Books: Last Book You Read and Rate It

[EXTRAS]

Dubliners by James Joyce

I'd recommend it. Beauty in small snippets of everyday life.

 

[Thucydides]

Depressing book, but came away with knowledge on how the situation has gotten as tense as it has.

shows clearly how many civil wars have started , and how they happen by slow degrees. USA seems to be very close to civil war , but the end offers a bit of hope and solutions - one of the main ones being getting big pockets out of funding elections as they tend to be more extreme . Other countries (Canada) have done this to great success .

interesting and timely book. I’d recommend if you have an interest in world affairs and current events. It’s a short read, too about 180 pages or so.

8.5/10

 

[Chili]

"We never had a pot to piss in when I was small, but my parents left me great riches in the form of a childhood that's travelled with me down every path I have taken."

Interesting approach to this autobiography, there's alot of self analysis as he tells his life story. He felt that the key to succeeding was always knowing who he was. He grew up on Cat Island in the Bahamas. No cars, phones, plumbing. Shoes were something worn to church on Sunday. Then at age 10 his family moved to Nassau and at 15 he left the islands to live with his brother in Florida and a completely different world. In retrospect, he felt that his early years gave him a foundation to deal with the obstacles and challenges he would face.

One of my favorite films of his was Lilies of the Field. One of several jobs he worked at before he made it as an actor was carpenter's helper. He had also worked with his father in law (who was a master bricklayer) so I understand the appeal of that role which won him an Oscar.

He didn't have a lot of education when he was young, doesn't come through here, he came across as well read and articulate. Enjoyed the book.

 

[EXTRAS]

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I want to say that it may have been a terrible translation, but this book seemed to have all kinds of things wrong. Poorly written and poorly structured. I had high hopes from the synopsis, and it's goodreads rating. 1.5/5

 

[Chili]

Interesting look at the life of Ernest Hemingway by Leicester, his younger brother (by 16 years). And what a life! He would have enlisted in WWI but was not accepted because of his eyesight. So he joined the Red Cross and was sent to Italy. While he was distributing cigarettes and chocolate in a trench, a mortar shell landed nearby and killed one man, injuring the other three, including Ernest. Despite his injuries (200+ cuts below the knees) he picked up one of the badly injured and carried him to the rear. EH spent three months in hospital recovering. Alot of A Farewell to Arms seems to be true from his experiences in WWI. One of the first places he was published were articles for the Toronto Star. He lived in Toronto for a while and his first son John (aka Bumby) was born there. EH enjoyed fishing, hunting, boxing, Leicester tells some good stories, especially about their deep sea fishing together on Ernest's boat Pilar.

Ernest made four trips to Spain to cover that civil war as a correspondent. Got a lot of knowledge that helped in writing For Whom The Bell Tolls. WWII and of course Ernest had to be there. Leicester was also there and had some good stories of when they were able to meet up. Eventually when their health was on the serious decline both Ernest and Leicester took their own lives. Many years before, their father Dr. Clarence Hemingway had done the same.

Too bad Ernest didn't write an autobiography, although there appear to be some books of his letters. Enjoyed this book, well written, Ernest wasn't the only writer in the family.

I'm always interested in what someone like EH enjoyed reading. These are some of the writers/books he recommended to Leicester: Huck Finn, Kipling, Stephen Crane, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Joyce, Henry James, de Maupassant, Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Stendahl, Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks).

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage (1967) - Don't feel like writing a long review, but it's very good and anyone who enjoyed the movie would enjoy the novel. The only tiny knock that I have against the book is that it doesn't delve enough into its major revelation (and revelation here is important, not twist) and instead gives kind of scattered anecdotes that never make much of an impression in building up to that revelation. Still, great prose and a very good story. It's always fun to watch a film and read its book as I always like to notice what/where the filmmaker cut. Campion did great here.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Mercure by Amelie Nothomb (2000) - Way too much dialogue for such a short piece. Not great.

You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames (2012) - Great awareness of the page, too little of prose besides two or three electric lines.

 

[Thucydides]

Excellent book. The enemy was the west all along . Shows how the KGB took advantage of the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union and put Putin into power . Once that was complete they very slowly took control of the courts , media , and the countries resources which they used to make themselves wildly rich , and used what was left to sow chaos in the west by funneling money to far right and far left groups all over Europe trying to cause chaos in the EU and the USA.

Probably the best book I’ve read detailing the overview of the current situation.

9/10

 

[Thucydides]

Kierkegaard makes the case for God, arguing that he didn’t come into existence as a part of history, but instead, God is eternal and we discovered him, the same way we stumbled upon gravity, the color purple , and other things that are undeniably true.

Took me a long time to read this one. It’s dense, but rewarding if philosophical thinking is something you’re interested in .

8/10

 

[Thucydides]

page after page after page of atrocity. Unlike most world war 2 books I’ve read that start from the outside and go in, this one starts from the inside and works its way out. A fascinating read and I feel like I walked away with a great grasp on the events that led to the war . I would recommend.

