Book Diary 2021

Subject: An idealistic doctor finds his principles compromised.

Subject: The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th-century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell.

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice.

For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they couldn't escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath.

He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.

Subject: Set on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, "A View from the Bridge" follows the cataclysmic downfall of Eddie Carbone, who spends his days as a hardworking longshoreman and his nights at home with his wife, Beatrice, and niece, Catherine.

Subject: The story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse.

Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.

It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism.

Why am I always looking at life through a window? And after it's all over I'm sick with myself because there is so little time left for me to read and write and think, and because I should know better than to drug my mind with this dishonest stuff that's aimed at the child in me.

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

Subject: A psychological study of the confluence of power, allegiance, innocence, and corruption among two brothers and a tramp.
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Quite absurd, much in the same of Pinter's Birthday Party, might be due another read in a couple of years. Got a few good chuckles out of me but I get the sneaky suspicion this might be better on a second go. Great writing actually just not very exciting, I'm just surprised these type of dialogue plays were quite popular once upon a time, then again they might still be in style haven't been to Broadway or anything.
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Subject: The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love, and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well. . . .

A certain simplicity is necessary for love. You have it. Keep it.It is a gift of God. Never to be gotten again once it is lost.

She used her husband as other folk do the Bible—for quotations. And the longer he was dead the harder she worked him. He now had something for all occasions—just like the Bible.

Upright we sat on the high bar stools; the music chattered, the pulse of life was clear and strong; it beat bravely in our hearts; the cheerlessness of the beastly furnished rooms that awaited us, the hopelessness of existence, was forgotten; the counter of "The Bar" was the Captain's bridge of the Ship of Life, and we were set once more for the open sea.

So there they sat on top of one another, the woman grown hysterical and the man in constant dread of losing his little job. If that happened he would be done for. He was already forty-five. No one would take him on again if he once got out of work. Such is the modern misery—formerly one went under slowly and there was always a chance still of coming up again—but in these days on the farther side of every dismissal yawns the abyss of permanent unemployment.

I wanted to say something, but I could not. It is difficult to find words when one really has something to say. And even if one knows the right words, then one is ashamed to say them. All these words belong to other, earlier centuries. Our time has not the words yet to express its feelings. We can only be offhand—anything else rings false.

I looked at the audience. They were people of every calling clerks, little business people, civil servants, a sprinkling of workers and lots of women. They sat there in the hot hall, leaning back or looking forward, row upon row, cheek by jowl, the torrent of words pouring over them, and it was curious different as they all were, the faces had all the same absent expression, a sleepy yearning look into the remoteness of some misty Fata Morgana; there was vacancy in it, and at the same time a supreme expectancy that obliterated everything—criticism, doubt, contradictions and questions, the obvious, the present, reality. He, up there, knew everything—had an answer for every question, a help for every need. It was good to trust oneself to him. It was good to have someone to think for one. It was good to believe.

Subject: A future technology makes it possible for cops to catch criminals before a crime is committed. John Anderton is accused of one such crime and sets out to prove his innocence.

Subject: generally interpreted as an allegory of the Communist revolution and "the revolution's misguided attempt to radically transform mankind."

Subject: The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage.

Subject: When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit his old home in London, he finds his family still living in the house. In the conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy.

Subject: It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth.
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Started well enough but tapered out miserably. This is my second and for all intents last reading of Heinlein, DNF Starship Troopers and this was a terrible drudge.
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Subject: the plot of Betrayal integrates different permutations of betrayal relating to a seven-year affair involving a married couple.
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Think I love Pinter :)
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Subject: A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

Contents:
The Minority Report
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale
Paycheck
Second Variety
The Eyes Have It

Subject: The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Subject:The Monk is the story of Ambrosio, a revered monk, torn between his spiritual vows and the temptations of physical pleasure.

Subject: George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality.

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

Subject: Over the course of a midsummer night in Fermanagh in 1890, an unsettled daughter of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy encourages her father's valet to seduce her.

Subject: Set in a society that has taken away pain and strife by converting to "Sameness", the novel follows a 12-year-old boy named Jonas who is selected to inherit the position of Receiver of Memory.
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Really good, will definitely be reading book#2... in the future.
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Subject: Don Juan in Hell consists of a philosophical debate between Don Juan, the Devil, Doña Ana and the Statue of Don Gonzalo, Ana's father looking on.

Subject: In a park, Sourin and Tchekalinsky discuss the strange behavior of their fellow officer Hermann. He seems obsessed with gambling, watching his friends play all night, though he never plays himself, until...

The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.

Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.

When cab drivers recognize me, he decided, it’s probably not in my mind. But when the heavens open and God speaks to me by name . . . that’s when the psychosis takes over. It would be hard to distinguish.

Knocking TV. It's a national pastime in itself. Think in your mind of all the homes, people sitting around saying, 'What's happened to this country? Where's the level of education gone? The morality?

Meg Merrilies
Old Meg she was a Gipsy,
And liv'd upon the Moors:
Her bed it was the brown heath turf,
And her house was out of doors.

Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants pods o' broom;
Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a churchyard tomb.

Her Brothers were the craggy hills,
Her Sisters larchen trees—
Alone with her great family
She liv'd as she did please.

No breakfast had she many a morn,
No dinner many a noon,
And 'stead of supper she would stare
Full hard against the Moon.

But every morn of woodbine fresh
She made her garlanding,
And every night the dark glen Yew
She wove, and she would sing.

And with her fingers old and brown
She plaited Mats o' Rushes,
And gave them to the Cottagers
She met among the Bushes.

Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen
And tall as Amazon:
An old red blanket cloak she wore;
A chip hat had she on.
God rest her aged bones somewhere—
She died full long agone!

To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Subject: In a society ruled by savagery, Kira left orphaned and physically flawed faces a frightening, uncertain future.

Subject: During the reign of Catherine the Great, the young Grinev sets out for his new career in the army.

Subject: In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic.

He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion’s stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come.

Subject: dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev.

I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.

We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.

How easy it is, Doctor, to be a philosopher on paper, and how difficult in real life!

Subject:In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time.

He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural. And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one's course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.

“Don't knock neurosis,” Silvia had said to him and he understood. Neurosis was a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path of life. Because beyond lay— Every schizophrenic knew what lay there. And every ex-schizophrenic, Jack thought, as he remembered his own episode.

Subject: World War III is raging - or so the millions of people crammed in their underground tanks believe. For fifteen years, subterranean humanity has been fed on daily broadcasts of a never-ending nuclear destruction, sustained by a belief in the all powerful Protector.

Subject: Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around.

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly,I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable;
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Yes, they are all assholes.
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I remember something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: 'For a penny,' the Buddha said, 'I can board a ferry and do that.' It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all.

Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal bars or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere, and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anyhow, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it was a good idea.

What Carl Dondero had not thought out clearly is the ominous fact that Los Angeles is the nut capital of the world; that every religious, paranormal, and occult group originates there and draws its followers there; that Nicholas, were he to resettle in the southland, would be exposed to other people like himself and hence would probably worsen rather than mend.Nicholas would be moving to an area which ill defined the quality of sanity. What could we expect from Nicholas, if he were exposed to LA? Valis, most likely, would emerge into the open as Nicholas’s meager contact with reality dwindled out of existence entirely.

The incredible part is not that I heard Valis, listened to Valis, and moved here, but that without him, or them, I wouldn’t have contemplated it,let alone done it. Phil, the idea of leaving Berkeley, quitting my job with Herb Jackman—it wouldn’t even have entered my mind.” “Yeah, that is the incredible part,” I agreed. He was right. It said something about the normal trajectory of human existence, Homo unimpeded: allowed to trudge out his circular course, like a wedge of dead rock circling a dead sun, mindless and purposeless, deaf to the universe at
large, as blind as it was cold. Something into which no new idea ever came.
Barred forever from originality. It made you stop and reflect.

Subject: Alfred Bester imagines a future in which people "jaunte" a thousand miles with a single thought, where the rich barricade themselves in labyrinths and protect themselves with radioactive hitmen—and where an inarticulate outcast is the most valuable and dangerous man alive.

Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.

There are many women in the world as attractive as Ruth Stamm. But the expression they wear for the world betrays them. Their faces are arrogant, or petulant, or sensuous. That is all right because their desirability makes up for it, and you know they will be good for a little time and when you have grown accustomed to the beauty, there will be just the arrogance or the petulance left.

And I really can't tell you much more about Timmy. I liked him and had hopes for him. But he lacked motivation. That seems to be the trouble with too many of the children lately. No motivation. They see no goal worth working for. They no longer have any dreams. They are content with the manufactured dreams of N.B.C. and Columbia.

You sensed that Fitz was a man who would not be restrained by the things that restrain the rest of us. He had proved in the camp that he didn't give a damn what people thought of him. He depended on himself to an almost psychopathic extent. It made you feel helpless in trying to deal with him. You could think of no appeal that would work. He couldn't be scared or reasoned with. He was as primitive and functional as the design of an ax. He could not even be anticipated, because his logic was not of normal pattern. And then, too, there was the startling physical strength.

I do not try to excuse it. Until then she had had no special appeal to me. I can try to explain it. It is an urgency that comes at times of danger. It is something deep in the blood, that urgency. It is a message from the blood. You may die. Live this once more, this last time. Or it may be more complicated. There may be defiance in it. Your answer to the blackness that wants to swallow you. To leave this one thing behind you. To perform this act which may leave a life behind you, the only possible guarantee of immortality in any form.When catastrophe strikes cities, people learn of this basal urge. Men and women in war know it. It is present in great intensity in many kinds of sickness. Men and women are triggered by danger, and they lie together in a hungry quickness in the cellars of bombed houses, behind the brush of mountain trails, in lifeboats, on forgotten beaches, on the grounds of sanitariums.

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Easily the worst book I have read this year.
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Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

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Reads more like a fictional essay in male and legislative impotence :/
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