning to approach myth as a source of knowledge.]]> 416 Joseph Campbell 0691017840 J 0 to-read 4.15 1949
author: Joseph Campbell
name: J
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12194
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties. He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent world. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.

Contents:

Lord Jim

Memoirs & Letters:

A Personal Record; or Some Reminiscences

The Mirror of the Sea

Notes on Life & Letters

Biography & Critical Essays:

Joseph Conrad (A Biography) by Hugh Walpole

Joseph Conrad by John Albert Macy

A Conrad Miscellany by John Albert Macy

Joseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf]]> 455 Joseph Conrad 1551111721 J 4
It is a disjointed tale, now quite commonplace, but at the time it was innovative. We learn things secondhand. And one wonders why this Marlow character has taken such a keen interest in Jim.

The first 60% of the novel might make some give up on it. By the time Jim gets to Patusan, things pick up. The caper he pulls on Sherif Ali is a splendid episode. The intrusion of Brown is also handled with precision and zeal.

By the end, it is all worth it.]]> 3.63 1900
author: Joseph Conrad
name: J
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1900
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves:
review:
Lord Jim will make you earn it. It seems to linger too long on unimportant elements of the story. We don't hear much from the narrator. Instead, we hear from Marlowe (the same Marlowe we meet in Heart of Darkness), a friend and benefactor of Jim's. We hear it as Marlowe's crew hears it, because this is a seafaring novel: but without much actual seafaring.

It is a disjointed tale, now quite commonplace, but at the time it was innovative. We learn things secondhand. And one wonders why this Marlow character has taken such a keen interest in Jim.

The first 60% of the novel might make some give up on it. By the time Jim gets to Patusan, things pick up. The caper he pulls on Sherif Ali is a splendid episode. The intrusion of Brown is also handled with precision and zeal.

By the end, it is all worth it.
]]> 11371 Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to "save the nation." Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news.]]> 400 Sinclair Lewis 045121658X J 4
Berzelius Windrip is a shrewd, intelligent, countrified authoritarian.

The book warns us against our fellow citizens: the breathing mouths, conforming bodies, and boot licking tongues of the hoopleheads who glare back at our more thoughtful gazes.

Beware the herd: all too willing to ignore atrocities that do not directly affect them.

The general populace is obsequious, ignorant, weak, and scared. Do not follow their lead.]]> 3.77 1935
author: Sinclair Lewis
name: J
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1935
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/20
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves:
review:
It Can't Happen Here is a more practical, more realistic precursor to Orwell's more popular work, 1984. It is a monition rather than a satire.

Berzelius Windrip is a shrewd, intelligent, countrified authoritarian.

The book warns us against our fellow citizens: the breathing mouths, conforming bodies, and boot licking tongues of the hoopleheads who glare back at our more thoughtful gazes.

Beware the herd: all too willing to ignore atrocities that do not directly affect them.

The general populace is obsequious, ignorant, weak, and scared. Do not follow their lead.
]]> 43763
Louis and Claudia travel Europe, eventually coming to Paris and the ragingly successful Theatre des Vampires--a theatre of vampires pretending to be mortals pretending to be vampires. Here they meet the magnetic and ethereal Armand, who brings them into a whole society of vampires. But Louis and Claudia find that finding others like themselves provides no easy answers and in fact presents dangers they scarcely imagined.

Originally begun as a short story, the book took off as Anne wrote it, spinning the tragic and triumphant life experiences of a soul. As well as the struggles of its characters, Interview captures the political and social changes of two continents. The novel also introduces Lestat, Anne's most enduring character, a heady mixture of attraction and revulsion. The book, full of lush description, centers on the themes of immortality, change, loss, sexuality, and power.
source: annerice.com]]> 346 Anne Rice 0345476875 J 2
Lestat is the only interesting character, and the writing is bad.

I would give a more thorough review deriding this book, but it does not deserve the effort.

The only thing saving it from the lowest of ratings is that they managed to make an okay movie out of the thing.]]> 4.04 1976
author: Anne Rice
name: J
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1976
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
Louis is too lugubrious and whiny. The story makes what should be interesting into an absolute slog.

Lestat is the only interesting character, and the writing is bad.

I would give a more thorough review deriding this book, but it does not deserve the effort.

The only thing saving it from the lowest of ratings is that they managed to make an okay movie out of the thing.
]]> 1704719

Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled and depraved but irresistibly, undeniably real. Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.

With an artistic instinct honed on the works of Flannery O' Connor and Harry Crews, Pollock offers a powerful work of fiction in the classic American vein. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.]]> 206 Donald Ray Pollock 0385523823 J 5
The loose connections and recurring characters add depth to the blunt descriptions.

These stories will repulse. They all smell like a "closet full of bad times." But you'll want to read them.

Pollock's prose is lean and mean. There's a holler just like he writes about. There are hundreds of hollers like it all over Ohio and all over this country; and one can bet they are replicated in the nooks and crannies of great cities and foreign provinces as well.

People can seem quite pathetic, and life can seem cruel; yet there is a little hope and beauty to be found. What else can anyone say?]]> 3.98 2008
author: Donald Ray Pollock
name: J
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2018/05/14
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:
The best American short story collection since Oblivion, a magic that is darker than Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, OH.

The loose connections and recurring characters add depth to the blunt descriptions.

These stories will repulse. They all smell like a "closet full of bad times." But you'll want to read them.

Pollock's prose is lean and mean. There's a holler just like he writes about. There are hundreds of hollers like it all over Ohio and all over this country; and one can bet they are replicated in the nooks and crannies of great cities and foreign provinces as well.

People can seem quite pathetic, and life can seem cruel; yet there is a little hope and beauty to be found. What else can anyone say?
]]> 53597791 Sophie. Meanwhile—after a heated first encounter that nearly comes to a duel—Aubrey and a brilliant but down-on-his-luck physician, Stephen Maturin, strike up an unlikely rapport. On a whim, Aubrey invites Maturin to join his crew as the Sophie’s surgeon. And so begins the legendary friendship that anchors this beloved saga set against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars.


Through every ensuing adventure on which Aubrey and Maturin embark, from the witty parley of their lovers and enemies to the roar of broadsides as great ships close in battle around them, O’Brian “provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises—comic, grim, farcical and tragic.� [A] whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit� (A. S. Byatt).]]> 384 Patrick O'Brian 0393541584 J 5 4.00 1969
author: Patrick O'Brian
name: J
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/21
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
Early 19th century war was loud and brutal, but oh, what a time of adventure! The Age of Sail has never felt so authentic and enjoyable. T'gallants!
]]> 77040 320 C.S. Forester 0316290637 J 0 to-read 4.29 1952
author: C.S. Forester
name: J
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 J 5 favorites
It is both modernist and romantic, nearly as digressive as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: nearly equaling the adventure in a completely different type of classic, The Three Musketeers. It is an encyclopedic epic—some other examples being Ulysses, Foucault’s Pendulum, Infinite Jest, and Gould’s Book of Fish.

Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publishers in the late 1940s and cited Melville as one of the writers he was “still trying to beat.� This he never accomplished. We honor Hemingway’s blue-gill sized yarn, The Old Man and the Sea, but how puny that is when compared to this Whale Tale.

A list of venerable literature that mentions the whale starts things off, like a myth. The whale is the “Salt-Sea Mastodon.�

Much of the book is an ode to the sea. And of course the sea represents so many things, but mainly the unknown.

Even early on, one can tell Moby Dick is one of the rare books seeming to contain the whole world in its finite pages.

But is not long before we find our author rather gloomy: “…this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it…� Even if not without hope: “…man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature…� Nearly all misanthropes were molded first by the unrequited love of their fellow humans. All noble things are touched with some melancholy.

Our narrator, Ishmael, is progressive, philosophical, and inquisitive. Upon meeting Queequeg, a “clean, comely-looking cannibal�, we get these lines: “A man can be honest in any sort of skin,� (Queequeg being covered in tattoos) and, “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,� the idea of judging one another on individual merit, rather than by preconceptions. Melville’s forward-thinking ideas about “savages� align him with Rousseau.

Finally aboard the Pequod and ready to set sail, we find that the harpooner is to the lancer as the squire was to the knight. There is even a bit of The Canterbury Tales in Moby Dick.

Once out of the frigid temperatures of the Atlantic near Nantucket and into agreeable weather, Ishmael displays more of his skilled prosody, “…when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants…�

But the sun does not warm Ahab, who infrequently takes over for Ishmael, either in soliloquy or in thought, and he is a different kind of narrator, character, and man. Monomaniacal is used many times to describe his obsession with the murder of Moby Dick.

Captain Ahab is a monster, a hero, a villain; but perhaps above all, he is a poet, an insightful psychologist. He’s of one mind with Dostoevsky when he says, “This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! Damned in the midst of Paradise!�

There is no way of knowing, but Dostoevsky probably never read Moby Dick, as Melville was not known internationally in his day. In his 1886 novel, Crime and Punishment (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Fyodor writes, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness.�

Melville’s pessimism sometimes seems to come straight from Arthur Schopenhauer; however, we only have proof that he read the German philosopher later in life. Like Rousseau, we can either speculate that Melville was familiar with him before writing Moby Dick or that he came to similar conclusions independently. Like in many of these situations, it was probably a bit of both. We know less about his influences, outside of the Bible and Shakespeare, than we do about whom he’s influenced. James Joyce never mentions reading Melville, but it seems possible that the Irishman came upon the idea for writing a chapter in Ulysses in the form of a play from Moby Dick.

An interesting aside: a night of drinking on the ship sees the sailors and harpooners sing a song, a Napoleonic ballad called, “Spanish Ladies.� This song is also sung in the 1970s movie, Jaws, by the ship captain in that film who leads the attempt to find and kill the man-eating great white shark.

Ishmael has been on ships before, and though he is able to see the wonder in the world, he can also reduce the grandness of global travel to lyrical cynicism: “Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.�

There is an entire section that reads as if Melville had already read a copy of Darwin’s, On the Origin of Species. But that book was published almost a decade later. We are given a surprisingly accurate explanation of the taxonomy of cetaceans, not without its errors but still prescient. It is a satisfying portion where we see that even something as hideous as whaling has taught us much about the world. The baleen of the right whales, Humpbacks, etc, is described as looking rather like Venetian blinds. The amount of oil each whale species can produce is logged as well.

After a literal and rather complex description of the whale lines and their danger, we get this beautiful and poignant metaphor: “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turns of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whaleboat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.�

Despite the quality of the book as a whole, the first description of a successful whale hunt is every bit as gruesome and hard to read as one might imagine. The force that propelled the evolution of certain land mammals into fully aquatic animals, whales, did not account for the coming of man, the building of ships, the mastheads of said ships, and the deadly call of the watch, “There she blows!� The fate of so many creatures sealed by the otherwise ingenious adaptation of the blowhole. For no matter how deep the whale sounds, he must inevitably surface to expel his air, thus perpetually signaling to the death-ship his location. This brings the lowering of the whaleboats, the line of the harpoon, and the sting of the lance.

The killing of the whale is sad and atrocious—blood spouting from the blowhole—necessarily torturous. What humans are able to do, though sometimes amazing, is often horrendous.

The description of “cutting in� the whale is almost as rough as the hunt and the killing. The blubber is rolled off with a line pulled by the windlass—a hook and a couple of spades begin the cut into the dead whale. Sharks must constantly be fended off. This whaling business was truly a rough trade. That was one of Melville’s aims: to show the harshness and the barbarity. But there is always admiration in Ishmael’s descriptions. This is why the measurements and the listing of the different whales are important parts of the book. They show the respect for whaling and the whale that the narrator possesses.

Ishmael often admires the battering ram capabilities and other qualities of the sperm whale. This love he has for the whale, and the compassion he shows for life in general, mitigates some of the horror of the book. The whalemen who hunt sperm whales are at the top of the heap. They think of hunting any other species as an inferior endeavor.

Melville seems to be writing for posterity. There is no way a contemporary human can comprehend the whaling profession of the mid-19th century. At least we have this work to tell us a little about it—the immensity, the danger, the thrill; and despite the wrongness and cruelty in killing such a smart, curious, and gentle creature, a giant dog in the sea, we can tell it took some kind of man to be a whaleman. The kind of danger involved ended with the invention of exploding harpoons. Humans are hard to beat when it comes to destruction. “There is no folly of the beasts of earth that is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.�

Another harrowing whale hunt shows more of Melville’s sardonic, misanthropic disdain. We are not spared any detail, but I will spare the reader here and only say that the maiming and killing of one poor whale was almost too much to bear.

For what is all this murdering? “But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm (fin), and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gray bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.�

Above all books on which to linger, there is Moby Dick—to study cetology, the evolution of whales, to discover arcane words and obscure references. And like all the great books, not all the learning is academic.

Most chapters begin with the goings on of the ship; but after these practicalities are described, we get interesting observations both sorrowful and inspiring. Not only is the chief narrator, Ishmael, full of high-minded thought, but the brief sojourns into the minds of Ahab and Starbuck (the first mate) give us recondite but beautiful language.

The future of whales is pondered. Can they survive the onslaught? Melville thinks a bit too much of both man and the leviathan. He could not foresee the aforementioned exploding harpoons, the endless entanglements caused by discarded fishing lines and nets, collisions with cruise ships—ships of a size that a sailor from the 19th century could never imagine.

The book is tangential, meant to meander. There is no guilt of prolix. So timeless is the work that it is frozen in the infinite.

The narrator knows he must accept the world of whaling for what it is—a nasty business--but one where beauty and awe are found. The birth of a sperm whale is described, and this gives us some needed humaneness.

Ishmael loves the whale, but he must hunt him, help kill him. He must ruminate on things for which there are no answers. He must describe the feelings for which there are no words. The whale is the world and the world is the whale.

Sometimes, a beautiful morning begins a chapter, but we know this is not for long. Blood and death are the order of the day. Ahab says, “Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.�

No matter if the reader comes to enjoy Ishmael’s musings, laugh at Stubb’s humor in the face of danger, admire Queequeg’s sincerity and courage, or take interest in Ahab’s poetic fatalism, the whale is the hero. Any respectable reader must root for Moby Dick to break the planks of every boat. One must hope for the giant flukes to smash the oars, lances, and harpoons to bits. Unlike Jonah, all aboard the Pequod can take the whale’s belly for their cemetery.

But Melville knows exactly how to end his tour de force. His is like all the great misanthropic minds—all those who realize humanity’s overreaching ways are not only harmful to the earth’s other inhabitants but also harmful to humanity. He makes us wish there were a great creature, on land or sea, too massive and powerful for humans to defeat. It might do a lot to temper our arrogance. If only there were beasts we still had to fear, adventures left to take.

In a last bit of irony, it is the coffin fitted for Queequeg and repurposed as a lifeboat that resurfaces at the end of it all to save Ishmael. The sharks won’t bother him at this point; even nature knows that someone must tell this story.]]> 3.53 1851
author: Herman Melville
name: J
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/23
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: favorites
review:
Moby Dick is the Great American Novel. Nothing else from North America can stand with Dante, Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the like. William Faulkner may be the greatest of American authors, but nothing in his vast catalog quite measures up to Herman Melville’s opus. It is cited in various publications that Faulkner named Moby Dick as a book he wished he’d have written.

It is both modernist and romantic, nearly as digressive as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: nearly equaling the adventure in a completely different type of classic, The Three Musketeers. It is an encyclopedic epic—some other examples being Ulysses, Foucault’s Pendulum, Infinite Jest, and Gould’s Book of Fish.

Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publishers in the late 1940s and cited Melville as one of the writers he was “still trying to beat.� This he never accomplished. We honor Hemingway’s blue-gill sized yarn, The Old Man and the Sea, but how puny that is when compared to this Whale Tale.

A list of venerable literature that mentions the whale starts things off, like a myth. The whale is the “Salt-Sea Mastodon.�

Much of the book is an ode to the sea. And of course the sea represents so many things, but mainly the unknown.

Even early on, one can tell Moby Dick is one of the rare books seeming to contain the whole world in its finite pages.

