203. CAT's CRADLE

Kurt Vonnegut 1963

The Book Blurb:

Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a Calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.

What Hooked Me:

Any book that portrays some of humankind's absurdity is a must-read for me.  And any book that shows what stupidity men do (or say) in the name of religion makes it even more compelling  for me. This brilliant satire was written fifty years ago, and yet I feel as though the ideas were taken from today's headlines. Another timeless classic!

The Quotes:

'Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Jonah -- John -- if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still -- not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.'(1)

'We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the books to be called The Day the World Ended.'(2)

'New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.'(41)

'Pure research men work on what fascinates them, not on what fascinates other people.'(49)

'A wrang-wrang, according to Bokonon, is a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity.'(78)

"Americans, ... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."(97)

'A pissant is somebody who thinks he's so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he's got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he'll tell you why you're wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.'(130)

"I always knew, ... that, if I waited long enough, somebody would come and envy me. I kept telling myself to be patient, that, sooner or later, somebody envious would come along.'(151)

'Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat's cradle were strung between them. "No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's ..."
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."(166)

'People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.'(169)

'... when it became evident that no government or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.'(172)

'Science is magic that works.'(218)

'I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolations of literature?"
"In one of two ways," he said, "petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system."(232)

'Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.'(256)

'Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.'(270)

'Each person here has some specialty, something to give the rest.'(278)

'Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. ... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.'(281)

a Delta Book Edition
287 pages
Book owned

202. 11/22/63

Stephen King 2011

The Book Jacket Blurb:

   It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away -- a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer.
   Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life -- like Harry's, like America's in 1963 -- turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession -- to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
   So begins Jake's life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there's Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore.
   Time travel has never been so believable . Or so terrifying.

What Hooked Me:

I just realized that I have only read a handful of books about time travel. And judging from how much I love this one, I should probably read more on the subject. I should also read more novels by Stephen King, that is, if I can find the right mix just like this one: not too gory nor terrifying, suspenseful and convoluted, but also sweet and sentimental. Masterfully written, this book is dazzling and so totally engrossing, you will hardly notice that it is almost 900 pages. During the weekend that I read this book, I was totally back in the 60's and just like Jack Epping a.k.a. George Amberson, a good part of me wanted to stay.  

The Quotes:

'I have never been what you'd call a crying man.
My ex-wife said that my "nonexistent emotional gradient" was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point).'(opening lines)

'I had not yet entered the fog of unreality that would soon swallow me, but the first tendrils were seeping around me, and I felt them. It wasn't a summer cold that had caused the hoarseness I'd heard in Al's voice, nor the croaking cough. Not the flu, either. Judging by the sign, it was something more serious.'(15)

'You know how, on a bright day, you can close your eyes and see an afterimage of whatever you were just looking at? It was like that. When I looked at my foot, I saw it on the floor. But when I blinked -- either a millisecond before or a millisecond after my eyes closed, I couldn't tell which -- I caught a glimpse of my foot on a step. And it wasn't in the dim light of a sixty-watt bulb, either. It was in bright sunshine.'(27)

"Two minutes. I told you, it's always two minutes. No matter how long you stay. He coughed, a spat into a fresh wad of napkins, and folded them away in his pocket. "And when you go down the steps, it's always 11:58 A.M. on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip."(45)

"And every person you meet is meeting you for the first time, no matter how many times you've met before."(45)

'Life turns on a dime, and when it does, it turns fast.'(212)

"The past is obdurate, Al. It doesn't want to be changed. ... But what I think now is that the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act."(232)

'The Book Depository wasn't a ruin, but it conveyed the same sense of sentient menace. I remembered coming on that submerged, soot-blackened smokestack, lying in the weeds like a giant prehistoric snake dozing in the sun. I remembered looking into its dark bore, so large I could have walked into it. And I remembered feeling that something was in there. Something alive. Something that wanted me to walk into it. So I could visit. Maybe for a long, long time.'(293)

'...life's simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook.'(303)

'Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling like on earth like it.'(322)

'Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to nurture it is much more difficult.'(330)

'Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.'(399)

'Sometimes a man and a woman reach a crossroads and linger there, reluctant to take either way, knowing the wrong choice will mean the end .. and knowing there's so much worth saving.'(411)