 

[sr edler]

View attachment 523342

Kierkegaard makes the case for God, arguing that he didn’t come into existence as a part of history, but instead, God is eternal and we discovered him, the same way we stumbled upon gravity, the color purple , and other things that are undeniably true.

Took me a long time to read this one. It’s dense, but rewarding if philosophical thinking is something you’re interested in .

8/10

Kierkegaard means "Churchyard" in English, perhaps (to some people) a funny name for the perceived grandfather of existential anguish. For some reason, for the longest time, I thought Kierkegaard was Norwegian despite his very Danish sounding name, but I guess it's not technically wrong if we consider the union, just factually and practically wrong. Otherwise I think his most central work on religion is Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) written under the pen name John of Silence, though I haven't read that.

 

[Thucydides]

Kierkegaard means "Churchyard" in English, perhaps (to some people) a funny name for the perceived grandfather of existential anguish. For some reason, for the longest time, I thought Kierkegaard was Norwegian despite his very Danish sounding name, but I guess it's not technically wrong if we consider the union, just factually and practically wrong. Otherwise I think his most central work on religion is Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) written under the pen name John of Silence, though I haven't read that.

I’ve read it, he weaves Christianity in through much of his philosophical arguments. Fear and Trembling & his big one, Either/or are his best out of the few I’ve read .

 

[EXTRAS]

South of the border, west of the sun
And
Norwegian Wood

By Murakami

Given everything I'd heard about Murakami's writing I expected more. South of the border was pretty bad and Norwegian wood was okay.

Both books are in first person, so I may try one of his in 3rd person to see if I prefer him in that voice.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins (1970) Didn't end up liking it, unfortunately. I thought I would. The work is so dialogue heavy that it kind of took me out of it. Also, I thought it moved too slow despite the dialogue being use repeatedly to advance the plot. I think it would have worked better with less characters and I simply lost interest. It just kind of lagged.

 

[kihei]

Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantam Gravity by Carlo Rovelli

Even though Einstein had long since published his ground-breaking papers on relativity, I grew up and largely remain in a Newtonian universe, Pretty much we all do. In such a universe there are laws and facts and formulas and theories that all purport to show us that we live in a normal, comprehensible reality, where right angles are always 90 degrees, time and space are real; objects are dependably "there," and everything has a clear cause and effect. Then came quantam physics, which even many scientists find hard to understand, and everything changed. And that's the interesting part. Newton and I never got along (science and math were by far my worst subjects) and reality was so certain it held no mystery. I never thought to challenge it; why would I?--I mean, I would have flunked high school physics (and graduation) without the merciful intervention of a nun not previously known for her kindness. Quantam physics exploded the Newtonian assumptions completely. Carlo Rovelli in a physicist but also a Renaissance thinker who does as good a job of explaining some the implications of this new model as any other physicist out there.

Reality is indeed not what it seems. I wouldn't claim to suggest that I understand how the theory works but some of the possiblities are fascinating. As a predictive tool, its track record has been very close to flawless. Yet its implications are mind-boggling. Anyway, according to some theories related to quantam physics:

Time may not exist;
Space may not exist;
Space/time may not exist;
There may be as many as eleven dimensions, most of them all curled up;
All that is certain in a Newtonian universe is uncertain in a quantam universe;
The future can effect the present;
The moon isn't there if you are not looking at it; neither is your partner, your dog or your favourite hockey team;
The same particle can be in two places at the same time;
Something indeed can be created from nothing, making a god or gods a complete redundancy;
There may be infinite universes (and infinite versions of you);
We can now at least theorize what happened before the Big Bang;
In one famous experiment, a cat can be both dead and alive simultaneously. And it makes sense, given the theory;
Consciousness may be a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental property of reality;
Relational events may be more fundamental than matter;
At a certain point near the end, our universe may forget how big it is;
The Big Bang may really have been the Big Bump, a eons-long reoccuring process of universe creation that may have already happened gazillions of times;
Some other universes may have bumped into ours, a possibility being currently investigated..

The biggest revelation that Rovelli talks about has to do with one of the main differences between the Newtonian and Einstein models and the Quantam model: what ever reality is, it requires an observer. Without said observer, there may be no reality beyond the micro-micro level, a quantam soup of fields, particles and wave functions. In fact, ultimate reality may be most closely related to the wave function, an entity that only collapses into something when it is observed. However, the observer also influences what he/she is perceiving; therefore observer and experiment are always linked. In a way that is unavoidable, the two are entertwined in what is ultimately a quantam relationship.

Specifically Rovelli focuses on quantam gravity, which doesn't yet have a proven theory, but such a theory is physicists' Holy Grail. Why? Because such a theory would make it so that Eistein's laws of the "very big" would prove compatible with quantam theory's laws of the "very small." At present, the two don't quite fit together and gravity is the key to the possibility that they might. While scientists aren't there yet, the feeling is that they are getting closer. In short, reality is now the stuff of science fiction, and pretty wild science fiction at that.

 

[kihei]

South of the border, west of the sun
And
Norwegian Wood

By Murakami

Given everything I'd heard about Murakami's writing I expected more. South of the border was pretty bad and Norwegian wood was okay.