But is not long before we find our author rather gloomy: “…this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it…� Even if not without hope: “…man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature…� Nearly all misanthropes were molded first by the unrequited love of their fellow humans. All noble things are touched with some melancholy.

Our narrator, Ishmael, is progressive, philosophical, and inquisitive. Upon meeting Queequeg, a “clean, comely-looking cannibal�, we get these lines: “A man can be honest in any sort of skin,� (Queequeg being covered in tattoos) and, “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,� the idea of judging one another on individual merit, rather than by preconceptions. Melville’s forward-thinking ideas about “savages� align him with Rousseau.

Finally aboard the Pequod and ready to set sail, we find that the harpooner is to the lancer as the squire was to the knight. There is even a bit of The Canterbury Tales in Moby Dick.

Once out of the frigid temperatures of the Atlantic near Nantucket and into agreeable weather, Ishmael displays more of his skilled prosody, “…when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants…�

But the sun does not warm Ahab, who infrequently takes over for Ishmael, either in soliloquy or in thought, and he is a different kind of narrator, character, and man. Monomaniacal is used many times to describe his obsession with the murder of Moby Dick.

Captain Ahab is a monster, a hero, a villain; but perhaps above all, he is a poet, an insightful psychologist. He’s of one mind with Dostoevsky when he says, “This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! Damned in the midst of Paradise!�

There is no way of knowing, but Dostoevsky probably never read Moby Dick, as Melville was not known internationally in his day. In his 1886 novel, Crime and Punishment (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Fyodor writes, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness.�

Melville’s pessimism sometimes seems to come straight from Arthur Schopenhauer; however, we only have proof that he read the German philosopher later in life. Like Rousseau, we can either speculate that Melville was familiar with him before writing Moby Dick or that he came to similar conclusions independently. Like in many of these situations, it was probably a bit of both. We know less about his influences, outside of the Bible and Shakespeare, than we do about whom he’s influenced. James Joyce never mentions reading Melville, but it seems possible that the Irishman came upon the idea for writing a chapter in Ulysses in the form of a play from Moby Dick.

An interesting aside: a night of drinking on the ship sees the sailors and harpooners sing a song, a Napoleonic ballad called, “Spanish Ladies.� This song is also sung in the 1970s movie, Jaws, by the ship captain in that film who leads the attempt to find and kill the man-eating great white shark.

Ishmael has been on ships before, and though he is able to see the wonder in the world, he can also reduce the grandness of global travel to lyrical cynicism: “Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.�

There is an entire section that reads as if Melville had already read a copy of Darwin’s, On the Origin of Species. But that book was published almost a decade later. We are given a surprisingly accurate explanation of the taxonomy of cetaceans, not without its errors but still prescient. It is a satisfying portion where we see that even something as hideous as whaling has taught us much about the world. The baleen of the right whales, Humpbacks, etc, is described as looking rather like Venetian blinds. The amount of oil each whale species can produce is logged as well.

After a literal and rather complex description of the whale lines and their danger, we get this beautiful and poignant metaphor: “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turns of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whaleboat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.�

Despite the quality of the book as a whole, the first description of a successful whale hunt is every bit as gruesome and hard to read as one might imagine. The force that propelled the evolution of certain land mammals into fully aquatic animals, whales, did not account for the coming of man, the building of ships, the mastheads of said ships, and the deadly call of the watch, “There she blows!� The fate of so many creatures sealed by the otherwise ingenious adaptation of the blowhole. For no matter how deep the whale sounds, he must inevitably surface to expel his air, thus perpetually signaling to the death-ship his location. This brings the lowering of the whaleboats, the line of the harpoon, and the sting of the lance.

The killing of the whale is sad and atrocious—blood spouting from the blowhole—necessarily torturous. What humans are able to do, though sometimes amazing, is often horrendous.

The description of “cutting in� the whale is almost as rough as the hunt and the killing. The blubber is rolled off with a line pulled by the windlass—a hook and a couple of spades begin the cut into the dead whale. Sharks must constantly be fended off. This whaling business was truly a rough trade. That was one of Melville’s aims: to show the harshness and the barbarity. But there is always admiration in Ishmael’s descriptions. This is why the measurements and the listing of the different whales are important parts of the book. They show the respect for whaling and the whale that the narrator possesses.

Ishmael often admires the battering ram capabilities and other qualities of the sperm whale. This love he has for the whale, and the compassion he shows for life in general, mitigates some of the horror of the book. The whalemen who hunt sperm whales are at the top of the heap. They think of hunting any other species as an inferior endeavor.

Melville seems to be writing for posterity. There is no way a contemporary human can comprehend the whaling profession of the mid-19th century. At least we have this work to tell us a little about it—the immensity, the danger, the thrill; and despite the wrongness and cruelty in killing such a smart, curious, and gentle creature, a giant dog in the sea, we can tell it took some kind of man to be a whaleman. The kind of danger involved ended with the invention of exploding harpoons. Humans are hard to beat when it comes to destruction. “There is no folly of the beasts of earth that is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.�

Another harrowing whale hunt shows more of Melville’s sardonic, misanthropic disdain. We are not spared any detail, but I will spare the reader here and only say that the maiming and killing of one poor whale was almost too much to bear.

For what is all this murdering? “But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm (fin), and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gray bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.�

Above all books on which to linger, there is Moby Dick—to study cetology, the evolution of whales, to discover arcane words and obscure references. And like all the great books, not all the learning is academic.

Most chapters begin with the goings on of the ship; but after these practicalities are described, we get interesting observations both sorrowful and inspiring. Not only is the chief narrator, Ishmael, full of high-minded thought, but the brief sojourns into the minds of Ahab and Starbuck (the first mate) give us recondite but beautiful language.

The future of whales is pondered. Can they survive the onslaught? Melville thinks a bit too much of both man and the leviathan. He could not foresee the aforementioned exploding harpoons, the endless entanglements caused by discarded fishing lines and nets, collisions with cruise ships—ships of a size that a sailor from the 19th century could never imagine.

The book is tangential, meant to meander. There is no guilt of prolix. So timeless is the work that it is frozen in the infinite.

The narrator knows he must accept the world of whaling for what it is—a nasty business--but one where beauty and awe are found. The birth of a sperm whale is described, and this gives us some needed humaneness.

Ishmael loves the whale, but he must hunt him, help kill him. He must ruminate on things for which there are no answers. He must describe the feelings for which there are no words. The whale is the world and the world is the whale.

Sometimes, a beautiful morning begins a chapter, but we know this is not for long. Blood and death are the order of the day. Ahab says, “Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.�

No matter if the reader comes to enjoy Ishmael’s musings, laugh at Stubb’s humor in the face of danger, admire Queequeg’s sincerity and courage, or take interest in Ahab’s poetic fatalism, the whale is the hero. Any respectable reader must root for Moby Dick to break the planks of every boat. One must hope for the giant flukes to smash the oars, lances, and harpoons to bits. Unlike Jonah, all aboard the Pequod can take the whale’s belly for their cemetery.

But Melville knows exactly how to end his tour de force. His is like all the great misanthropic minds—all those who realize humanity’s overreaching ways are not only harmful to the earth’s other inhabitants but also harmful to humanity. He makes us wish there were a great creature, on land or sea, too massive and powerful for humans to defeat. It might do a lot to temper our arrogance. If only there were beasts we still had to fear, adventures left to take.

In a last bit of irony, it is the coffin fitted for Queequeg and repurposed as a lifeboat that resurfaces at the end of it all to save Ishmael. The sharks won’t bother him at this point; even nature knows that someone must tell this story.
]]> 70535
So great are the implications of this discovery that for the first time men are sent out deep into our solar system.

But long before their destination is reached, things begin to go horribly, inexplicably wrong...

One of the greatest-selling science fiction novels of our time, this classic book will grip you to the very end.]]> 297 Arthur C. Clarke J 5 favorites 4.17 1968
author: Arthur C. Clarke
name: J
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2003/01/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: favorites
review:
This classic transcends genre and is a first-rate novel, science fiction, or otherwise. From the dawn of humanity to the next step: to something beyond the corporeal, beyond us. The last few pages are mind-bending.
]]> 5974719
In this classic work by the legendary Aldous Huxley - a remarkable true story of religious and sexual obsession considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece - a compelling historical event is clarified and brought to vivid life.]]> 368 Aldous Huxley 0061724912 J 0 to-read 3.84 1952
author: Aldous Huxley
name: J
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51893 Thus Spoke Zarathustra is translated from the German by R.J. Hollingdale in Penguin Classics.

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found in purely human terms, and his doctrine of the Superman and the will to power were all later seized upon and unrecognisably twisted by, among others, Nazi intellectuals. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but in an all-powerful life passionate, chaotic and free.]]> 327 Friedrich Nietzsche J 2 4.10 1883
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: J
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1883
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
This is written in a biblical and archaic style that was seen as inventive at the time. Nietzche's conclusions seem irrational to me, but I'm not into these life-affirming, recovering nihilists.
]]> 20518872 472 Liu Cixin J 0 to-read 4.08 2006
author: Liu Cixin
name: J
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 4799 Cannery Row is a book without much of a plot. Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that introduce us to various denizens of the Row, most of whom are not directly connected with the central story. These vignettes are often characterized by direct or indirect reference to extreme violence: suicides, corpses, and the cruelty of the natural world.

The "story" of Cannery Row follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row.

Sweet Thursday is the sequel to Cannery Row.]]> 181 John Steinbeck 014200068X J 4
Steinbeck had a knack for developing characters effortlessly, though I'd bet he'd have said it took great effort. Doc, Lee Chong, Mac, Dora, and even the dog, Darling, are all well conceived characters.

Doc: the scientist/philosopher. Mac: the slacker with compassion. Hazel: the dimwitted but strong boy who was almost a girl. Dora: the sophisticated, pragmatic, well-dressed madam of the local brothel. The place itself, the row of canneries in Monterey, CA, is a character, like London might be in a Dickens novel.

The plot is not the center of the action. There are some suicides and some sad souls. There is life, and there is beauty and pain. Love doesn't conquer all but makes the suffering less horrific. It's almost the same story in all the great works of literature. Every great writer is trying to aim their own personal microscope at life, yet most keep seeing the same little one-celled organism squirming around, trying to make sense of chaos, trying to brighten the darkest parts of existence with a little love, a little individuality, a little spontaneity, a bit of good cheer. Sometimes, it doesn't work, and sometimes it does. Sometimes, it just "is," and the little amoeba wakes up with a hangover and has to grab a beer first thing in the morning at Lee Chong's grocery.]]> 4.06 1943
author: John Steinbeck
name: J
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/26
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:
Cannery Row is a little like Winesburg, Ohio, the nice collection of connected stories by Sherwood Anderson. Steinbeck's work is not made up of interwoven stories, but the vignettes that form the tale are sort of isolated, and many could stand alone.

Steinbeck had a knack for developing characters effortlessly, though I'd bet he'd have said it took great effort. Doc, Lee Chong, Mac, Dora, and even the dog, Darling, are all well conceived characters.

Doc: the scientist/philosopher. Mac: the slacker with compassion. Hazel: the dimwitted but strong boy who was almost a girl. Dora: the sophisticated, pragmatic, well-dressed madam of the local brothel. The place itself, the row of canneries in Monterey, CA, is a character, like London might be in a Dickens novel.

The plot is not the center of the action. There are some suicides and some sad souls. There is life, and there is beauty and pain. Love doesn't conquer all but makes the suffering less horrific. It's almost the same story in all the great works of literature. Every great writer is trying to aim their own personal microscope at life, yet most keep seeing the same little one-celled organism squirming around, trying to make sense of chaos, trying to brighten the darkest parts of existence with a little love, a little individuality, a little spontaneity, a bit of good cheer. Sometimes, it doesn't work, and sometimes it does. Sometimes, it just "is," and the little amoeba wakes up with a hangover and has to grab a beer first thing in the morning at Lee Chong's grocery.
]]> 1639642 This is an alt. cover ed. for ISBN 0140185852.

Before Brave New World...
Before 1984...There was...

WE

In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.

One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space...and that disease the ancients called the soul.

A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.]]> 256 Yevgeny Zamyatin J 4
Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 novel is written in somewhat stilted but engaging prose. That doesn't do it justice... The use of ellipses is prevalent. Lines like "Neither mathematics nor death ever makes a mistake," and "True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics," are rather startling when you come to them.

As with most novels about the future, the main character seems strangely focused on persons living in the old days, which happened to be when the author lived, in this case, the 1910-20s.

Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is breaking away from the "We" and becoming an individual. Individualism is not something fostered in a world of no names, only numbers.

Zamyatin helped Orwell develop "doublespeak" in this novel. Freedom is a bad word in "We." Freedom equals crime.

A well known book among the numbers in One State (the name given to the society of numbered humans and its officials) is thought of as an immortal tragedy and is entitled, "He Who was Late to Work." This gives an idea of the mundane and tragically boring society these numbers inhabit.

Zamyatin refers to eyes as windows and eyelids as blinds or curtains. He describes the wind as flapping its dark wings in the night. It is not flowery prose, but a strange beauty is prevalent. Much is suggested. Nothing is over-explained. I would name Ken Kesey his American counterpart.

Written in journal form and segmented into short entries, "We" can be read quickly; but it does not lack profundity. Along with Brave New World and 1984, it is a supreme exemplar of dystopian fiction.]]> 3.78 1924
author: Yevgeny Zamyatin
name: J
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1924
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/27
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:
It is rather amusing to read George Orwell's review of this book. He is quick to point out that it is not a book of the first order; but Orwell is wrong. And even though he had this and Brave New World to use as models, 1984 is not quite as good as either. This is not to say that 1984 is bad. But compared to "We," it is, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, rather wooden, the conclusion obvious, and not nearly as prescient. Animal Farm is an earlier and better work by Orwell.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 novel is written in somewhat stilted but engaging prose. That doesn't do it justice... The use of ellipses is prevalent. Lines like "Neither mathematics nor death ever makes a mistake," and "True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics," are rather startling when you come to them.

As with most novels about the future, the main character seems strangely focused on persons living in the old days, which happened to be when the author lived, in this case, the 1910-20s.

Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is breaking away from the "We" and becoming an individual. Individualism is not something fostered in a world of no names, only numbers.

Zamyatin helped Orwell develop "doublespeak" in this novel. Freedom is a bad word in "We." Freedom equals crime.

A well known book among the numbers in One State (the name given to the society of numbered humans and its officials) is thought of as an immortal tragedy and is entitled, "He Who was Late to Work." This gives an idea of the mundane and tragically boring society these numbers inhabit.

Zamyatin refers to eyes as windows and eyelids as blinds or curtains. He describes the wind as flapping its dark wings in the night. It is not flowery prose, but a strange beauty is prevalent. Much is suggested. Nothing is over-explained. I would name Ken Kesey his American counterpart.

Written in journal form and segmented into short entries, "We" can be read quickly; but it does not lack profundity. Along with Brave New World and 1984, it is a supreme exemplar of dystopian fiction.
]]> 18488 324 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 0743487583 J 3
It is not, in the least, scary. It is not to be placed in the horror section. The scenes one anticipates to be horrific or startling, for the fame of the book means that even a first time reader will have many preconceptions, are actually mundane or, at best, cerebral.

It is akin to Wells' Island of Dr Moreau or the much more recent Jurassic Park from Crichton. It is not like Poe or the ghost stories of antiquity. It's about how humans do things to see if they can, rather than because they should.

Modern readers may find much of it boring. There are parts that devolve into contests between the creator and his monster to decide who is more miserable. The ending is anticlimactic. Still, the writing is solid, and it deserves high praise for its originality.]]> 3.84 1818
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: J
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1818
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/01
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves:
review:
This is a philosophical novel: venerable for when it was written and its influence, astonishing that the author, Mary Shelley, was so young.

It is not, in the least, scary. It is not to be placed in the horror section. The scenes one anticipates to be horrific or startling, for the fame of the book means that even a first time reader will have many preconceptions, are actually mundane or, at best, cerebral.