"Excellent, dude,' that's what you said. I think maybe you better tell where you heard that. And kick out the jams. And boogie shoes. And shake your bootie. Chill and freaking out. I want to know where you heard those, too. Why you say them and no one else does. I want to know why you were scared of that stupid Jimla chant that you talked about in your sleep. I want to know where Derry is and why it's like Dallas. I want to know when you were married, and to who, and for how long. I want to know where you were before you were in Florida, because Ellie Dougherty says she doesn't know, that some of your references are fake. 'Appear to be fanciful' is how she put it."(427)

'I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?'(581)

'For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror  and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.'(615-616)

'It's because the brain can't help to reconcile all those thin overlays of reality. The strings create multiple images of the future. Some are clear, most are hazy.'(797)

'The past is obdurate for the same reason a turtle's shell is obdurate: because the living flesh inside is tender and defenseless.
And something else. The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a passing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply! Harry didn't know what that watery ripping sound was, but I'm pretty sure I do; that's the sound of too much harmony created by too many strings.'(827)

First Shribner hardcover edition
849 pages
Book owned
Personal Note: My URL has changed to athousandbookswith quotes.com.

201. SALVAGE the BONES

Jesmyn Ward 2011

The Book Jacket Blurb:

   A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show interest in much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fifteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pit bull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
   As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to a dramatic conclusion, the unforgettable family at the novel's core -- motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce -- pulls itself up to face another day. A bighearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
  

What Hooked Me:

A motherless poverty-stricken family. Teenage pregnancy. Pit bull dog-fights. Hurricane Katrina. This book has all the elements of what sounds like a very depressing book, and that it is. In fact, it made me cry, one of a handful of books on my list that made me really cry.  Its' wonderful lyrical prose, strong characters (including the dog China), and powerful imagery will stay with me for a while. And instead of thought-provoking quotes, the quotes below are a few of the vivid scenes I will remember from this book.

The Quotes:

'China's turned on herself. If I didn't know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won't let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until they're beaten soft. Only Mama's forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on their own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. She'd stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.'(opening lines)

'Mornings after birth should be quiet; the air should muffle sounds. But quiet comes and goes here on the Pit like the pack of stray dogs that Daddy used to run off with his gun before Skeetah brought China here to stay. When Daddy kept hogs, in the morning the sows squealed at their sticky piglets. The chickens hatched the chicks from their hidden eggs, and they woke us with flapping and clucking. China's pups first day in the world was no different. I woke up to the hammering.'(20)

'We worm our way through the woods as we watch the house for movement. We slide on our stomachs under bushes so tangled and overgrown that we cannot crouch or crawl through them. We slither like snakes, grab dirt and pine straw with our elbows, and pull. Skeetah stops often, straw and twigs sliding off his slick head to catch on his shoulders like holiday tinsel, and he listens. I stop, too, try my hardest to be so still, to hear the threat, but the blood beats through my ears so strongly I cannot hear anything over that and the whooshing of my breath. Skeetah crawls through a stand, and we start again.'(69-70)

'They cannot tell, but it is there. Perhaps Skeetah saw when I walked from the water and put on my clothes. I do not know, but I will not give him the chance to see me again now. I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us into stone.'(88)

'I am glad to be sitting in the backseat by the window in the car, Junior's bony rump squirming on my lap, Skeetah in the middle pulling at the blunt, Marquise next to him at the other window, opaque through the cloud of smoke. Big Henry's head could be any other boy's head under his baseball cap, and Randall leans on the headrest, his eyes closed, everything still but his eyelids jumping like dragonflies. I do not think that he is dreaming. Junior shifts, and I hold him tight; he is my shield.'(140)

'On the court, Randall is already blinking hard at the sweat blinding him. His shirt sticks to him on his sides, close as a bud. He goes up for a rebound, rises up out of the cluster of players, but they buzz angrily, and he falls. The referee whistles, and Randall walks to the foul line, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Nothing about him seems to touch anything else: the court, the ball, his shirt that he picks at so that his skin can breathe. He is a bayou crane, alighting so he doesn't even sink into the black marsh before taking off in flight.'(143)