Both books are in first person, so I may try one of his in 3rd person to see if I prefer him in that voice.

Loved Norwegian Wood, also the movie adaptation. Other Murakami definitely worth a try.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

8/10

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri (2014) - I really enjoyed this. Following the afterlife thoughts/observations of a destitute man, the thing I enjoyed most was the structure of the writing. While the narrative plays out in a fairly linear fashion, I liked how hazy and stringy the prose played out and thought it complemented what I perceived as the spirit of the book pretty well. It's not something that really knocks you out with singular/quotable sentences but just a well-crafted little story that seems to emanate from a pretty sensitive place.

While the core points of the book are fairly common (the hardships of the working class and the homeless, the lack of care and dignity which can come from that, etc.) I didn't find them presented in too maudlin a fashion though I could have done without the long Buddhism bit halfway throughout the story as I didn't feel like it added much to the story either artistically or anthropologically. Though I'm sure an academic paper could be a blast, it was a kind of by-the-numbers presentation that didn't strike me as particularly insightful, interesting or beautiful and really was just kind of bland and kind of took the sails of what was supposed to be an impactful event.

A nice read and I'd recommend it for both casual and serious readers. It was my first hardcover in I don't know how long.

 

[Thucydides]

 

[Thucydides]

Nobody likes being clowned , especially the national police force whose job is to serve and protect its citizens , but in my opinion, that is what happened here. Wortman made the RCMP look dumb and incompetent and because of this the crazy conspiracy theories started to come out . This book is full of them .

If you’ve never heard of this case, this book does cover the massacre quite well. There’s a little info on the perpetrator , but there’s a whole lot of filler and an author who loves to hear himself talk. It’s repetitive and I think just a cash grab by author and publisher .

There is a story here . A good one, but it’s not conspiracy theories , it’s generational trauma and its effect on humans . It’s personality disorders and a culture that is in desperate need of a wake up call.

I wouldn’t recommend . I’ve followed this case super super closely , and you’d get more out of reading the foundational documents released by the mass casualty commission than you would this book.

3/10

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

A fun little ghost story. 4/5

 

[Spring in Fialta]

A Regicide by Alain Robbe-Grillet (written in '49, published in '78) - Loved it, though I didn't understand any of the tricks besides on a surface level, which is my usual with that author. It was initially denied when he had first submitted a draft in the late 40s but became more confident in his current, ever so slightly less avant-garde work that came just a little later. In its opening notes, he deems it a less accessible work than his subsequent novels though I kind of disagree. A bit less rigid and circular than stuff like Jealousy, the format is still fairly straight forward yet still without reason and conclusion.

Two stories intertwine, both set on remote islands without prospect and without love. One, modern, concerns Boris, a statistician who, out of of some random headache, decides he should murder the symbolic king of his island, suspected to be used by agile politics. The other, which both teases and pulls back on the idea that its counterpart are linked, deals with an - ancient? - celibate and minimalist people living away from Earth, but enamored with suspicious mermaids.

This summary sounds a lot more bizarre than its actual readings and I'm realizing now how out there the plot's surface is. But I never cared. It's never why I read Robbe-Grillet's stuff. I'm sure he's thinking his books on a far deeper level but my biggest perk is the joy I get from his very clean sentences. Polished and in order, there is nothing sloppy about what he does and reading his novels is like an effortless afternoon skate on some palace's pond. When the words and their order are that pleasurable, who the hell cares if he had anything to share? I don't. Reading him is like watching someone build an unbreakable Janga tower that you wouldn't even want to touch in the first place.

 

[Thucydides]

I’ve read a ton of these books for professional purposes lately -

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928) -

...

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov (Written in '39, published in '86) - The proto-Lolita. Barely a novella (novelette would be more like it) the plot is largely the same as Lolita (pedophile marries a young girl's mother to get close to the kid and the mother dies) but with significant differences from the developed novel. As the work is much shorter, the differences (obviously) have to do with things simply not being as developed/more condensed than the final product. There are no antagonists to the antagonist, no long trips across America, no gum-snapping snark, no major soliloquy, no sin save the original one and barely any humor. The story is timeless and nameless, which unless the physical location is of major importance to either plot and spirit, is something that I always think is the right decision (and in Lolita, America itself is very much important to the piece). The Enchanter very much focuses on the bare essential and is bereft of Nabokov's (not always fruitful) digressions: Man sees child at the park - Man games it and marries mother - Mother dies - Man gets overzealous and spooks child - Man dies. That last bit is the best of the book (and radically different from the novel that came 20 years later) and is infused with Nabokov's incomparable lyricism while playing out as far more grotesque (and less maudlin) than the Lolita version.

It was a really enjoyable read and does away with a lot that I thought didn't work as much in Lolita (a really good book with dynamic moments but I prefer by far some of his other stuff) and would be an interesting read for anyone who's into lyricism and/or Lolita. It works as more than a curiosity piece. It's superbly written in and of itself.