It is akin to Wells' Island of Dr Moreau or the much more recent Jurassic Park from Crichton. It is not like Poe or the ghost stories of antiquity. It's about how humans do things to see if they can, rather than because they should.

Modern readers may find much of it boring. There are parts that devolve into contests between the creator and his monster to decide who is more miserable. The ending is anticlimactic. Still, the writing is solid, and it deserves high praise for its originality.
]]> 4796
Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty that today ranks it alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This edition features an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.]]> 291 John Steinbeck 0143039482 J 0 to-read 4.01 1961
author: John Steinbeck
name: J
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218569912 This is a book about languages, what languages can and what they cannot do.

Speaking in Tongues is a brilliant treatise from Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee in collaboration with leading international translator Mariana Dimópulous. Presented as a dialogue, Coetzee and Dimópulous’s provocative work digs into questions that have plagued writers for centuries. They invite readers to grapple with the idea that language is actually culture’s unique reflection into words. The difference between cultures, and in turn langauges, leads to the almost impossible task of the to liberate the language imprisoned in a text and instill it into her recreation of that work.

Along the journey, the authors also delve into topics such as which languages are gendered, the threat of monolingualism, and the possibility that mathematics could tell the truth about everything in the universe. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin’s seminal The Task of the Translator, Speaking in Tongues, with its wide range of observations and propositions, emerges as a work of philosophy on its own, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.]]> 144 J.M. Coetzee 1324096454 J 0 to-read 4.62
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: J
average rating: 4.62
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25167837 'They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.' A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration.]]> Katherine Mansfield J 4 3.70 1921
author: Katherine Mansfield
name: J
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1921
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 21727 417 Scott Smith 0307279952 J 0 to-read 3.91 1993
author: Scott Smith
name: J
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy J 5 favorites
If prose were a weapon, McCarthy's would be an ideal melee instrument meant to inflict blunt force trauma. The violence hardly flags long enough for the author, perhaps an amateur botanist, to describe the scenery in minute detail, including common and rare desert and mountain flora and the fauna used for transportation, food, shelter, clothing, etc, as well as abused, burned, killed; and whose corpses lie in the desert while wind and sand reduce all to bones which are too collected and used. All life is used up.

The veracity of the novel's events in regards to the actions of the real Glanton Gang is not important. The legend and real events serve as a vehicle for McCarthy to display the darkest, cruelest, most malicious side of human nature. The reader can feel the crew grow colder, more steely in its murderous endeavors, until most of the men can kill with inhuman apathy and nonchalance, even when dealing with children.

A more horrific representation of human atrociousness may not exist in print. Though it is a work of fiction, we all know it is as true as any book of its caliber. The world of humanity is already finished. It's been over for some time. We are witness to our part of the Great Decline.

The judge, the character most interesting and symbolic, represents the spirit of war inside of our species: in the DNA, the heart. We are the most violent animals. We will fight, always. In the battlefield and in the courtroom, with knives and muskets, with attorneys and loopholes; and worse, with bombs and chemicals.

We were made to rip one another apart in one way or another. Something bloodthirsty lives inside each of us, and someone has to tell us about it, whether we like it or not.]]> 4.18 1985
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: J
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2016/04/24
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: favorites
review:
McCarthy's masterpiece--sparse, profound, gruesome, and dazzling. Some books encourage aspiring writers because the writing appears emulative. A minority of books, like Blood Meridian, encourage because their inimitability inspires, provokes one's own quest for originality, shows that it is possible and what it is like.

If prose were a weapon, McCarthy's would be an ideal melee instrument meant to inflict blunt force trauma. The violence hardly flags long enough for the author, perhaps an amateur botanist, to describe the scenery in minute detail, including common and rare desert and mountain flora and the fauna used for transportation, food, shelter, clothing, etc, as well as abused, burned, killed; and whose corpses lie in the desert while wind and sand reduce all to bones which are too collected and used. All life is used up.

The veracity of the novel's events in regards to the actions of the real Glanton Gang is not important. The legend and real events serve as a vehicle for McCarthy to display the darkest, cruelest, most malicious side of human nature. The reader can feel the crew grow colder, more steely in its murderous endeavors, until most of the men can kill with inhuman apathy and nonchalance, even when dealing with children.

A more horrific representation of human atrociousness may not exist in print. Though it is a work of fiction, we all know it is as true as any book of its caliber. The world of humanity is already finished. It's been over for some time. We are witness to our part of the Great Decline.

The judge, the character most interesting and symbolic, represents the spirit of war inside of our species: in the DNA, the heart. We are the most violent animals. We will fight, always. In the battlefield and in the courtroom, with knives and muskets, with attorneys and loopholes; and worse, with bombs and chemicals.

We were made to rip one another apart in one way or another. Something bloodthirsty lives inside each of us, and someone has to tell us about it, whether we like it or not.
]]> 4900
A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.]]> 188 Joseph Conrad 1892295490 J 5 3.43 1899
author: Joseph Conrad
name: J
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1899
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves:
review:
A nice parody of the classic film Apocalypse Now.
]]> 22060860
Fans of Nietzsche and E.M. Cioran will devour this text greedily. A short essay, but hits hard, leaving a lasting impact.

Enjoy!]]> 20 Peter Wessel Zapffe J 4
Especially insightful are Zappfe's four defense mechanisms humans use to protect themselves from the doom of existence: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation.]]> 4.32 1933
author: Peter Wessel Zapffe
name: J
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves:
review:
This profound work is a noble attempt to condense Schopenhauer's philosophy into a fairly short essay.

Especially insightful are Zappfe's four defense mechanisms humans use to protect themselves from the doom of existence: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation.
]]> 243705 283 John Fowles J 0 to-read 3.97 1963
author: John Fowles
name: J
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 469571 302 Cormac McCarthy 0679744398 J 3
The novel is not on par with The Road, No Country For Old Men, or, and especially, Blood Meridian. Perhaps value is gained after reading the entire Border Trilogy.]]> 4.04 1992
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: J
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2013/06/17
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves:
review:
From most authors, this would be considered a great novel. There are great parts. From McCarthy, one of the best American authors, this feels sort of like a typical romance with typical Western themes. It's not a prime delivery for such a supremely talented writer.

The novel is not on par with The Road, No Country For Old Men, or, and especially, Blood Meridian. Perhaps value is gained after reading the entire Border Trilogy.
]]> 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 J 4
The prose is appealing because it is very descriptive in a detached manner. I've heard it described as perpetually modern, and this is an accurate observation. It's a bit like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, only with a sense of humor, maybe because it's fiction.

If Hemingway included gore and porn you might have something like Brett Easton Ellis. If Hunter S. Thompson tried to write A Clockwork Orange, it might turn out something like this novel.

The novel is about a lot of things, and there's much symbolism. The question of whether the murders actually take place is not that important.

The characters surrounding Patrick Bateman, even though they aren't killing people, are still just as shallow and materialistic and empty and greedy as he is.

And if he truly is doing the things described in the novel, he gets away with them because he's tall, rich, and good-looking; and the women he preys upon are shallow enough to believe this makes him good.

His male friends are shallow and greedy enough to think he is normal. The book is a mirror for us all. We are one superficial and materialistic society.

And so it boils down to the fact that Brett Easton Ellis writes in an interesting way, and maybe his style and esthetic carry the book.

Maybe all writing boils down to that. Nevertheless, it is strange that such a repulsive book can be so good.]]> 3.82 1991
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: J
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:
What makes this good? It's brutal, disturbing, sometimes revolting; so why does anyone like it?

The prose is appealing because it is very descriptive in a detached manner. I've heard it described as perpetually modern, and this is an accurate observation. It's a bit like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, only with a sense of humor, maybe because it's fiction.

If Hemingway included gore and porn you might have something like Brett Easton Ellis. If Hunter S. Thompson tried to write A Clockwork Orange, it might turn out something like this novel.

The novel is about a lot of things, and there's much symbolism. The question of whether the murders actually take place is not that important.

The characters surrounding Patrick Bateman, even though they aren't killing people, are still just as shallow and materialistic and empty and greedy as he is.

And if he truly is doing the things described in the novel, he gets away with them because he's tall, rich, and good-looking; and the women he preys upon are shallow enough to believe this makes him good.

His male friends are shallow and greedy enough to think he is normal. The book is a mirror for us all. We are one superficial and materialistic society.

And so it boils down to the fact that Brett Easton Ellis writes in an interesting way, and maybe his style and esthetic carry the book.

Maybe all writing boils down to that. Nevertheless, it is strange that such a repulsive book can be so good.
]]> 286957
In a private journal, the woman records her growing obsession with the “horrid� wallpaper. Its strange pattern mutates in the moonlight, revealing what appears to be a human figure in the design. With nothing else to occupy her mind, the woman resolves to unlock the mystery of the wallpaper. Her quest, however, leads not to the truth, but into the darkest depths of madness.

A condemnation of the patriarchy, The Yellow Wallpaper explores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.

First published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

Excerpt:
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.]]> 62 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1558611584 J 3 4.11 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: J
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1892
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
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review:

]]> 485894 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0553213695 / 9780553213690

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes."

With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."]]> 201 Franz Kafka 0553213695 J 5 favorites 3.90 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: J
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: favorites
review:
All of humanity is a wriggling bug stuck on its back.
]]> 12361530 32 Franz Kafka J 3 3.59 1913
author: Franz Kafka
name: J
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1913
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:
An early story from an absurdist of the first order. Camus wishes he could fill a reader with unease and dread in so few pages.
]]> 591189 22 D.H. Lawrence 1860920071 J 5 3.84 1926
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: J
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1926
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves:
review:
A very imaginative and brilliant short story!
]]> 766869 288 Edgar Allan Poe 0140437487 J 4 3.47 1838
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: J
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1838
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 11741501
Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle; the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago.

Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive note of threat.

But behind the house and away from the road: that was safe. Just a carefully clear path up into the woods where generations of local children have processed with the solemn innocence of the young, taking with them their dear departed pets for burial.

A sad place maybe, but safe. Surely a safe place. Not a place to seep into your dreams, to wake you, sweating with fear and foreboding...]]> 424 Stephen King J 2
The parts left out were not missed in the film. King wrote the screenplay and should take a lesson from it in regards to his novels.]]> 4.09 1983
author: Stephen King
name: J
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1983
rating: 2
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:
Once again, King's book is not as good as the film (I know I am in the minority here for sure). I think King is the luckiest author in the world. Kubrick took his mediocre book, The Shining, and made a film masterpiece. Since then, every director thinks they can grab a King novel and hit it big, and they're mostly right, and I'm afraid they mostly improve his books.

The parts left out were not missed in the film. King wrote the screenplay and should take a lesson from it in regards to his novels.
]]> 32418 564 Thomas Harris J 4
The novel is on par with its predecessors. Much of it takes place in Italy and deals with Renaissance and Medieval art and history. This is a nice touch.

Hannibal is a sophisticated cannibal.

The late, great Hannibal Lector, my friends...

Now he dances on the small screen, too. Fire up the burners for the copper fait-tout saucepan, and gobble down the truffled pate de foie gras. Take a sip from the bottle of St. Estephe.

Enjoy him in all his flavors.]]> 3.82 1999
author: Thomas Harris
name: J
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves:
review:
I'll have to re-watch the film. I remember not liking it, or at least feeling let down in relation to The Silence of the Lambs.

The novel is on par with its predecessors. Much of it takes place in Italy and deals with Renaissance and Medieval art and history. This is a nice touch.

Hannibal is a sophisticated cannibal.

The late, great Hannibal Lector, my friends...

Now he dances on the small screen, too. Fire up the burners for the copper fait-tout saucepan, and gobble down the truffled pate de foie gras. Take a sip from the bottle of St. Estephe.

Enjoy him in all his flavors.
]]> 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X J 2
The writing at first seemed stellar, but the low ceiling of the prose became apparent and was never broken.

The message is too obtuse, too one-trick.

I stopped reading about halfway through and could not care any less about how the disparate narratives come together.

After a couple of chapters, I thought there might be some sort of strange combination of McCarthy and Steinbeck, a kind of primitive magic to the book, but it turned out more like the worst of Upton Sinclair mixed with the consistently bad John Irving.]]> 4.10 2018
author: Richard Powers
name: J
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves:
review:
A promising beginning precipitously devolved into an unreadable waste of time. I learned some cool facts about trees. That's where the superlatives end.

The writing at first seemed stellar, but the low ceiling of the prose became apparent and was never broken.

The message is too obtuse, too one-trick.

I stopped reading about halfway through and could not care any less about how the disparate narratives come together.

After a couple of chapters, I thought there might be some sort of strange combination of McCarthy and Steinbeck, a kind of primitive magic to the book, but it turned out more like the worst of Upton Sinclair mixed with the consistently bad John Irving.
]]> 18245613 301 William Gay 1849821003 J 0 to-read 4.12 1999
author: William Gay
name: J
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 11989
It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.

The book tells a gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.]]> 308 Albert Camus J 3 4.05 1947
author: Albert Camus
name: J
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1947
rating: 3
read at: 2014/01/21
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:
An efficient novel that sometimes borders on dullness: yet by the last 1/3 of it, all the underlying meanings, the symbolism, become evident. All the while, Camus is describing the city during the epidemic, and he is also describing everyday life for every person. Whether we are battling a pestilence or simply living, trying to avoid pain and ennui, it is an endless battle that will not end in victory.
]]> 85386 Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.]]> 325 John Updike 0449911659 J 3 3.58 1960
author: John Updike
name: J
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1960
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 214579
Father Jared Osborne has received an extraordinary assignment from his superiors: Investigate an itinerant preacher stirring up deep trouble in central Europe. His followers all him B, but his enemies say he’s something else: the Antichrist. However, the man Osborne tracks across a landscape of bars, cabarets, and seedy meeting halls is no blasphemous monster—though an earlier era would undoubtedly have rushed him to the burning stake. For B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes, opening up a spiritual direction for humanity that would have been unimaginable to any of the prophets or saviors of traditional religion. Pressed by his superiors for a judgment, Osborne is driven to penetrate B’s inner circle, where he soon finds himself an anguished collaborator in the dismantling of his own religious foundations. More than a masterful novel of adventure and suspense, The Story of B is a rich source of compelling ideas from an author who challenges us to rethink our most cherished beliefs.]]> 352 Daniel Quinn 0553379011 J 4
What can be done? Nothing. Sit back and watch the dying circus.]]> 4.14 1996
author: Daniel Quinn
name: J
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2012/01/01
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:
A provocative premise: civilization itself is the problem. Food under lock and key. Quinn is the descendant of the great Rousseau, less poetic but more practical.

What can be done? Nothing. Sit back and watch the dying circus.
]]> 5472 This edition features George Orwell’s best-known novels�1984 and Animal Farm—with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organisation called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

Animal Farm is Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution - an account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm into Animal Farm - a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. But are they? AUTHOR: George Orwell (1903-1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was the author of six novels as well as numerous essays and nonfiction works.]]> 400 George Orwell J 4 4.29 1949
author: George Orwell
name: J
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 56577 416 Harold Robbins 076534050X J 2
Update: Several years after reading this, I discovered that it was not completely written by Robbins. This novel was completed after his death.

I became interested in the author because he is mentioned in the Squeeze song, "Pulling Mussels."]]> 3.45 2001
author: Harold Robbins
name: J
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:
Harrold Robbins is one of the best-selling authors of all time. This one isn't good. The book is a series of pointless events told in mundane fashion. Was he only selling paper?

Update: Several years after reading this, I discovered that it was not completely written by Robbins. This novel was completed after his death.

I became interested in the author because he is mentioned in the Squeeze song, "Pulling Mussels."
]]> 25330133 180 Brian Evenson 1566894166 J 0 to-read 3.89 2009
author: Brian Evenson
name: J
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 636226 212 Anna Kavan 0720611237 J 0 to-read 4.04 1940
author: Anna Kavan
name: J
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 48588075 For your 2009 Hugo Award
"Best Short Story" consideration
Ted Chiang’s "Exhalation"

As Published in

Eclipse Two:
New Science Fiction and Fantasy

Edited by Jonathan Strahan]]> 32 Ted Chiang J 4 4.24
author: Ted Chiang
name: J
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 26114269 208 Maryse Meijer 0374536066 J 0 to-read 3.74 2016
author: Maryse Meijer
name: J
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204779
In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms.