'I've crossed the threshold out of the bathroom three times, and each time I think I am done crying, that I can go back into the game to sit next to my brothers as if nothing has happened, my eyes start leaking and my chest burns, hotter than the bright air with the bees drowning in the crape myrtle, and I have to go back into the bathroom. I go in the other stall, pull my feet up, squat on the toilet. Smash my face into my salty knees. When I can breathe, I leave the stall to splash cold water on my face, but my eyes still look red, my eyelids swollen in the funhouse mirror. And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying again for what I have been, for what I am, and what I will be, again.'(146-147)

'The few dirt-scratched yards and thin-siding houses and trailers of Bois Sauvage seem a sorry match to the woods, like pitting a puppy against a full grown dog. Here, there are swimming holes that are fat puddles and some the size of swimming pools fed by skinny clear creeks, but the earth makes the holes black, and the trees make them as filthy with leaves as a dog is with fleas. There are clusters of magnolias that are so tall and green and glossy, they are impossible to climb, and the air around them always smells like peaches. There are oaks so big and old that their arms grow out black and thick as trunks, which rest on the ground. There are ponds  that are filled with slime and tall yellow grasses, and at night, frogs turn them teeming, singing a burping chorus. There are clearings where deer feed, startle white, and kick away. There are turtles plowing through pine straw, mud, trying to avoid the pot.(158)

'Skeetah stands in the sun, the only boy in the yellow clearing who braves the light with the dogs. He ignores us and looks off as well, standing, never sitting. I wonder if he has trained her to do this, to stand at his side, to not dirty even her haunches with sitting so that they gleam. China is as white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way that Skeetah does.'(162)

'When Mama first explained to me what a hurricane was, I thought that all the animals ran away, that they fled the storms before they came, that they put their noses to the wind days before and knew. That maybe they stuck their tongues out, pink and warm, to taste, to make sure. That the deer looked at their companions and leapt. That the foxes chattered to themselves, rolled their shoulders, and started off. And maybe the bigger animals do. But now I think that other animals, like the squirrels and the rabbits, don't do that at all. Maybe the small don't run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us. The squirrels pack feathers, pack pine straw, pack shed fur and acorns from the oaks in the bowels of their trees, line them so that they are buried deep in the trunks, so safe they can hardly hear the storm cracking around them. The rabbits stand in profile, shank to shank, smell that storm smell that hits them all at once like a loud sound and they tunnel down through the red clay and the sand, down until the earth turns black and cold, down past all the roots, until they have dug great halls so deep that they sit right above the underground reservoirs we tap into with our wells, and during the hurricane, they hear water lapping above and below while they are safe in the hand of the earth.'(215-216)

'It is terrible. It is the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt. It is the rain, which stings like stone, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut. It is the water, swirling and gathering and spreading on all sides, brown with an undercurrent of red to it, the clay of the Pit like a cut that won't stop leaking. It is the remains of the yard, the refrigerators and lawn mowers and the RV and mattresses, floating like a fleet. It is trees and branches breaking, popping like Black Cat fire crackers in an endless crackle of explosions, over and over and again and again.'(230-231)

'She left us as dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.'(255)

a Bloomsbury Hardcover Edition
258 pages
Book borrowed from the library

GIVEAWAY NOTES: After determining the valid entries and assigning numbers to the comments in the order that they posted, the winners are:

#14 - Suko and   #21 - Cialina

Congratulations!!

My 'every 50th Best Book Post Giveaway'

I just posted my 200th book so it is time for a giveaway!

 

$25.00 gift card from Amazon.com

OR

$25.00 worth of books from the Book Depository

Valid entries should have the following TWO elements:

1. a book recommendation of a book that is not on my list but you think should be
2.  your e-mail or blog address

Deadline for the giveaway: January 22, 2012, 8:00 PM EST
There will be TWO winners.
All valid entries will be assigned nuumbers according to when they posted
and the winning numbers will be determined through Random.org.

