Book Diary 2015

First mystery novel ever and as one does when reading such novels he tries to find out who the mastermind is right; well I failed lol I overcompensated and attributed it to more than one person for someone to carry out such subtle killings and have the agility to remove the little Indian dolls off the table one by one deserves applause. Reading I'm like break those mofo dolls, burn down the house don't this guy or gal the satisfaction but alas...

Shipwrecked and castaway with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker the young protagonist Piscine Molitor ″Pi″ Patel from Pondicherry India comes of age in the most harsh conditions and resembles something more of the beast he manages to tame. Lucid and eclectic I thoroughly enjoyed this misadventure. On the verge of death, hopeless from the vastness of the ocean and the universe Pi issues these words "It was daylight that brought my protest: "No! No! No! My suffering does matter. I want to live! I can't help but mix my life with that of the universe. Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness-how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view I have of things? This peephole is all I've got!"

I found this space adventure fairly implausible even with a decent suspension of disbelief but I'm sure others less cynical than myself would be able to push on. However, the book also lacked an interesting character( a businessman narrator, Mr. Bedford, and an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor were dull and cliche)In the end anti climatic and overall a bore.

Elizabeth the vivacious heroine sane and likable captured my imagination with her intelligence, vulnerability and effervescence. My emotions twisted and changed has much as the fickle characters in this great read. The English setting muddy, gay and prideful in a time of Victorian civility laced with superciliousness and prejudices light up the mind in this pompous era. Love and marriage are the main theme, conjectures and letters the wonderful motifs which drive the plot.

An almost brilliant dystopian novel by the man with the bad-ass name Aldous Huxley. Wonderfully written in many areas but also long-winded and convoluted in others. The novel opens in London in A.F 632(After Ford) where people are mass produced by ectogenesis,conditioned to their caste and manipulated to achieve societal“happiness” under the ruling World State.

A great collection of short stories. J.D Salinger's style of writing captures the essence of the post- war WW2 materialism and jingoism in America has he saw it. "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor" and "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" are simply top class.

Quote:

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”
“I can’t say.”

"Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness,sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away."

Jam smack in the middle of 1970's New York we are introduced to Fonny and Tish, two childhood friends now lovers who live right across the street from each other. Looking to escape their negative surroundings they get engaged and search for a loft for themselves away from their dysfunctional families where they can form a life for themselves. This comes crashing down when Fonny gets thrown in jail on a rape charge done on the whim of a racist cop. Most of the story entails a pregnant Tish and her family trying to get him out. James Baldwin brings life to this tale of struggle and perseverance and will have you busting a gut at all the 70's slang “you dig”.

Quotes:

"Trouble means you're alone."

"These cap-tive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned"

"We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are so lost."

"Get him out. That's what we have to do. We both know he ain't got no business in there. Them lying motherfuckers, they know it, too. Look I know what you're saying. You're saying they got us by the balls. Okay. But that's our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don't know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it. I know you ain't scared for you, and God knows I ain't scared for me. That boy is got to come out of there. That's all. And we got to get him out. That's all. And the first thing we got to do, man, is just not to lose our nerve. We can't let these runt-faced white-assed motherfuckers get away with this shit no longer." He subsides, he sips his beer. "They been killing our children long enough."

Miguel Street a collection of vivid short stories and more colorful characters is V.S Naipaul's fictional account of his childhood. Filled with nostalgia to the brim that overflows into phenomenal, bleak, gleeful and enriching tales of Caribbean life in a small close knit Trinidadian community as seen through the eyes of a child growing up rough to finally leaving for better opportunities. Naipaul deals with Trinidadian disillusionment symbolized by the limiting Miguel Street blanketed by the instability and lost of identity in a WW2 generation.

"We felt it wasn't fair, making a boy like Elias do litritcher and poultry."

A true tragedy. The Great Gatsby exposes the affliction associated with the materialistic American Dream of the 1920's. The Roaring Twenties with the proliferation of the automobile, post war disillusionment and great excesses formed a callous society where "Life starts over again when it gets crisp in the fall". Meaning all wrongs and indulgences are quickly forgotten without care. Daisy Buchanan the final piece to Gatsby's puzzle, the "green" light with the "voice full of money" is ultimately his ruin.

Quotes:

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.

You can't repeat the past.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Set during the Bangladesh War of Independence of 1971. The story chronicles a widowed wife's determination to keep her son and daughter alive in body and mind has they are soaked by the monsoon of independence.

Le’s go, George. Le’s get outa here. It’s
mean here.”

I guess satire just isn't my thing. A short book but had me straining for journey's end which ironically through a brisk plot details the eponymous Candide's grapple with optimistic theory and harsh reality, becoming disillusioned with his teacher's Pangloss best of all possible worlds philosophy. Human crises and unbelievable personal parlors force him to abandon his staunch optimistic beliefs for an outlook of “Let us cultivate our garden.” Voltaire satirizes religion, philosophies,aristocrats... I even managed a few chuckles along the way.

"The poor in all parts of the world bear an inveterate hatred to the rich, even while they creep and cringe to them; and the rich treat the poor like sheep,whose wool and flesh they barter for money"

“Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.”

And here I thought Aldous' Brave New World was convoluted Lolita borders on cryptic. Nabokov had my brain stoping and starting more than a Walmart jalopy. Good book but another I was not disappointed when I finished learnt plenty of new vocabulary though, hmm I wonder when I'll use Gluteal sulcus butt at least other people share my pain. asalinguist.com/2011/05/20/beware-of-the-russians/

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Kind of a drab read for me but I can also see why others might view it as good. Touches mostly on the postwar Beat Generation of 1950's America sprinkled with a "little" drug use, poetry and jazz.

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”