The story follows many traditions of Gothic fiction and is often analyzed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading. Many different interpretations have been presented, as well as attempts to identify the true nature of the titular disease.

Librarian's note: this entry relates to the story "The Masque of the Red Death." Collections of short stories by the author can be found elsewhere on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ.]]> 129 Edgar Allan Poe 1594567395 J 5 4.09 1842
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: J
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1842
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 528048
These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ( The Soul Is Not a Smithy ). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ( The Suffering Channel ). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ( Oblivion ).

Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.]]> 329 David Foster Wallace 0316919810 J 5 favorites 3.96 2004
author: David Foster Wallace
name: J
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2016/01/17
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> 4677970 287 John MacKinnon 0030176263 J 0 to-read 3.79 1978
author: John MacKinnon
name: J
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28877 454 Thomas Harris J 4
In this novel, Will Graham and the Tooth Fairy (The Great Red Dragon) are adversaries and the two main characters. Graham is not your typical, hard-boiled homicide detective. The author allows us in on his insecurity, his confusion, and his fear. He doesn't spit one-liners in tense moments. He seems like a real person in an unreal vocation.

Stephen King said of Red Dragon: "The Best Popular Novel to be Published in America Since The Godfather." High praise. Books are sometimes considered either literary and high-brow or entertaining and non-literary. These two books share the ability to entertain, but the writing does not disappoint.

Thomas Harris has a nice, clean style. He doesn't get in the way of the action, and he doesn't make his characters too slick.

Though Dr. Lecter only gets a few lines in a few scenes, his shadow is omnipresent, while Jack Crawford and Will Graham are on the Dragon's tail. Reba and Molly give the book a couple of strong female leads as well. Highly recommended.]]> 4.07 1981
author: Thomas Harris
name: J
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/20
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
review:
Hannibal Lecter is noteworthy but not a major character in Red Dragon. The 1986 film, Manhunter, featured the erudite killer a bit more; but it was not until Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning portrayal in The Silence of the Lambs film that Hannibal became the most famous fictional cannibal since Queequeg from the Pequod.

In this novel, Will Graham and the Tooth Fairy (The Great Red Dragon) are adversaries and the two main characters. Graham is not your typical, hard-boiled homicide detective. The author allows us in on his insecurity, his confusion, and his fear. He doesn't spit one-liners in tense moments. He seems like a real person in an unreal vocation.

Stephen King said of Red Dragon: "The Best Popular Novel to be Published in America Since The Godfather." High praise. Books are sometimes considered either literary and high-brow or entertaining and non-literary. These two books share the ability to entertain, but the writing does not disappoint.

Thomas Harris has a nice, clean style. He doesn't get in the way of the action, and he doesn't make his characters too slick.

Though Dr. Lecter only gets a few lines in a few scenes, his shadow is omnipresent, while Jack Crawford and Will Graham are on the Dragon's tail. Reba and Molly give the book a couple of strong female leads as well. Highly recommended.
]]> 343 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.]]> 263 Patrick Süskind J 5 favorites 4.05 1985
author: Patrick SĂĽskind
name: J
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: favorites
review:
This guy writes beautifully about vile things.
]]> 846122 Meno (/�mi�noʊ/; Greek: Μένων, Menōn) is a Socratic dialogue by Plato. In it, Socrates tries to determine the definition of virtue, or rather arete, meaning virtue in general, rather than particular virtues, such as justice or temperance. The first part of the work is written in the Socratic dialectical style, and depicts Meno as being reduced to confusion or aporia. In response to Meno's paradox (or the learner's paradox), however, Socrates introduces positive ideas: the immortality of the soul, the theory of knowledge as a recollection (anamnesis), which Socrates demonstrates by posing a mathematical puzzle to one of Meno's slaves, the method of hypothesis, and, in the final lines, the distinction between knowledge and true belief.]]> 33 Plato 0915144247 J 3 3.94 -386
author: Plato
name: J
average rating: 3.94
book published: -386
rating: 3
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
review:
Eno, Meno, Mino, Moe. When did I read this? I don't know!
]]> 14935 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141439662

'The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!'

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love—and its threatened loss—the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.

This edition includes explanatory notes, textual variants between the first and second editions, and Tony Tanner's introduction to the original Penguin Classic edition.]]> 409 Jane Austen 0141439661 J 2
Judgment shall be reserved on Jane Austen’s overall writing, as this was her first full-fledged attempt. Pride and Prejudice is considered a better book by critics and readers alike.

The age of the work must also be taken into account. Austen wrote in the first part of the 19th century, and the middle to the back half of that century was when the novel as a piece of art truly came into form.

But there is no getting around it; this book is dull. The characters are dull, the plot is inconsequential, and the writing feels clumsy. Run-of-the-mill descriptions are too wordy, overdone. Nothing is succinct.

Marriane and Elinor Dashwood are a couple of hoity toity sisters: punctilious, officious, and…boring. The only characters with any personality, Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings are not reserved or mannerly enough for the Dashwoods.

Willoughby and Marriane’s unsensual connection is unremarkable. Elinor’s wet blanket approach to everything puts an end to any hope for an engaging narrative. Each character suspiciously speaks and sounds like the narrator and one another. The romance is muted. The action is less than meager.

The obligatory ending does nothing to lift things from the doldrums. Everything comes out a little too, just so...

There is a quote regarding the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian, which goes something like this: He is Jane Austen at sea.

Sense and Sensibility contains none of the humor and wit of the seafaring novels in the Aubrey-Maturin series; and as far as action? This is sitting on a tuffet, while O’Brian is Odysseus himself.]]> 4.10 1811
author: Jane Austen
name: J
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1811
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
Boring is a word to avoid when describing a poor novel. Tedious is more acceptable. Whatever word you would like to use, Sense and Sensibility is a real drag to finish.

Judgment shall be reserved on Jane Austen’s overall writing, as this was her first full-fledged attempt. Pride and Prejudice is considered a better book by critics and readers alike.

The age of the work must also be taken into account. Austen wrote in the first part of the 19th century, and the middle to the back half of that century was when the novel as a piece of art truly came into form.

But there is no getting around it; this book is dull. The characters are dull, the plot is inconsequential, and the writing feels clumsy. Run-of-the-mill descriptions are too wordy, overdone. Nothing is succinct.

Marriane and Elinor Dashwood are a couple of hoity toity sisters: punctilious, officious, and…boring. The only characters with any personality, Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings are not reserved or mannerly enough for the Dashwoods.

Willoughby and Marriane’s unsensual connection is unremarkable. Elinor’s wet blanket approach to everything puts an end to any hope for an engaging narrative. Each character suspiciously speaks and sounds like the narrator and one another. The romance is muted. The action is less than meager.

The obligatory ending does nothing to lift things from the doldrums. Everything comes out a little too, just so...

There is a quote regarding the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian, which goes something like this: He is Jane Austen at sea.

Sense and Sensibility contains none of the humor and wit of the seafaring novels in the Aubrey-Maturin series; and as far as action? This is sitting on a tuffet, while O’Brian is Odysseus himself.
]]> 6759
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1088 David Foster Wallace J 5 favorites
The author goes to great lengths to describe the buildings (all tending to look like something from human anatomy) and serpentine tunnels that surround the tennis academy; even MIT's radio station gets a brain-like roof. Boston is described in great detail, reminding one of Joyce's lyrical sojourns in Dublin.

Hal, Orin, and Mario Incandenza, as well as Don Gately, all stand in, at least a bit, for the author. Hal is annoyingly knowledgeable and bright. Orin is a humorous lothario. Mario is kind but damaged. Gately is gruff and diligent.

The humor is often juvenile, but much of it takes place at what amounts to a fancy high school; thus, this seems appropriate and unsurprising.

The long descriptions of the rules and of the playing of one out-of-hand game of "Eschaton" are tiresome, though there are interesting bits about math and geopolitics in this small section.

The book's descriptions of AA meetings will not make the reader want to attend one. However, the work as a whole might be a good deterrent, or even aid in the recovery, for various types of addictions. The sober life is not made to look exciting, but the life of an addict is made to look unbearable, morbidly odious, utterly abominable. In other words, life is hard either way, but hustling for fixes is a disastrous way to exist.

There are occasions of first person narration, but mostly, there is an omniscient voice that channels the inner thoughts of the main character(s) in a given episode. The omniscient voice attempts to use a vocabulary similar to that of the given episode's character(s), but when the narrator must use a word outside the scope of the character in question (a lot of the time this involves Gately), then an end-note will appear, to the back of the tome, where the thoughts are described in a more accurate manner.

When a scene features Marathe, a French Canadian, the omniscient voice uses several incorrectly structured forms of English idioms to describe the thoughts of the Francophile Canuck.

It's often a third person POV featuring the personality and vernacular of whatever character is most important in the scene.

The more polished, erudite prose is used to describe those at the educational institution. Slang and vulgarity are prevalent at the recovery house; and there is a lower, more guttural type of writing used for the class of folks lower than those at the recovery house--the drug dealers and addicts still using and still on the street, "Out There."

Hamlet, Ulysses, 1984, and Gravity's Rainbow are all paid homage. There are Vonnegut-esque scenes involving a wraith. Faulkner is hearkened. Nabokov's influence is seen throughout, and there are enough digressions to satisfy Lawrence Sterne.

The novel contains mystery, but this is not the prime mover of the plot. Loneliness, depression, anxiety, fear, advertising, and entertainment all get special treatment.

Here are a couple decent but obscure quotes from this astonishing book (despite its length, it is not especially quotable).

"There's something elementally horrific about waking before dawn."

"... Saturday still being the week's special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but party 24/7/365."]]> 4.27 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: J
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2018/11/06
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: favorites
review:
Infinite Jest is a challenge, a delight, a potentially life-altering novel. Here are some scant insights:

The author goes to great lengths to describe the buildings (all tending to look like something from human anatomy) and serpentine tunnels that surround the tennis academy; even MIT's radio station gets a brain-like roof. Boston is described in great detail, reminding one of Joyce's lyrical sojourns in Dublin.

Hal, Orin, and Mario Incandenza, as well as Don Gately, all stand in, at least a bit, for the author. Hal is annoyingly knowledgeable and bright. Orin is a humorous lothario. Mario is kind but damaged. Gately is gruff and diligent.

The humor is often juvenile, but much of it takes place at what amounts to a fancy high school; thus, this seems appropriate and unsurprising.

The long descriptions of the rules and of the playing of one out-of-hand game of "Eschaton" are tiresome, though there are interesting bits about math and geopolitics in this small section.

The book's descriptions of AA meetings will not make the reader want to attend one. However, the work as a whole might be a good deterrent, or even aid in the recovery, for various types of addictions. The sober life is not made to look exciting, but the life of an addict is made to look unbearable, morbidly odious, utterly abominable. In other words, life is hard either way, but hustling for fixes is a disastrous way to exist.

There are occasions of first person narration, but mostly, there is an omniscient voice that channels the inner thoughts of the main character(s) in a given episode. The omniscient voice attempts to use a vocabulary similar to that of the given episode's character(s), but when the narrator must use a word outside the scope of the character in question (a lot of the time this involves Gately), then an end-note will appear, to the back of the tome, where the thoughts are described in a more accurate manner.

When a scene features Marathe, a French Canadian, the omniscient voice uses several incorrectly structured forms of English idioms to describe the thoughts of the Francophile Canuck.

It's often a third person POV featuring the personality and vernacular of whatever character is most important in the scene.

The more polished, erudite prose is used to describe those at the educational institution. Slang and vulgarity are prevalent at the recovery house; and there is a lower, more guttural type of writing used for the class of folks lower than those at the recovery house--the drug dealers and addicts still using and still on the street, "Out There."

Hamlet, Ulysses, 1984, and Gravity's Rainbow are all paid homage. There are Vonnegut-esque scenes involving a wraith. Faulkner is hearkened. Nabokov's influence is seen throughout, and there are enough digressions to satisfy Lawrence Sterne.

The novel contains mystery, but this is not the prime mover of the plot. Loneliness, depression, anxiety, fear, advertising, and entertainment all get special treatment.

Here are a couple decent but obscure quotes from this astonishing book (despite its length, it is not especially quotable).

"There's something elementally horrific about waking before dawn."

"... Saturday still being the week's special mythic Party-Night even for persons who long ago ceased to be able to do anything but party 24/7/365."
]]> 581552 52 Franz Kafka J 5 4.02 1918
author: Franz Kafka
name: J
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1918
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves:
review:
"As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life, nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony." (Schopenhauer)
]]> 10979 Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.]]> 507 William Faulkner 0679732268 J 5
The novel is written as if it were being told by a local farmer who'd observed the whole thing, but with bits of profundity delivered with exactly the right amount of obscurity. It's an accessible work from an incredibly dense writer.]]> 3.93 1932
author: William Faulkner
name: J
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2014/06/11
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:
Faulkner plays the prophet in this book: we have an indefatigable, expecting mother, a man struggling with his identity--driven by something he doesn't understand, a wise old ex-minister, an egoistic drunk, and other colorful characters, living in a flat pattern, which they take for a line.

The novel is written as if it were being told by a local farmer who'd observed the whole thing, but with bits of profundity delivered with exactly the right amount of obscurity. It's an accessible work from an incredibly dense writer.
]]> 85384 Ěý
The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”]]> 304 John Updike 0449912167 J 0 to-read 3.70 1963
author: John Updike
name: J
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37449 here .

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos.]]> 376 Harper Lee 1439550417 J 3
Too obvious, contrived. A children's book really that some folks hold up as great literature. And yes, I'm implying that children's literature is an inferior genre.

Side note: Harper Lee was pals with Truman Capote, the writer of another overrated American classic: In Cold Blood.]]> 4.30 1960
author: Harper Lee
name: J
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1960
rating: 3
read at: 1996/01/01
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:
Along with The Sun Also Rises, this is the most overrated classic produced by an American. It's not horrible, but the echelon on which it sits is far too high.

Too obvious, contrived. A children's book really that some folks hold up as great literature. And yes, I'm implying that children's literature is an inferior genre.

Side note: Harper Lee was pals with Truman Capote, the writer of another overrated American classic: In Cold Blood.
]]> 117586 76 Arthur Schopenhauer 1419161296 J 5
But in the end, there is no argument for the perpetuation of life. It's just that we can't stop. Without thought, we, and all species, propagate. Without the slightest regret, we condemn those we love the most to death.

Humans in the thralls of life, at least in relatively good health, wonder what all the fuss is about: as if nothing awaits them, nothing sinister right around the corner...]]> 3.91 1890
author: Arthur Schopenhauer
name: J
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1890
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves:
review:
There is no argument against Schopenhauer. There is nervous laughter and phony scoffing. There are heroic pessimists, absurdists, shallow optimists, and recovering nihilists who try to rail against him.

But in the end, there is no argument for the perpetuation of life. It's just that we can't stop. Without thought, we, and all species, propagate. Without the slightest regret, we condemn those we love the most to death.

Humans in the thralls of life, at least in relatively good health, wonder what all the fuss is about: as if nothing awaits them, nothing sinister right around the corner...
]]> 19267354 Ěý
Some stories—such as “A Rose for Emily,� “The Hound,� and “That Evening Sun”—are famous, displaying an uncanny blend of the homely and the horrifying. But others, though less well known, are equally colorful and characteristic. The gently nostalgic“Delta Autumn� provides a striking contrast to “Dry September� and “Barn Burning,� which are intensely dramatic.
Ěý
As the editor, Saxe Commins, states in his illuminating Foreword: “These eight stories reflect the deep love and loathing, the tenderness and contempt, the identification and repudiation William Faulkner has felt for the traditions and the way of life of his own portion of the world.�

Stories in this volume: A Rose for Emily; The Hound; Turn About; That Evening Sun; Dry September; Delta Autumn; Barn Burning; An Odor of Verbena.]]> 156 William Faulkner J 4 3.90 1930
author: William Faulkner
name: J
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1930
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 168668
Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.]]> 453 Joseph Heller 0684833395 J 2 3.99 1961
author: Joseph Heller
name: J
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1961
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:
This is an interesting novel for a lot of smart folks; however, for me, it was too tedious to finish. I could see the influence on Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. They all like these wacky names, like "Major Major." Too clever by half.
]]> 7184
Twenty Years After (1845), the sequel to The Three Musketeers, is a supreme creation of suspense and heroic adventure.