200. NEITHER HERE nor THERE

Bill Bryson 1992

The First Page Book Blurb:

Anyone who has been to Europe -- or just dreamed of going -- will be engaged by the blend of awe and bewilderment that Bill Bryson brings to this uproariously funny memoir of a trip around the Continent. Deciding to get a jump on a budding midlife crisis, he loads a bag with maps and old clothes and sets off to retrace the journey he took as a young backpacker in the 1970s, accompanied by an unforgettable sidekick named Stephen Katz (who will be gloriously familiar to readers of Bryson's A Walk in The Woods). Interweaving his comic misadventures from the first trip with the razor-sharp insights of his older self, Bryson wanders through Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Rome, Geneva, Vienna, and other great cities of Europe. With affection and wit he explains why the French are constitutionally incapable of "queuing," why Yugoslavian beer encourages your legs to "go in for a little involuntary moonwalking," and asks: Why didn't the armistice treaty require the Germans to lay down their accordions along with their arms?

What Hooked Me:

I suppose any book by Bill Bryson hooks me. This one is my favorite so far. Except for Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and thanks to my husband's 'travel bug' I have been very lucky to have gone to all the countries that the author traveled to in this book. It is quite amazing to me that his thoughts are so parallel to mine, in particular, how he feels about Bruges in Belgium and Florence in Italy. And I also happen to adore the title of this book. It is so perfect, and so Bill Bryson!

The Quotes:

'In the winter, Hammerfest is a thirty-hour ride by bus from Oslo, though why anyone would want to go there in winter is a question worth considering. It is on the edge of the world, the northernmost town in Europe, as far from London as London is from Tunis, a place of dark and brutal winters, where the sun sinks into the Arctic Ocean in November and does not rise again for ten weeks.(opening lines)

'I knew from my reading that the Northern Lights are immensely high up in the atmosphere, something like two hundred miles up, but this show seemed to be suspended just above the town. There are two kinds of Northern Lights -- the curtains of shimmering gossamer that everyone has seen in pictures, and the rather rarer gas clouds that I was gazing at now. They are never the same twice. Sometimes they shoot wraithlike across the sky, like smoke in a wind tunnel, moving at enormous speed, and sometimes they hang like luminous drapes or glittering spears of light, and very occasionally -- perhaps once or twice in a lifetime -- they creep out from every point on the horizon and flow together overhead in a spectacular, silent explosion of light and color.'(32)

'One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying movie tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could be at once so alike -- that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cozy inviting places to eat and drink -- and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.'(35)

'But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.'(36)

'I wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist.'(38)

'By eight-thirty Paris is a terrible place for walking. There's too much traffic. A blue haze of uncombusted diesel hangs over every boulevard. I know Baron Haussmann made Paris a grand place to look at, but the man has no concept of traffic flow. At the Arc de Triomphe alone, thirteen roads come together. Can you imagine? I mean to say, here you have a city with the world's most pathologically aggressive drivers -- drivers who in other circumstances would be given injection of Valium from syringes the sizes of bicycle pumps and confined to their beds with leather straps -- and you give them an open space where they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or what?'(44)

'It is a rare place. I walked for a day with my mouth open. I looked in at the Groeninge Museum and visited the famous Beguinage, its courtyard lawns swimming in daffodils, but mostly I just walked the streets, agog at such a concentration of perfection. Even the size of Bruges was perfect -- big enough to be a city, to have bookstores and interesting restaurants, but compact enough to feel contained and friendly. You could walk every street within its encircling canal in a day or so. I did just that and never once saw a street I wouldn't want to live on, a bar I wouldn't like to get to know, a view I wouldn't wish to call my own. It was hard to accept that the place was real -- that people came home to these houses every night and shopped in these shops and walked their dogs on these streets and went through life thinking that this is the way of the world.'(61)

'Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.'(106)

'I made a circuit of the colossal royal palace (and I mean colossal -- it has six hundred rooms), which may be one of the most boring buildings ever constructed. It's not ugly or unpleasant, just boring, featureless, like the buildings children make by cutting window holes in cardboard boxes. Still, I enjoyed the sentries, who must be the most engagingly wimpish-looking in the world. Sweden has been at peace for 150 years and remains determinedly unmilitaristic, so I suppose they don't want their soldiers to look too macho and ferocious, and as a result they make them wear a white helmet that looks disarmingly like a bathing cap and white spats straight out of Donald Duck. It's very hard not to go up to one and say, out of the side of the mouth, "You know, Lars, you look quite ridiculous."'(129)