Two decades have passed since the musketeers triumphed over Cardinal Richelieu and Milady. Time has weakened their resolve, and dispersed their loyalties. But treasons and stratagems still cry out for justice: civil war endangers the throne of France, while in England Cromwell threatens to send Charles I to the scaffold. Dumas brings his immortal quartet out of retirement to cross swords with time, the malevolence of men, and the forces of history. But their greatest test is a titanic struggle with the son of Milady, who wears the face of Evil.]]> 845 Alexandre Dumas 0192838431 J 0 to-read 4.06 1845
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: J
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1845
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 537365
The World as Will and Idea (1819) holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life; that the truest understanding of the world comes through art and the only lasting good through ascetic renunciation. Unique in western philosophy for his affinity with Eastern thought, Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, writers, and composers including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett.

The Work presented here appeals not only to the student of philosophy but everyone interested in psychology, literature and eastern and western religion.

This paperback edition is the most comprehensive available and includes an introduction, bibliography, selected criticism, index and chronology of Schopenhauer's life and times.]]> 336 Arthur Schopenhauer 0460875051 J 5 favorites
A little about the author: sandwiched between two, perhaps more well known thinkers, Kant and Nietzsche, sits a clearer and more quotable writer, a more pragmatic philosopher, and a greater influence on authors, musicians, and artists. He does not purport a system for academics to disentangle. His pessimism is often described as depressing.

But Schopenhauer is a superior realist who can live in a world of ideas. He presents the problems of humanity and offers solutions. They may not be solutions many folks would like to try; indeed, Schop did not practice asceticism, though he prescribed it as an escape from the suffering of the world.

The writing is refreshing, insightful, and grounded in more reason than most. There is truly original thought here.

He is present in the work and/or mentioned directly by Darwin, Freud, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, Edgar Saltus, Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, Carl Jung, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Einstein, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut, Wittgenstein and Thomas Ligotti, to name some heavyweights.

Now, for the book itself:

The Will is not only energy. All living things, and even non-living objects, are manifestations of the Will.

Kant was right, that we cannot know the thing-in-itself wholly. However, through one's consciousness in relation to the body, in voluntary and involuntary movements and processes, we can gather an idea of the Will, which does the moving and motivates all action.

We intuitively relate all objects around us and everything we experience only as far as how they relate to other objects, and especially how they relate to us: how they affect us, how we perceive them.

The Will is in eternal flux; thus, the world is in eternal flux. This takes us back to Heraclitus.

Without a subject to acknowledge and play by the same rules as an object, the object is nothing. The world is full of many subjects and many objects. We are subjects to objects which are subjects to us.

A sensation should not be held as the cause of, or to come from, an object, but as merely something that our senses, one of them at least, has sensed. We only know that an object is real because it stimulates at least one of our senses.

Our objective comprehension is subjective.

When we say something is matter, we not only say that something exists but also that it is perceived.

An easy starting point to ponder the Will: involuntary acts of the body--unwanted thoughts, innate desires, absent-minded gestures of the hands while speaking.

The Will, apart from the body, is still only knowable abstractly. This means Kant's thing-in-itself, as unknowable, still holds validity. But Schopenhauer has taken things beyond Kant, his garrulous, moralistic predecessor.

The Will is present in non-living objects. It gives objects their particular qualities. In living things, the Will can be subordinated in a more overt manner.

A stone rolls down a hill, an animal hunts its prey--both are manifestations of the Will.

Gravity does not cause the stone to fall to earth. The cause is the stone's proximity to earth. Gravity is always there.

Causality is only present in time and space. Gravity and all energy is eternal and exists outside time and space.

Schopenhauer's Will takes Plato's Forms and expresses them in myriad replicas we see in time and space.

Though we harness fire & electricity, etc, these things would exist if we did not harness them. Nature's laws sometimes seem extraordinary to us, but they are not. The laws are consistent. We become shocked when we see a natural phenomenon that is new to us, but we should not be. It has always been so and will always be so when circumstances dictate.

Animals must eat plants and one another. Everything preys on something and/or is preyed upon by something. This displays the constant strife, the essential discord, of the Will. The Will feeds on itself. Humanity devours itself. Everything is trying and striving to express its highest Form, and to do so generally impinges on the striving of something else.

The Will is the force propelling evolution, all the tiny mutations.

Our actions are guided by motives which are guided by the Will. The Will wants to strive, thrive, and live.

Nothing, not gravity, a stone, an insect, or a human ever reaches a final goal. All is merely eternally becoming.

The Will is pure desire. In humans, the intellect must be called on to temper the Will. The Will does not plan. It desires; its motives can be hidden.

Human disposition is always cycling through three states of emotion: desire, momentary satisfaction, and boredom. Two of the three cause pain and suffering, and the other is ephemeral.

Schop says the Kantian "thing-in-itself" is the Will, but not a realized objectification of the Will. It is the becoming part of the thing, since Kant's thing needn't take any form.

Everything we see is only a copy of an Idea, coming and going in time and space.

Knowledge can break free from the Will. When an individual is involved in, producing or contemplating or executing, something artistic, the individual breaks free from the awareness of time and space; thus, it can break from the Will. But this can only be temporary.

A loss of individuality comes from perceiving the object as the Idea, without relationships to other things subject to causality. An individual can become a "pure subject of knowing." This respite from the Will is fleeting, though. One must sustain this higher level to produce art.

On nostalgia: we look back on things and see them in an objective light. We forget all the worries and troubles we had in those times. The time elapsed separates us from our old subjective selves, even though our current selves are as subjective as ever.

Beauty can facilitate our transference from subjective knowledge of particular things to the objective contemplation of Ideas.

In music, melodies represent the great striving and gratification of the will. Catchy, short melodies in dance music mimic everyday pleasures. Winding, meandering melodies with painful discord and sustained, languid notes show sadness and tragedy, while gratification is expressed when the music falls back to the key-note.

Like in Buddhism and Hinduism, in Schopenhauer, we are taught that the best way to live would be by denying the Will. But here it's by using the intellect, knowledge, art, and wisdom to totally set oneself free from cravings and desires. Still, for the most part, this is impossible.

I will leave off with a few quotes from the gloomy philosopher and some from others he used in this most remarkable philosophical masterpiece:

Schopenhauer:

"The world is my idea."

"The body is a condition of the knowledge of the Will."

"Genius is the clear eye of the world."

"The Principle of Sufficient Reason is thus again the form into which the Idea enters when it comes to the knowledge of the subject as individual."

"Often, we don't know what we wish or what we fear."

"For one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten which are denied."

(on literature) "Man's unspeakable pain and misery, the triumph of malice, the tyranny of mere chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent, are here presented to us; and in lies a significant hint as to the nature of the world and of existence."

"Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence."

Agrippa von Nettesheim:

"It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, nor the stars in the sky. The spirit who lives in us makes those."

Plato:

"What is that which always is, and has no becoming? And what is that which is always becoming and never is?"

"Time is the moving picture of eternity."

Goethe:

"No ill can touch him who looks on human beauty; he feels himself at one with himself and with the world."

"To fix in lasting thoughts the hovering images that float before the mind."

Thomas Paine:

"It is only a short step from the sublime to the ridiculous."]]> 4.17 1818
author: Arthur Schopenhauer
name: J
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1818
rating: 5
read at: 2016/12/16
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: favorites
review:
The book is not voluminous, but it is deep and wide in subject matter. It is a book to mull over. Schopenhauer uses multiple examples to support his arguments. These are helpful and part of the philosopher's artistry.

A little about the author: sandwiched between two, perhaps more well known thinkers, Kant and Nietzsche, sits a clearer and more quotable writer, a more pragmatic philosopher, and a greater influence on authors, musicians, and artists. He does not purport a system for academics to disentangle. His pessimism is often described as depressing.

But Schopenhauer is a superior realist who can live in a world of ideas. He presents the problems of humanity and offers solutions. They may not be solutions many folks would like to try; indeed, Schop did not practice asceticism, though he prescribed it as an escape from the suffering of the world.

The writing is refreshing, insightful, and grounded in more reason than most. There is truly original thought here.

He is present in the work and/or mentioned directly by Darwin, Freud, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, Edgar Saltus, Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, Carl Jung, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Einstein, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut, Wittgenstein and Thomas Ligotti, to name some heavyweights.

Now, for the book itself:

The Will is not only energy. All living things, and even non-living objects, are manifestations of the Will.

Kant was right, that we cannot know the thing-in-itself wholly. However, through one's consciousness in relation to the body, in voluntary and involuntary movements and processes, we can gather an idea of the Will, which does the moving and motivates all action.

We intuitively relate all objects around us and everything we experience only as far as how they relate to other objects, and especially how they relate to us: how they affect us, how we perceive them.

The Will is in eternal flux; thus, the world is in eternal flux. This takes us back to Heraclitus.

Without a subject to acknowledge and play by the same rules as an object, the object is nothing. The world is full of many subjects and many objects. We are subjects to objects which are subjects to us.

A sensation should not be held as the cause of, or to come from, an object, but as merely something that our senses, one of them at least, has sensed. We only know that an object is real because it stimulates at least one of our senses.

Our objective comprehension is subjective.

When we say something is matter, we not only say that something exists but also that it is perceived.

An easy starting point to ponder the Will: involuntary acts of the body--unwanted thoughts, innate desires, absent-minded gestures of the hands while speaking.

The Will, apart from the body, is still only knowable abstractly. This means Kant's thing-in-itself, as unknowable, still holds validity. But Schopenhauer has taken things beyond Kant, his garrulous, moralistic predecessor.

The Will is present in non-living objects. It gives objects their particular qualities. In living things, the Will can be subordinated in a more overt manner.

A stone rolls down a hill, an animal hunts its prey--both are manifestations of the Will.

Gravity does not cause the stone to fall to earth. The cause is the stone's proximity to earth. Gravity is always there.

Causality is only present in time and space. Gravity and all energy is eternal and exists outside time and space.

Schopenhauer's Will takes Plato's Forms and expresses them in myriad replicas we see in time and space.

Though we harness fire & electricity, etc, these things would exist if we did not harness them. Nature's laws sometimes seem extraordinary to us, but they are not. The laws are consistent. We become shocked when we see a natural phenomenon that is new to us, but we should not be. It has always been so and will always be so when circumstances dictate.

Animals must eat plants and one another. Everything preys on something and/or is preyed upon by something. This displays the constant strife, the essential discord, of the Will. The Will feeds on itself. Humanity devours itself. Everything is trying and striving to express its highest Form, and to do so generally impinges on the striving of something else.

The Will is the force propelling evolution, all the tiny mutations.

Our actions are guided by motives which are guided by the Will. The Will wants to strive, thrive, and live.

Nothing, not gravity, a stone, an insect, or a human ever reaches a final goal. All is merely eternally becoming.

The Will is pure desire. In humans, the intellect must be called on to temper the Will. The Will does not plan. It desires; its motives can be hidden.

Human disposition is always cycling through three states of emotion: desire, momentary satisfaction, and boredom. Two of the three cause pain and suffering, and the other is ephemeral.

Schop says the Kantian "thing-in-itself" is the Will, but not a realized objectification of the Will. It is the becoming part of the thing, since Kant's thing needn't take any form.

Everything we see is only a copy of an Idea, coming and going in time and space.

Knowledge can break free from the Will. When an individual is involved in, producing or contemplating or executing, something artistic, the individual breaks free from the awareness of time and space; thus, it can break from the Will. But this can only be temporary.

A loss of individuality comes from perceiving the object as the Idea, without relationships to other things subject to causality. An individual can become a "pure subject of knowing." This respite from the Will is fleeting, though. One must sustain this higher level to produce art.

On nostalgia: we look back on things and see them in an objective light. We forget all the worries and troubles we had in those times. The time elapsed separates us from our old subjective selves, even though our current selves are as subjective as ever.

Beauty can facilitate our transference from subjective knowledge of particular things to the objective contemplation of Ideas.

In music, melodies represent the great striving and gratification of the will. Catchy, short melodies in dance music mimic everyday pleasures. Winding, meandering melodies with painful discord and sustained, languid notes show sadness and tragedy, while gratification is expressed when the music falls back to the key-note.

Like in Buddhism and Hinduism, in Schopenhauer, we are taught that the best way to live would be by denying the Will. But here it's by using the intellect, knowledge, art, and wisdom to totally set oneself free from cravings and desires. Still, for the most part, this is impossible.

I will leave off with a few quotes from the gloomy philosopher and some from others he used in this most remarkable philosophical masterpiece:

Schopenhauer:

"The world is my idea."

"The body is a condition of the knowledge of the Will."

"Genius is the clear eye of the world."

"The Principle of Sufficient Reason is thus again the form into which the Idea enters when it comes to the knowledge of the subject as individual."

"Often, we don't know what we wish or what we fear."

"For one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten which are denied."

(on literature) "Man's unspeakable pain and misery, the triumph of malice, the tyranny of mere chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent, are here presented to us; and in lies a significant hint as to the nature of the world and of existence."

"Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence."

Agrippa von Nettesheim:

"It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, nor the stars in the sky. The spirit who lives in us makes those."

Plato:

"What is that which always is, and has no becoming? And what is that which is always becoming and never is?"

"Time is the moving picture of eternity."

Goethe:

"No ill can touch him who looks on human beauty; he feels himself at one with himself and with the world."

"To fix in lasting thoughts the hovering images that float before the mind."

Thomas Paine:

"It is only a short step from the sublime to the ridiculous."
]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X J 2 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: J
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
Never follow the crowd into an over-hyped book. Not since the Da Vinci Code have I read such a meretricious novel. More for young and casual readers, I suppose.
]]> 32827922 One of the most important philosophical works of the nineteenth century, the basic statement of one important stream of post-Kantian thought. It is without question Schopenhauer's greatest work. Conceived and published before the philosopher was 30 and expanded 25 years later, it is the summation of a lifetime of thought.

"...This book will be of interest to general readers, undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in the field."
--George L�z�roiu, PhD, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, New York, Analysis and Metaphysics]]> 1474 Arthur Schopenhauer 1773130404 J 5 4.34 1818
author: Arthur Schopenhauer
name: J
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1818
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 842004
Here are twenty long-unavailable stories by the master who brought us The Maltese Falcon . Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double- and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America's poet laureate of the dispossessed.]]> 396 Dashiell Hammett 0375701028 J 0 to-read 3.99 1999
author: Dashiell Hammett
name: J
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17332846 William Faulkner J 4 3.66 1931
author: William Faulkner
name: J
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1931
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 16631 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 his 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 of the others".]]> 256 Hermann Hesse 0140282580 J 3 4.15 1927
author: Hermann Hesse
name: J
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1927
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves:
review:
Hermann Hesse is a great author, but this book never got my motor running. I surely wasn't exploding into space.
]]> 77431 348 Patrick O'Brian 039330762X J 4
Some of the appeal of the first novels came from the depictions of the hungry, upwardly striving Commander, Jack Aubrey: his willingness to take chances at sea and his quick thinking at the center of naval battles.

Here, he is no longer so much at the center of it all and has to hang back to make the big decisions, oftentimes watching the action from afar.

He is an acting Commodore now, and though our fondness for him is enough for us to join in his joy of promotion, we don't get the thrill of his leadership in the same close-quartered manner.

Stephen Maturin plays the psychologist in this one, his naturalist tendencies a bit hemmed in by the difficulties of Jack's orders.

Still, this is another great addition to O'Brian's brilliant historical fiction catalog. The British Royal Navy's customs and history are always well-represented by this underappreciated, literary author.]]> 4.35 1977
author: Patrick O'Brian
name: J
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves:
review:
Not quite as enjoyable as the first three books in the series, the Mauritius Command finds our beloved duo in the Indian Ocean ordered to take a French stronghold on an obscure island for the English.

Some of the appeal of the first novels came from the depictions of the hungry, upwardly striving Commander, Jack Aubrey: his willingness to take chances at sea and his quick thinking at the center of naval battles.

Here, he is no longer so much at the center of it all and has to hang back to make the big decisions, oftentimes watching the action from afar.

He is an acting Commodore now, and though our fondness for him is enough for us to join in his joy of promotion, we don't get the thrill of his leadership in the same close-quartered manner.

Stephen Maturin plays the psychologist in this one, his naturalist tendencies a bit hemmed in by the difficulties of Jack's orders.

Still, this is another great addition to O'Brian's brilliant historical fiction catalog. The British Royal Navy's customs and history are always well-represented by this underappreciated, literary author.
]]> 8524528
"There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."**

His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.]]> 240 Thomas Ligotti 098242969X J 5 favorites
To read his fiction, or nonfiction, is to visit a different world, an uncanny place that can feel uncomfortable.

The main idea is that life is more bad than good. While much of the book is an expansion of Schopenhauer (beyond merely promoting pessimism, both see optimism as not only foolish but nefarious), Ligotti touches on lesser-known pessimists: Mainlander, Zapffe, Michelstaedter, and others.

He goes farther than Ecclesiastes, farther than The Last Messiah, even farther than Mainlander's 'will to die.' At the heart of this book is Ligotti's malignant force (similar to Schopenhauer's Will). The force that causes all action, that makes things live and die.

And this force, far from being some benevolent deity or karmic justice, is not even indifferent, as many have said before. This force is pernicious.

There is a paradoxical warmth and consolation in a book so unapologetically nihilistic. What freedom when you realize everything is malignantly useless!]]> 4.04 2011
author: Thomas Ligotti
name: J
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2017/07/22
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: favorites
review:
This philosophical piece is written with gusto and humor. At times, it is caustic. But Ligotti's style is atmospheric, and his strangely haunting language affects in a very singular way.

To read his fiction, or nonfiction, is to visit a different world, an uncanny place that can feel uncomfortable.

The main idea is that life is more bad than good. While much of the book is an expansion of Schopenhauer (beyond merely promoting pessimism, both see optimism as not only foolish but nefarious), Ligotti touches on lesser-known pessimists: Mainlander, Zapffe, Michelstaedter, and others.

He goes farther than Ecclesiastes, farther than The Last Messiah, even farther than Mainlander's 'will to die.' At the heart of this book is Ligotti's malignant force (similar to Schopenhauer's Will). The force that causes all action, that makes things live and die.

And this force, far from being some benevolent deity or karmic justice, is not even indifferent, as many have said before. This force is pernicious.

There is a paradoxical warmth and consolation in a book so unapologetically nihilistic. What freedom when you realize everything is malignantly useless!
]]> 23692271 512 Yuval Noah Harari J 4
Anyone know where I can find a fig tree?

God, humans are the worst.]]> 4.33 2011
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: J
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves:
review:
Farming: a life sentence.

Anyone know where I can find a fig tree?

God, humans are the worst.
]]> 53410076 H.M.S. Surprise, British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin face near-death and tumultuous romance in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Tasked with ferrying a British ambassador to the Sultan of Kampong, they find themselves on a prolonged voyage aboard a Royal Navy frigate en route to the Malay Peninsula. In this new sphere, Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy who enjoys overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could secure him a marriage to his beloved Sophie and make him rich beyond his wildest dreams: the ships sent by Napoleon to attack the China Fleet.]]> 368 Patrick O'Brian 0393541606 J 5
HMS Surprise is probably the best of the 1st three novels, but then, the whole series is sort of one long book. The humor, the comraderie, and the action are at their peak.]]> 4.38 1973
author: Patrick O'Brian
name: J
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves:
review:
In the 3rd book of O'Brian's Age of Sail series, we begin to understand the philosophy of Stephen Maturin.

HMS Surprise is probably the best of the 1st three novels, but then, the whole series is sort of one long book. The humor, the comraderie, and the action are at their peak.
]]> 53410075 480 Patrick O'Brian 0393541592 J 5
You're in the rigging. You're running out the great guns. Beating to windward, teaching your body the rhythms of the vast oceans of our planet. This is a particular time and place described with humor and delight. Aubrey and Maturin represent the body and the mind, as well as life truly lived.]]> 4.20 1972
author: Patrick O'Brian
name: J
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves:
review:
These books put you on the deck of a wooden Man-of-War during the early 19th century in the Age of Sail.

You're in the rigging. You're running out the great guns. Beating to windward, teaching your body the rhythms of the vast oceans of our planet. This is a particular time and place described with humor and delight. Aubrey and Maturin represent the body and the mind, as well as life truly lived.
]]> 29579 The first novel in Isaac Asimov's classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future--to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire--both scientists and scholars--and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.]]> 244 Isaac Asimov 0553803719 J 1 4.18 1951
author: Isaac Asimov
name: J
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1951
rating: 1
read at: 2020/01/28
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 41817546 more susceptible to them. This is the "intelligence trap," the subject of David Robson’s fascinating and provocative book.

The Intelligence Trap explores cutting-edge ideas in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, including "strategic ignorance," "meta-forgetfulness," and "functional stupidity." Robson reveals the surprising ways that even the brightest minds and most talented organizations can go wrong—from some of Thomas Edison’s worst ideas to failures at NASA, Nokia, and the FBI. And he offers practical advice to avoid mistakes based on the timeless lessons of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and Daniel Kahneman.]]> 336 David Robson 0393651428 J 0 to-read 3.99 2019
author: David Robson
name: J
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 113946 "The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason."

Dr. Seuss's small-hearted Grinch ranks right up there with Scrooge when it comes to the crankiest, scowling holiday grumps of all time.

For 53 years, the Grinch has lived in a cave on the side of a mountain, looming above the Whos in Whoville. The noisy holiday preparations and infernal singing of the happy little citizens below annoy him to no end. The Grinch decides this frivolous merriment must stop. His "wonderful, awful" idea is to don a Santa outfit, strap heavy antlers on his poor, quivering dog Max, construct a makeshift sleigh, head down to Whoville, and strip the chafingly cheerful Whos of their Yuletide glee once and for all.

Looking quite out of place and very disturbing in his makeshift Santa get-up, the Grinch slithers down chimneys with empty bags and stealing the Whos' presents, their food, even the logs from their humble Who-fires. He takes the ramshackle sleigh to Mt. Crumpit to dump it and waits to hear the sobs of the Whos when they wake up and discover the trappings of Christmas have disappeared. Imagine the Whos' dismay when they discover the evil-doings of Grinch in his anti-Santa guise. But what is that sound? It's not sobbing, but singing! Children simultaneously adore and fear this triumphant, twisted Seussian testimonial to the undaunted cheerfulness of the Whos, the transcendent nature of joy, and of course, the growth potential of a heart that's two sizes too small.

This holiday classic is perfect for reading aloud to your favorite little Whos.]]> 64 Dr. Seuss 0007173040 J 3 4.38 1957
author: Dr. Seuss
name: J
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
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review:

]]> 10365 Billy, Old Dan, and Little Ann—a boy and his two dogs...

A loving threesome, they ranged the dark hills and river bottoms of Cherokee County. Old Dan had the brawn, Little Ann had the brains—and Billy had the will to train them to be the finest hunting team in the valley. Glory and victory were coming to them, but sadness waited too. And close by was the strange and wonderful power that's only found...

Where the Red Fern Grows—An exciting tale of love and adventure you'll never forget.

(from the back cover)]]> 272 Wilson Rawls 0375806814 J 4 4.11 1961
author: Wilson Rawls
name: J
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
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review:

]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 J 3 3.82 1884
author: Mark Twain
name: J
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
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]]> 33574273 It was a dark and stormy night.

Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure—one that will threaten their lives and our universe.

Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic Time Quintet.]]> 218 Madeleine L'Engle 1250153271 J 3 3.91 1962
author: Madeleine L'Engle
name: J
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
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review:

]]> 433428 369 Umberto Eco 0151013519 J 4 This guy could write! 3.76 2006
author: Umberto Eco
name: J
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves:
review:
This guy could write!
]]> 17841
Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled � a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth.

Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.]]> 623 Umberto Eco 015603297X J 5 favorites
*Edit 2024: keep you asking your chatbot for guidance.

*Edit 2027: bore you because data is cheap and ubiquitous.]]> 3.92 1988
author: Umberto Eco
name: J
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2004/01/01
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves: favorites
review:
It is difficult to review such a book from afar. This intricate novel from a semiotics professor is possibly the most corybantic and encyclopedic thing you'll ever read. Eco's intelligent writing is off the charts; his historical references will * keep your search engine humming.

*Edit 2024: keep you asking your chatbot for guidance.

*Edit 2027: bore you because data is cheap and ubiquitous.
]]> 76527
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations. The text and notes of this volume are based on the acclaimed Florida Edition, with a critical introduction by Melvyn New and Christopher Ricks's introductory essay from the first Penguin Classics edition.]]> 735 Laurence Sterne 0141439777 J 5
Ah...18th century novels: you'll find some archaic language, some sayings and references you've never heard before. Here, at least we have endnotes to help with that; thanks to them and the author's wit, it is entirely possible to get most of the humor of Laurence Sterne and be entertained by his digressions.

Shandy is both a joy and a pain. It is not a page-turner. Yet, at times, I was excited to find out what would happen to Toby and Ms. Wadman, what might occur during the title character's birth or later travels. Then, I would have to scoff at myself for expecting Sterne to give us anything like a standard conclusion to even the most trivial of subplots. But as our narrator tells us, "Every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it."

It is an early example of meta-fiction. It is bawdy and satirical. Some call it a postmodern novel written 150 years before modernism. And after one has read it and compared it to writings by the likes of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, and Richard Flanagan, and considering that Arthur Schopenhauer counted it as his favorite English romance, it should be heralded as one of the most influential novels ever written.

About those old sayings and terms: the use of the word hobby comes from the term hobby-horse. A hobby-horse was a metaphor for a person's vocation or a pastime. Sterne had this to say: "...and so long as a man rides his Hobby Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?" Contained herein is a whole moral philosophy to which any rational human could subscribe. And another thing, the term "Gadzooks" is a corruption of "God's hooks," as in the crucifixion.

Future readers: when the going gets tough and you wonder why you're reading a work with no real plot from the 1750s, remember a quote from the book (Sterne is quoting Pliny the Younger): "I never read a book so bad I drew no profit from it."

Not only does Sterne make digressions on top of digressions, but he converses with his audience about when he will be getting down to the portion of the story he has mentioned and assured us he will tell. Whether he actually gets to the part he promises is another matter.

He addresses and redresses his critics. Late in the book, the narrator's illness is mentioned--it is presented as Tristram's illness--but through the endnotes, we know that Sterne was actually suffering from tuberculosis during the writing of the latter volumes.

To illustrate the roundabout nature of the book, I have Tristram's birth not occurring until about page 258.

Lovers of classics and the Western Canon will likely enjoy this one. It is a novel that questions the nature of novels. And as I've alluded, you are likely to see its influence on something you've previously read.

Just remember, though, that in essence, it is one long d*ck-joke.]]> 3.72 1767
author: Laurence Sterne
name: J
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1767
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/03
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves:
review:
WARNING: This review may be inappropriate for some readers.

Ah...18th century novels: you'll find some archaic language, some sayings and references you've never heard before. Here, at least we have endnotes to help with that; thanks to them and the author's wit, it is entirely possible to get most of the humor of Laurence Sterne and be entertained by his digressions.

Shandy is both a joy and a pain. It is not a page-turner. Yet, at times, I was excited to find out what would happen to Toby and Ms. Wadman, what might occur during the title character's birth or later travels. Then, I would have to scoff at myself for expecting Sterne to give us anything like a standard conclusion to even the most trivial of subplots. But as our narrator tells us, "Every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it."

It is an early example of meta-fiction. It is bawdy and satirical. Some call it a postmodern novel written 150 years before modernism. And after one has read it and compared it to writings by the likes of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, and Richard Flanagan, and considering that Arthur Schopenhauer counted it as his favorite English romance, it should be heralded as one of the most influential novels ever written.

About those old sayings and terms: the use of the word hobby comes from the term hobby-horse. A hobby-horse was a metaphor for a person's vocation or a pastime. Sterne had this to say: "...and so long as a man rides his Hobby Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?" Contained herein is a whole moral philosophy to which any rational human could subscribe. And another thing, the term "Gadzooks" is a corruption of "God's hooks," as in the crucifixion.

Future readers: when the going gets tough and you wonder why you're reading a work with no real plot from the 1750s, remember a quote from the book (Sterne is quoting Pliny the Younger): "I never read a book so bad I drew no profit from it."

Not only does Sterne make digressions on top of digressions, but he converses with his audience about when he will be getting down to the portion of the story he has mentioned and assured us he will tell. Whether he actually gets to the part he promises is another matter.

He addresses and redresses his critics. Late in the book, the narrator's illness is mentioned--it is presented as Tristram's illness--but through the endnotes, we know that Sterne was actually suffering from tuberculosis during the writing of the latter volumes.

To illustrate the roundabout nature of the book, I have Tristram's birth not occurring until about page 258.

Lovers of classics and the Western Canon will likely enjoy this one. It is a novel that questions the nature of novels. And as I've alluded, you are likely to see its influence on something you've previously read.

Just remember, though, that in essence, it is one long d*ck-joke.
]]> 2452401 312 Thomas Ligotti 0978991176 J 5 favorites
In all severity, though, each story tingles the spine and straightens the hairs that grow on the arms and neck. Please forgive such cliches, but to put it any other way would be malefaction. Poe and Lovecraft were masters at producing creepy atmospheres, unspeakable terrors, and ineffable monstrosities; but Ligotti does something else. He conveys simple things: the meaninglessness and horror of existence, the futility of goals and triumphs. He presents these common pessimistic sentiments in majestic prose. Ligotti's style augments the world his language creates--a world disastrous to live in but impossible to escape.]]> 4.14 2006
author: Thomas Ligotti
name: J
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: favorites
review:
This is quite possibly the scariest collection of stories known to humankind. It contains horror, the likes of which the world has never seen.

In all severity, though, each story tingles the spine and straightens the hairs that grow on the arms and neck. Please forgive such cliches, but to put it any other way would be malefaction. Poe and Lovecraft were masters at producing creepy atmospheres, unspeakable terrors, and ineffable monstrosities; but Ligotti does something else. He conveys simple things: the meaninglessness and horror of existence, the futility of goals and triumphs. He presents these common pessimistic sentiments in majestic prose. Ligotti's style augments the world his language creates--a world disastrous to live in but impossible to escape.
]]> 219597 Grimscribe. ]]> 208 Thomas Ligotti 0786702354 J 3
All is heightened reading Ligotti's fiction along with his non-fiction (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race). Each story now has a message, a similar message, though it mutates a bit. Nothing is better than something. The scariest of all things is reality as we know it. There is something horrible waiting for us.

The novella sized piece, The Tsasal, was the weakest story in the collection. It probably didn't need the length it was allotted. Conversations in a Dead Language was a story more 'ordinary' than we usually see from Ligotti. His talent for developing a mood is always present, so it was nice to feel that in a tale utilizing a standard plot.

The flash fiction at the end was also stellar. These small pieces are ideal representations of Ligotti's ability to create worlds in paragraphs.]]> 4.09 1994
author: Thomas Ligotti
name: J
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/30
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
This collection doesn't make one shiver quite as much as Teatro Grottesco. It was written years earlier, and one can't blame Ligotti for honing his craft. As with anything from this conjurer of uncanny, atmospheric places and scenes, the book evokes excitement, fear, listlessness, powerlessness, melancholy, and despair.