'Traveling is more fun -- hell, life is more fun -- if you can treat it as a series of impulses.'(131)

'I love the way the Italian parks. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you've just missed a parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the sidewalks and half off, facing in, facing sideways blocking garages and side streets and phone booths, fitted into spaces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.'(134)

'Isn't it strange how wealth is wasted on the rich?(152)

'It is really the most unattractive language for foodstuffs. If you want whipped cream on your coffee in much of the German-speaking world, you order it mit Schlag. Now, does that sound like a frothy and delicious pick-me-up, or does that sould like the sort of thing smokers bring up the first thing in the morning? Here the menu was filled with items that brought to mind the noises of a rutting pig: Knoblauchbrot, Schweinskotelett ihrer Wahl, Portion Schlagobers (and that was a desert).'(179-180)

'Most people are unaware of the rich beauty of Yugoslavia's interior. It is as green as England and as stunningly serene as Austria, but almost wholly untouristed. Within an hour or two of leaving the hot coastline, with its teeming resorts and cereal-box hotels, you find yourself descending from the empty mountains into this farmhouses and snug villages -- a corner of Europe lost to time. In the fields people cut and gather hay by hand, with scythes and wooden pitchforks, and cross their fields behind horse-drawn plows. In the villages elderly women are almost all dressed in black with scarves around their heads. It is like a picture out of the distant past.'(223)

'The farther you roam in Sofia the better everything gets. I took to going for daylong walks out into the hilly districts on the southeast side of the city, an area of forests, parks, neighborhoods of rather grand apartment buildings, winding tranquil streets, some nice homes. As I was walking back into the city center, over a footbridge across the Slivnica River and down some anonymous residential street, it struck me that this really was quite a beautiful city. More than that, it was the most European-looking of all the cities I had been to. There were no modern shopping centers, no big gas stations, no McDonalds'ses or Pizza Huts, no revolving signs for Coca Cola. No city I had visited had more thoroughly resisted the blandishments of American culture. It was completely, comprehensively European. This was, I realized with a sense of profound unease, the Europe I had dreamed of as a child.'(238)

"Istanbul isn't a city. It is a collective delirium. I had never seen such activity -- people rushing, pushing carts, carrying trays of food or coffee, hefting huge and ungainly loads (I saw one man with a ten-foot-long sofa on his back moving through the crowds as easily as if he were  carrying a deck of cards), people every five feet selling something: lottery tickets, wristwatches, cigarettes, replica perfumes. Every few paces someone comes up to you wanting to shine your shoes, sell you postcards or guidebooks, take your photograph, weigh you, lead you to his brother's carpet shop, or otherwise induce you to part with some trifling sum of money. Nowhere else on earth can there be a city where the visitor's every sense is so relentlessly tugged and shaken. It is an experience that is at once confusing, mildly unnerving, and strangely exciting.'(243)

'There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.'(245)  

Perennial Edition 2001
245 pages
Book Owned

199. READING LOLITA in TEHRAN: a Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi 2003

The Book Blurb:

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

What Hooked Me:

The author's unique perspective and analysis of great literature and the way she relates the novels to her life, her book club and the history of Iran is truly impressive. She shows us glimpses of the past and present Iran as only a person who truly misses and longs for her country can.

The Quotes:

'In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature.'(opening lines)

'Our class was shaped within this context, in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week. There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom. And like Lolita, we took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves, insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity or our appearances, growing our nails, falling in love and listening to forbidden music.'(25-26)

'Whoever we were -- and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not -- we had become the figment of someone else's dream. A stern ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land. He had come in the name of a past, he claimed, had been stolen from him. And he now wanted to re-create us in the image of that illusory past. Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?'(28)

'Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.'(47)

'These students, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation has no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.'(76)

'The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.'(94)

'Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, ... as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked into it.'(109)

'A novel is not an allegory, ... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in the destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience.'(111)

'When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?'(144)

'Turning points always seem so sudden and absolute, as if they have come bolt out of the blue. That is not true, of course. A whole slow process goes into their making.'(176)

'Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people, like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.'(315)

'Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.'(317)

'Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?'(325)

'You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and place, because you'll never be this way again.'(336)

'I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to  imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desires, hated, feared?'(338-339)

a Random House Trade paperback edition
347 pages
Book Owned

198. The WIZARD of OZ

L. Frank Baum 1900

The Book Blurb:

When a cyclone hits her Kansas home, Dorothy and her dog Toto are whisked to the magical land of Oz. To find her way back to Kansas, she must follow the yellow brick road to where the great Wizard lives. Together with her companions the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion, Dortohy embarks on a strange and enchanting adventure, and a journey that takes her to the city of Emeralds.