All is heightened reading Ligotti's fiction along with his non-fiction (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race). Each story now has a message, a similar message, though it mutates a bit. Nothing is better than something. The scariest of all things is reality as we know it. There is something horrible waiting for us.

The novella sized piece, The Tsasal, was the weakest story in the collection. It probably didn't need the length it was allotted. Conversations in a Dead Language was a story more 'ordinary' than we usually see from Ligotti. His talent for developing a mood is always present, so it was nice to feel that in a tale utilizing a standard plot.

The flash fiction at the end was also stellar. These small pieces are ideal representations of Ligotti's ability to create worlds in paragraphs.
]]> 318236 The French Revolution is “one of the grand poems of [Carlyle’s] century, yet its poetry consists in being everywhere scrupulously rooted in historical fact.�

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition, complete and unabridged, is unavailable anywhere else.]]> 848 Thomas Carlyle 0375760229 J 0 to-read 3.97 1837
author: Thomas Carlyle
name: J
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1837
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52998 Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored) is ostensibly an introduction to a strange history of clothing by the German Professor of Things in General, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh; its deeper concerns are social injustice, the right way of living in the world, and the large questions of faith and understanding.

This is the first edition to present the novel as it originally appeared, with indications of the changes Carlyle made to later editions.]]> 320 Thomas Carlyle 0192836730 J 0 to-read 3.65 1834
author: Thomas Carlyle
name: J
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1834
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24614866 The must-have companion to Bill O'Reilly's historic series Legends and The Real West, a fascinating, eye-opening look at the truth behind the western legends we all think we knowHow did Davy Crockett save President Jackson's life only to end up dying at the Alamo? Was the Lone Ranger based on a real lawman-and was he an African American? What amazing detective work led to the capture of Black Bart, the "gentleman bandit" and one of the west's most famous stagecoach robbers? Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really die in a hail of bullets in South America? Generations of Americans have grown up on TV shows, movies and books about these western icons. But what really happened in the Wild West? All the stories you think you know, and others that will astonish you, are here--some heroic, some brutal and bloody, all riveting. Included are the ten legends featured in Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies docuseries -from Kit Carson to Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok to Doc Holliday-- accompanied by two bonus chapters on Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.Frontier America was a place where instinct mattered more than education, and courage was necessary for survival. It was a place where luck made a difference and legends were made. Heavily illustrated with spectacular artwork that further brings this history to life, and told in fast-paced, immersive narrative, Legends and Lies is an irresistible, adventure-packed ride back into one of the most storied era of our nation's rich history.]]> 304 David Fisher 1627795081 J 0 to-read 3.85 2015
author: David Fisher
name: J
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 863338 The Mansion completes Faulkner’s great trilogy of the Snopes family in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, which also includes The Hamlet and The Town. Beginning with the murder of Jack Houston, and ending with the murder of Flem Snopes, it traces the downfall of this indomitable post-bellum family, who managed to seize control of the town of Jefferson within a generation.]]> 448 William Faulkner 0394702824 J 5
Snopes spans about five decades and is a local history, narrow in its ostensible scope; however, in many instances it encompasses a history of Mississippi, the Deep South, the United States, and even the whole of humankind.

This review will attempt to refrain from discussing the entirety of the trilogy as much as possible and focus on The Mansion in itself. It will not achieve total success because the Mansion explains, sometimes in more detail and other times from a new perspective, events from The Town, as well as and even more so, events from The Hamlet.

From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, Snopes chronicles an evolving country: mule and horse-drawn carriages and buckboards turn into automobiles, an agrarian economy becomes financialized. Even the advent of American football is described. Inequality and war are two things that remain constant. Of the latter, Faulkner says, regarding the men returning from combat: “…with only a third of life over, to know now that they had already experienced their greatest experience, and now to find that the world for which they had so endured and risked was in their absence so altered out of recognition by the ones who had stayed safe at home as to have no place for them in it anymore.�

The Mansion is the most overt of the three books in its anti-racism. The KKK and the lesser known Silver Shirts are mentioned fairly frequently. Faulkner is never heavy-handed but allows bigotry to appear senseless on its own account.

The Mansion also features politics more prominently. A member of the Snopes clan, Clarence, is a state senator and has potential in Washington. This corrupt character is not even close to being the most depraved of the Snopes, but he is used to represent most politicians; and we mustn’t forget this prescient statement: “Politics and political office are not the method and means by which we can govern ourselves in peace and dignity and honor and security, but instead are our national refuge for our incompetents who have failed at every other occupation by means of which they might make a living for themselves and their families.�

Pessimistic sentiments are prevalent as the main catastrophe from The Town, a suicide, is revisited. Here's a bleak example: “You are happy when your life is filled, and any life is filled when it is so busy living from moment to moment that it has no time over to remember yesterday or dread tomorrow. Which of course couldn’t last.�

More than racism, bigotry, misogyny, politics, or philosophy, The Mansion is about the superstitious and sanctimonious fools and foolishness that typically make up a town like Jefferson, MS—or a county like his fictitious Yoknapatawpha. Only a few characters, Charles Mallison, Gavin Stevens, VK Ratliff, and Linda Snopes, provide us with freethinking mouthpieces for the author. Public sentiment dictates a lot of what happens over the course of the lives of these characters and others. We see what “Main Street� has to offer, and generally, it is not good.

The Mansion has Faulkner jabbing at the good old U.S. of A.: for all its backwardness, for all its bull pucky, but he is not making fun of it. He’s lamenting human frailty and folly. He speaks of the doom of war, the carnage; but he’s speaking as one of those watching the men return home—the men injured in mind and body. It is amazing how the voice of the author can feel like that of a large group: a community, a town, a county, or even a country.

The novel is not all grim. There is some good advice: “Don’t ever waste time regretting errors. Just don’t forget them.� There are sensible, good-hearted characters. But there are hard truths, and there is much cynicism: “Illusionees”—those who believe that “honor and justice and decency would prevail just because they were honorable just and decent.�

It is in this last book that we truly see what Snopes represents. The “Sn� sound in the name is no coincidence (sounds like snake). The family, the name, and even all the individual Snopeses come to represent all the greedy philistines in all the world.]]> 4.14
author: William Faulkner
name: J
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/10
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
review:
The final installment of the Snopes by William Faulkner uses the 3rd person perspective while oscillating in tone between poetic and colloquial, depending on the character(s) being described. The Mansion is more lucid than the preceding books, The Hamlet and The Town, respectively. But even when Faulkner’s prose is polished, it is rather circuitous.

Snopes spans about five decades and is a local history, narrow in its ostensible scope; however, in many instances it encompasses a history of Mississippi, the Deep South, the United States, and even the whole of humankind.

This review will attempt to refrain from discussing the entirety of the trilogy as much as possible and focus on The Mansion in itself. It will not achieve total success because the Mansion explains, sometimes in more detail and other times from a new perspective, events from The Town, as well as and even more so, events from The Hamlet.

From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, Snopes chronicles an evolving country: mule and horse-drawn carriages and buckboards turn into automobiles, an agrarian economy becomes financialized. Even the advent of American football is described. Inequality and war are two things that remain constant. Of the latter, Faulkner says, regarding the men returning from combat: “…with only a third of life over, to know now that they had already experienced their greatest experience, and now to find that the world for which they had so endured and risked was in their absence so altered out of recognition by the ones who had stayed safe at home as to have no place for them in it anymore.�

The Mansion is the most overt of the three books in its anti-racism. The KKK and the lesser known Silver Shirts are mentioned fairly frequently. Faulkner is never heavy-handed but allows bigotry to appear senseless on its own account.

The Mansion also features politics more prominently. A member of the Snopes clan, Clarence, is a state senator and has potential in Washington. This corrupt character is not even close to being the most depraved of the Snopes, but he is used to represent most politicians; and we mustn’t forget this prescient statement: “Politics and political office are not the method and means by which we can govern ourselves in peace and dignity and honor and security, but instead are our national refuge for our incompetents who have failed at every other occupation by means of which they might make a living for themselves and their families.�

Pessimistic sentiments are prevalent as the main catastrophe from The Town, a suicide, is revisited. Here's a bleak example: “You are happy when your life is filled, and any life is filled when it is so busy living from moment to moment that it has no time over to remember yesterday or dread tomorrow. Which of course couldn’t last.�

More than racism, bigotry, misogyny, politics, or philosophy, The Mansion is about the superstitious and sanctimonious fools and foolishness that typically make up a town like Jefferson, MS—or a county like his fictitious Yoknapatawpha. Only a few characters, Charles Mallison, Gavin Stevens, VK Ratliff, and Linda Snopes, provide us with freethinking mouthpieces for the author. Public sentiment dictates a lot of what happens over the course of the lives of these characters and others. We see what “Main Street� has to offer, and generally, it is not good.

The Mansion has Faulkner jabbing at the good old U.S. of A.: for all its backwardness, for all its bull pucky, but he is not making fun of it. He’s lamenting human frailty and folly. He speaks of the doom of war, the carnage; but he’s speaking as one of those watching the men return home—the men injured in mind and body. It is amazing how the voice of the author can feel like that of a large group: a community, a town, a county, or even a country.

The novel is not all grim. There is some good advice: “Don’t ever waste time regretting errors. Just don’t forget them.� There are sensible, good-hearted characters. But there are hard truths, and there is much cynicism: “Illusionees”—those who believe that “honor and justice and decency would prevail just because they were honorable just and decent.�

It is in this last book that we truly see what Snopes represents. The “Sn� sound in the name is no coincidence (sounds like snake). The family, the name, and even all the individual Snopeses come to represent all the greedy philistines in all the world.
]]> 6582120 This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

]]> 256 Edgar Saltus J 5 favorites
Starting with the Samkhya of Hinduism, to Buddha and Pyrrho, touching on Jesus, generally skipping medieval tomfoolery, and on into modern history, Saltus gives insights on the major themes of skepticism. He has the objectivity to admonish dogmatic atheists as much as shallow optimists and religious zealots.

He never lingers too long on one figure or on any one school. He is at ease discussing poets, emperors, philosophers, and charlatans. His vocabulary is voluminous, and his prose is stellar.]]> 3.97
author: Edgar Saltus
name: J
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/24
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: favorites
review:
Nothing less than a particular and vivid history of thought, up to the last portion of the 19th century, this scholarly look at atheists, agnostics, great thinkers, philosophers, and poets hurdles through centuries with the ease and grace of a gazelle in tall grass. That Saltus is an obscure writer should be considered a tragedy.

Starting with the Samkhya of Hinduism, to Buddha and Pyrrho, touching on Jesus, generally skipping medieval tomfoolery, and on into modern history, Saltus gives insights on the major themes of skepticism. He has the objectivity to admonish dogmatic atheists as much as shallow optimists and religious zealots.

He never lingers too long on one figure or on any one school. He is at ease discussing poets, emperors, philosophers, and charlatans. His vocabulary is voluminous, and his prose is stellar.
]]> 2691694 128 Lao Tzu 1889119822 J 4 3.90 -350
author: Lao Tzu
name: J
average rating: 3.90
book published: -350
rating: 4
read at: 2018/01/04
date added: 2024/07/11
shelves:
review:
I was a grasshopper reading this.
]]> 77425 "[O'Brian's] Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today's putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade." —David Mamet, New York Times

Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy—and a treacherous disease that decimates the crew.]]> 350 Patrick O'Brian 039330812X J 5 4.40 1978
author: Patrick O'Brian
name: J
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/06
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 3836
With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible."]]> 1023 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra J 3 3.86 1615
author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
name: J
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1615
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 5759 218 Chuck Palahniuk 0393327345 J 3
This is not a bad book. There are some memorable lines, but the repetition gets irritating; even though it's a stylistic choice and works to some extent. The nihilism is far less biting than I remember. Of course, I am more jaded.]]> 4.19 1996
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: J
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2020/02/06
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
review:
This was disappointing because my 20 year old self was easier to impress and so loved the movie. Or was the movie better than the book? Maybe... I'll have to go back and watch the film again. Another Palahniuk novel, Choke, left me feeling the same--unimpressed.

This is not a bad book. There are some memorable lines, but the repetition gets irritating; even though it's a stylistic choice and works to some extent. The nihilism is far less biting than I remember. Of course, I am more jaded.
]]> 656
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.


Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.]]> 1392 Leo Tolstoy 0192833987 J 5
So many characters fill the nearly 1400 pages, and it takes focus to keep up and thoroughly enjoy the mastery. It's well worth the effort, if only to cross this behemoth off your list.

War and Peace is historical fiction at its finest. It uses the overwhelming complexity of Napoleon's advance and retreat from Russia to display human fatuity and vanity, perseverance and selflessness. It is a model for all other novels of its kind.

In the epilogue, we find Tolstoy dipping his toe into metaphysics. This is the weakest portion but still quite intriguing. He was a fine philosopher as well as a prodigious storyteller, like all the great writers.]]> 4.14 1869
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: J
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1869
rating: 5
read at: 2019/05/30
date added: 2024/06/26
shelves:
review:
Leo Tolstoy's narrative power in War and Peace is the closest thing to the voice of god in literature. When he is describing events involving characters such as Pierre, Natasha, and Prince Andre, as a fairly standard 3rd person, omniscient narrator, it is merely the voice of A god. When he steps back and uses an objective lens and sketches the movements and grand events involving Napoleon and the Czar, entire peoples, the reader must become monotheistic, for this is the voice of the one true Deity.

So many characters fill the nearly 1400 pages, and it takes focus to keep up and thoroughly enjoy the mastery. It's well worth the effort, if only to cross this behemoth off your list.

War and Peace is historical fiction at its finest. It uses the overwhelming complexity of Napoleon's advance and retreat from Russia to display human fatuity and vanity, perseverance and selflessness. It is a model for all other novels of its kind.

In the epilogue, we find Tolstoy dipping his toe into metaphysics. This is the weakest portion but still quite intriguing. He was a fine philosopher as well as a prodigious storyteller, like all the great writers.
]]> 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 J 5 favorites 4.08 1886
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: J
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1886
rating: 5
read at: 1999/01/01
date added: 2024/06/26
shelves: favorites
review:
A towering achievement in short fiction.
]]> 5129 Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine� (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune]]> 268 Aldous Huxley 0060929871 J 4
A culture of instant gratification, we've heard it all.

Are we losing appreciation for art? Is there more solipsism? Are we weak, embarrassing, despicable?

But we have plenty of Soma, and we sing our nursery rhymes. Maybe we are on our way out? Probably not soon enough, but we can still dream.]]> 3.99 1932
author: Aldous Huxley
name: J
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at: 2011/01/01
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
review:
Huxley is the soothsayer everyone thought Orwell to be. His tale of future apathy and shallowness has come true. We are the brave new world, neither brave nor all that new, except maybe for our gadgets.

A culture of instant gratification, we've heard it all.

Are we losing appreciation for art? Is there more solipsism? Are we weak, embarrassing, despicable?

But we have plenty of Soma, and we sing our nursery rhymes. Maybe we are on our way out? Probably not soon enough, but we can still dream.
]]> 221524
1. The New Advocate
2. A Country Doctor
3. Up in the Gallery
4. A Leaf from an Old Manuscript
5. Before the Law
6. Jackals and Arabs
7. A Visit to the Mine
8. The Next Village
9. A Message from the Emperor
10. A Problem for the Father of the Family
11. Eleven Sons
12. A Fratricide
13. A Dream
14. Report to the Academy]]> 92 Franz Kafka 8090217141 J 0 to-read 3.72 1918
author: Franz Kafka
name: J
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1918
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10975 366 William Faulkner J 5
Mostly, the Russian polyglot did not give good reasons for his distaste for these authors. Of Camus he said, "I dislike him."

He also derided Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol, fellow Russian luminaries, so take Vlad's insults for what they're worth.

At any rate, this corncobby chronicle IS a masterpiece. Lauded for its innovation and often given up on for its difficulty, The Sound and the Fury is probably Faulkner's most famous work. The catchy title doesn't hurt, taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Since the tale of life is told by an idiot in Macbeth, Faulkner's narrator for the first section is a mentally disabled man named Benjamin.

The book is split into four sections which hearken Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Though the weather remains roughly the same throughout the novel, the writing begins like the tumult of a Winter blizzard—the low visibility in Ben's narration, to the ruminative and somber Spring—Quentin’s point of view at college, to the harsh and oppressively hot Summer of Jason IV’s bitterness, and finally to a 3rd person narrator in the fourth section, a clear vision of events not without the knowledge of the coming cold and barren months, the wholly lucid decay of Autumn.

Time flashes back and forth rapidly in Benji's mind. He has no concept of it. What he has a concept of is order, routine, sameness. Benji's disorientation amidst chaos represents the Compson family's bewilderment at their slow decline. Ben is one of Jason III and Caroline Compson’s children. The other children are Quentin, Candace, and Jason IV. Other characters are the womanizing ne'er-do-well, Uncle Maury, and the black servants: Dilsey, Roskus, T.P., Luster, Versh and Frony. We also meet Jason and Caroline's granddaughter, Miss Quentin, Candace’s illegitimate child.

The reason to mention all these characters is that they are almost all well developed in the 326 pages allotted. Another key point is that there are two Jasons and two Quentins. Add to this that the Compsons, later chronologically, live next to a golf course and often hear golfers calling, “Caddie� (Candace goes by Caddy most of the book), and you can see how there can be confusion, especially in the first section.

While reading that particularly arduous first part, entitled April 7th, 1928, keep in mind that things unclear will be illuminated later. By the time the fourth section is read, the high degree of difficulty proclaimed by some may seem exaggerated.

But why should we read this tragic tale from the Deep South? For one thing, the clever pessimistic metaphors: "...all men are just accumulations...dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away..." And this one, “A man is the sum of his misfortunes.�

It's typical of this author to write about a once powerful southern family succumbing to the changing times, losing hold or hanging on too tightly to their ideals and ideas of life in a post Civil War world. Incest is suggested, and the betrayals within the family, the unavoidable revenges, are explicitly described. Honor is dealt with sardonically, and the typical is lifted to a higher realm of art.

When reading some parts, mainly in the first two sections, things may seem cloudy, but then you glean a little something, and a little more, and because of the cadence and the abstruseness, those bits you glean burrow deeper into you than if they’d been told in some conventional manner. It seems you are being let in on a deep secret of humanity, and even though maybe you know you haven't really learned any secrets, that feeling way down deep is worth something; it becomes the knowledge of something profound about human beings, about how they don't really know much that is deep or profound.

More nihilism: "...man is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him…he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card—no man ever does that under the first fury of despair…he does it only when he has realized that even the despair…is not particularly important to the dark dice-man.�

Faulkner thinks that the odds are stacked against us. We know we will die, but that is not the worst of it. The worst is that the world that has stacked the odds doesn’t even have pity for our despair and sorrow, our inevitable decay and death.

There is suicide, alcoholism, hypochondria, cruelty, betrayal, castration and plenty of death. Quite a lot of trouble for a relatively short book. Faulkner wanted to cover as many of the timeless struggles of humanity that he could. Here is a great bit about desire, as the neutered Benji is described as, “…trying to want something he couldn’t even remember he didn’t and couldn’t want any longer.�

Jason IV is coldhearted, scheming, mean, and miserable. He is the narrator for the third section, which up to that point is described in the most accessible prose. Despite his mendacity and malevolence, when Jason thinks back on some of the decisions of his father and the Compson clan in general, the reader sees that he is right about a few things. Benjamin probably should have been sent to an asylum. They probably should not have sent Quentin to Harvard with the money from selling 40 acres of pasture.

Faulkner’s use of southern dialect and his spelling of words to mimic the speech of the place and time are added layers and fit the book. The third person narrator who tells the fourth and final part is more eloquent and clear than the previous chroniclers. When this narrator describes Benji’s crying, something the unfortunate lunatic does throughout the book, poetry arises: “But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.� Here the Bible is recalled, more specifically its most pessimistic book, Ecclesiastes. The last bit, “under the sun,� is the motif of that book from the Tanakh, repeated many times, and used by the narrator, said to be King Solomon, as a way to convey the frivolity of everything humans do (under the sun).

Throughout the novel Dilsey, who cooks and cleans for the Compsons and whose children look after Benji, can be seen as a glimmer of redemption. She faces her struggles doggedly and manages to find some solace and joy through church or her children, life as it is. But Faulkner never flinches, and redemption is not his theme; any bit of rectification occurs as haphazardly, yet ineluctably, as the tragedy does. In the end, Faulkner’s realism appears pessimistic because it is so real; that is also why it is so good.]]> 3.86 1929
author: William Faulkner
name: J
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/31
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves:
review:
Vladimir Nabokov said of William Faulkner, "A writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion." But Nabokov was well-known as a thorny critic, and often Nobel Prize winners were his targets: Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and the Southern Gothic master in question.

Mostly, the Russian polyglot did not give good reasons for his distaste for these authors. Of Camus he said, "I dislike him."

He also derided Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol, fellow Russian luminaries, so take Vlad's insults for what they're worth.

At any rate, this corncobby chronicle IS a masterpiece. Lauded for its innovation and often given up on for its difficulty, The Sound and the Fury is probably Faulkner's most famous work. The catchy title doesn't hurt, taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Since the tale of life is told by an idiot in Macbeth, Faulkner's narrator for the first section is a mentally disabled man named Benjamin.

The book is split into four sections which hearken Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Though the weather remains roughly the same throughout the novel, the writing begins like the tumult of a Winter blizzard—the low visibility in Ben's narration, to the ruminative and somber Spring—Quentin’s point of view at college, to the harsh and oppressively hot Summer of Jason IV’s bitterness, and finally to a 3rd person narrator in the fourth section, a clear vision of events not without the knowledge of the coming cold and barren months, the wholly lucid decay of Autumn.

Time flashes back and forth rapidly in Benji's mind. He has no concept of it. What he has a concept of is order, routine, sameness. Benji's disorientation amidst chaos represents the Compson family's bewilderment at their slow decline. Ben is one of Jason III and Caroline Compson’s children. The other children are Quentin, Candace, and Jason IV. Other characters are the womanizing ne'er-do-well, Uncle Maury, and the black servants: Dilsey, Roskus, T.P., Luster, Versh and Frony. We also meet Jason and Caroline's granddaughter, Miss Quentin, Candace’s illegitimate child.

The reason to mention all these characters is that they are almost all well developed in the 326 pages allotted. Another key point is that there are two Jasons and two Quentins. Add to this that the Compsons, later chronologically, live next to a golf course and often hear golfers calling, “Caddie� (Candace goes by Caddy most of the book), and you can see how there can be confusion, especially in the first section.

While reading that particularly arduous first part, entitled April 7th, 1928, keep in mind that things unclear will be illuminated later. By the time the fourth section is read, the high degree of difficulty proclaimed by some may seem exaggerated.

But why should we read this tragic tale from the Deep South? For one thing, the clever pessimistic metaphors: "...all men are just accumulations...dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away..." And this one, “A man is the sum of his misfortunes.�

It's typical of this author to write about a once powerful southern family succumbing to the changing times, losing hold or hanging on too tightly to their ideals and ideas of life in a post Civil War world. Incest is suggested, and the betrayals within the family, the unavoidable revenges, are explicitly described. Honor is dealt with sardonically, and the typical is lifted to a higher realm of art.

When reading some parts, mainly in the first two sections, things may seem cloudy, but then you glean a little something, and a little more, and because of the cadence and the abstruseness, those bits you glean burrow deeper into you than if they’d been told in some conventional manner. It seems you are being let in on a deep secret of humanity, and even though maybe you know you haven't really learned any secrets, that feeling way down deep is worth something; it becomes the knowledge of something profound about human beings, about how they don't really know much that is deep or profound.

More nihilism: "...man is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him…he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card—no man ever does that under the first fury of despair…he does it only when he has realized that even the despair…is not particularly important to the dark dice-man.�

Faulkner thinks that the odds are stacked against us. We know we will die, but that is not the worst of it. The worst is that the world that has stacked the odds doesn’t even have pity for our despair and sorrow, our inevitable decay and death.

There is suicide, alcoholism, hypochondria, cruelty, betrayal, castration and plenty of death. Quite a lot of trouble for a relatively short book. Faulkner wanted to cover as many of the timeless struggles of humanity that he could. Here is a great bit about desire, as the neutered Benji is described as, “…trying to want something he couldn’t even remember he didn’t and couldn’t want any longer.�

Jason IV is coldhearted, scheming, mean, and miserable. He is the narrator for the third section, which up to that point is described in the most accessible prose. Despite his mendacity and malevolence, when Jason thinks back on some of the decisions of his father and the Compson clan in general, the reader sees that he is right about a few things. Benjamin probably should have been sent to an asylum. They probably should not have sent Quentin to Harvard with the money from selling 40 acres of pasture.

Faulkner’s use of southern dialect and his spelling of words to mimic the speech of the place and time are added layers and fit the book. The third person narrator who tells the fourth and final part is more eloquent and clear than the previous chroniclers. When this narrator describes Benji’s crying, something the unfortunate lunatic does throughout the book, poetry arises: “But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.� Here the Bible is recalled, more specifically its most pessimistic book, Ecclesiastes. The last bit, “under the sun,� is the motif of that book from the Tanakh, repeated many times, and used by the narrator, said to be King Solomon, as a way to convey the frivolity of everything humans do (under the sun).

Throughout the novel Dilsey, who cooks and cleans for the Compsons and whose children look after Benji, can be seen as a glimmer of redemption. She faces her struggles doggedly and manages to find some solace and joy through church or her children, life as it is. But Faulkner never flinches, and redemption is not his theme; any bit of rectification occurs as haphazardly, yet ineluctably, as the tragedy does. In the end, Faulkner’s realism appears pessimistic because it is so real; that is also why it is so good.
]]> 28686959 256 Norm Macdonald 0812993624 J 5
This is meta, it's satire, it's farcical, it's literary, it's biographical, it's autobiographical, it's fantasy and it's funny and fun.]]> 4.03 2016
author: Norm Macdonald
name: J
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:
It's one of the funniest books you'll ever read from one of the funniest folks who ever breathed.

This is meta, it's satire, it's farcical, it's literary, it's biographical, it's autobiographical, it's fantasy and it's funny and fun.
]]> 2122
This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress...

“A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times]]> 704 Ayn Rand J 2
There are some truths to be found: most people are made up of conglomerations of what they’ve heard from others. They let the words of others fill their heads and become their own. Original thought is rare; we frequently enshrine mediocrity; brilliance is often ignored and sometimes smashed.

The idea is that if everyone were true to their own integrity, the world would be a better place; this might be true. Many are greedy, selfish, and egotistical without an ounce of integrity. The book thinks integrity makes these undesirable qualities okay, makes people "real." Maybe it does. But this idea makes things rough for the poor bastards who were born passive, affable, or weak. And circumstances play a big part in many people’s lives, whether they are real people in Rand's eyes or not.

One can judge the quality of a book by comparing how many times it produces scoffs compared to chuckles. I chuckled a few times; I scoffed hundreds of times; I rolled my eyes by the minute. The tediousness of this prolixity is nearly unbearable. The characters seem to be motivated by something foreign to what lies at the heart of human volition. Their words and actions ring false. Their thoughts are preposterous.

Rand harps on the invalidity of touting service, sacrifice, and altruism as virtues. What about teachers? What about nurses? What about those in the food service industry: janitors, bartenders, clerks? What about soldiers? Without these “servants�, who are not really human in Rand’s view, a nation might have a bunch of “real� folks with integrity whose state could be dominated by a rival filled with servants. We’d have no decent restaurants or hospitals. We’d be a state of starving, sick people with loads of superfluous integrity and individualism living in filth.

Architecture presented as the highest art and as more important than music, the fact that Roark is the only man capable of building the buildings he builds, Roark seeing trees as merely lumber for man to transform into structures, Ellsworth Toohey’s nebulous reasons for the destruction of other men: these are just a few of the ridiculous things presented.

It is ironic that this monstrosity has been labeled and stamped by so many as a philosophical work. I can think of countless other pieces of literature, not often called philosophical, which carry so much more weight metaphysically, epistemologically, ethically, existentially, etc.

The version I read had a foreword written by Rand. In it, she mentioned Nietzsche, a philosopher she both seemed to admire and contradict. While Nietzsche’s brand of thought can be derided nearly as easily as hers, at least his writing style was inventive.

There is a speech by Toohey near the end that did strike me as something great. He condemns the average, the things humans have created that make the masses feel guilty for natural desires, and the obedient nature of most people; and it's done succinctly and eloquently, and this is Rand's voice at its most powerful. Still, even this bright spot is tarnished by the fact that the reaction by Peter Keating, no matter how much of a doormat Rand has made him, is devoid of reason and self-interest so unthinkably as to make the would-be poignant scene outlandish.

Let’s not forget that at the end of her life, Ayn Rand collected social security and relied on Medicare. This alone does not make her a hypocritical parasite, but at the very least, she was wrong.]]> 3.87 1943
author: Ayn Rand
name: J
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1943
rating: 2
read at: 2017/06/22
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves:
review:
The Fountainhead is not a great novel. Not philosophically, not literarily. The characters are unbelievable. The plot is at times entertaining but mostly boring and far-fetched, yet nauseatingly predictable. The dialogue is predominantly stilted. The vocabulary is monotonous. How many times must she use the word bromide?

There are some truths to be found: most people are made up of conglomerations of what they’ve heard from others. They let the words of others fill their heads and become their own. Original thought is rare; we frequently enshrine mediocrity; brilliance is often ignored and sometimes smashed.

The idea is that if everyone were true to their own integrity, the world would be a better place; this might be true. Many are greedy, selfish, and egotistical without an ounce of integrity. The book thinks integrity makes these undesirable qualities okay, makes people "real." Maybe it does. But this idea makes things rough for the poor bastards who were born passive, affable, or weak. And circumstances play a big part in many people’s lives, whether they are real people in Rand's eyes or not.

One can judge the quality of a book by comparing how many times it produces scoffs compared to chuckles. I chuckled a few times; I scoffed hundreds of times; I rolled my eyes by the minute. The tediousness of this prolixity is nearly unbearable. The characters seem to be motivated by something foreign to what lies at the heart of human volition. Their words and actions ring false. Their thoughts are preposterous.

Rand harps on the invalidity of touting service, sacrifice, and altruism as virtues. What about teachers? What about nurses? What about those in the food service industry: janitors, bartenders, clerks? What about soldiers? Without these “servants�, who are not really human in Rand’s view, a nation might have a bunch of “real� folks with integrity whose state could be dominated by a rival filled with servants. We’d have no decent restaurants or hospitals. We’d be a state of starving, sick people with loads of superfluous integrity and individualism living in filth.

Architecture presented as the highest art and as more important than music, the fact that Roark is the only man capable of building the buildings he builds, Roark seeing trees as merely lumber for man to transform into structures, Ellsworth Toohey’s nebulous reasons for the destruction of other men: these are just a few of the ridiculous things presented.

It is ironic that this monstrosity has been labeled and stamped by so many as a philosophical work. I can think of countless other pieces of literature, not often called philosophical, which carry so much more weight metaphysically, epistemologically, ethically, existentially, etc.

The version I read had a foreword written by Rand. In it, she mentioned Nietzsche, a philosopher she both seemed to admire and contradict. While Nietzsche’s brand of thought can be derided nearly as easily as hers, at least his writing style was inventive.

There is a speech by Toohey near the end that did strike me as something great. He condemns the average, the things humans have created that make the masses feel guilty for natural desires, and the obedient nature of most people; and it's done succinctly and eloquently, and this is Rand's voice at its most powerful. Still, even this bright spot is tarnished by the fact that the reaction by Peter Keating, no matter how much of a doormat Rand has made him, is devoid of reason and self-interest so unthinkably as to make the would-be poignant scene outlandish.

Let’s not forget that at the end of her life, Ayn Rand collected social security and relied on Medicare. This alone does not make her a hypocritical parasite, but at the very least, she was wrong.
]]>