What Hooked Me:

Although I have watched the movie, I have to admit that this is the first time I have actually read this original book that started it all. It is no wonder that such an imaginative American fairy tale has won the hearts of so many and has gone to spin so many other book prequels and sequels as well as hundreds of Movie, Musical and Play adaptations. I just wish there were more scenes with Glinda in this book!

The Quotes:

'Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles.'(opening lines)

'The cyclone had set the house down, very gently -- for a cyclone -- in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of greensward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, grey prairies.'(7-8)

'No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.'(27)

"All the same," said the Scarecrow, "I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one."
"I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman, "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world."(41)

"It's a mystery," replied the Lion. "I suppose I was born that way. All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought to be the King of Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way. Whenever I've met a man I've been awfully scared; but I just roared at him, and he has always run away as fast as he could go."(44-46)

'You see, Oz is a great Wizard, and can take on any form he wishes. So that some say he looks like a bird; and some say he looks like an elephant; and some say he looks like a cat. To others he appears as a beautiful fairy, or a brownie, or in any form that pleases him. But who the real Oz is, when he is in his own form, no living person can tell.'(77)

'Even with eyes protected by the green spectacles Dorothy and her friends were at first dazzled by the brilliancy of the wonderful City. The streets were lined with beautiful houses all built of green marble and studded everywhere with sparkling emeralds. They walked over a pavement of the same green marble, and where the blocks were joined together were rows of emeralds, set closely and glittering in the brightness of the sun. The window panes were of green glass; even the sky above the City had a green tint, and the rays of the sun were green.'(83)

'The Wicked Witch was both surprised and worried when she saw the mark on Dorothy's forehead, for she knew well that neither the Winged Monkeys nor she, herself, dare hurt the girl in any way. She looked down at Dorothy's feet, and seeing the Silver Shoes, began to tremble with fear, for she knew what a powerful charm belonged to them.'(109)

'Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.'(140)

'All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.'(140)

'Dorothy now took Toto up solemnly in her arms, and having said one last good-bye she clapped the heels of her shoes together three times, saying:
"Take me home to Aunt Em!"'(187)

a Puffin Books Essentials Collection Edition
188 pages
Book Owned

197. the FIVE PEOPLE you MEET in HEAVEN

Mitch Albom 2003

The Book Jacket Blurb:

   Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meanigless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. As the park has changed over the years -- from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge -- so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age. His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.
   Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his -- and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.
   One by one, Eddie's five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to a stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life: Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.


What Hooked Me:

I find myself gravitating towards inspirational books every January. There is something about the start of the new year that gets me every time. Could it be because it is my birthday month? And getting old makes me seek the wisdom that I am supposed to have by now? Whatever the reasons may be, this highly recommended book is perfect. For it is hard not to be swept away by Eddie's story, albeit some parts are too melodramatic even for me. It is hard not to be amazed in the reality that people we meet casually or bump into accidentally do affect and change our lives everyday. And as one finishes the book, it is equally hard not to indulge in that one pondering moment: of that awesome possibility that there are indeed five people in heaven who will explain one's life's meaning here on earth. 

The Quotes:

'This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all the endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.'(opening lines)

'Every life has one true-love snapshot.'(9)

'People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.'(34)

"There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not know the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."(35)

"That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."(48)

"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."(48)

'Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuried have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.'(57)

'War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.'(65)

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.'(94)

'All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.'(104)

'Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them -- a mother's approval, a father's nod -- are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishemnts, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.'(126)

"Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."(141)

"Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.'(173)

'... the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.'(closing lines)

a Hyperion First Edition
196 pages
Book owned

2012 Must-Read List: the Best Books of 2011

 These books from 2011 seemed to have had great reviews by both bloggers and critics alike,
 so I am adding them to my must-read books for 2012.

Have and Happy and Healthy New Year !!!