Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

There are times when fatigue is the great aphrodisiac, annihilating all other thoughts, granting sensuous slow motion to heavy limbs, urging generosity, acceptance, infinite abandonment. We tumbled out of our respective days like creatures shaken from a net. (56)

People often remark on how quickly the extraordinary becomes commonplace. I think that every time I'm on a motorway at night, or on a plane as it rises through cloud cover into sunlight. We are highly adaptive creatures. The predictable becomes, by definition, background, leaving the attention uncluttered, the better to deal with the random or unexpected. (151)

I loved the telescopic nature of this next bit. McEwan takes us from pondering visible critters in the soil, down to the perspective of the most microscopic of mycelia and then suddenly we are sucked back up from such revery and thrown straight into the dangers of this world -- shooting down the road and into the immediate future. It's the perfect spell, this suspension of suspense, when our minds are sidetracked momentarily from what has been the obsessive driving force of this book. It's genius:

In the rich black crumbly mulch I saw two black ants, a springtail, and a dark red wormlike creature with a score of pale brown legs. These were the rumbling giants of this lower world, for not far below the threshold of visibility was the seething world of the roundworms, the scavengers and the predators who fed on them; and even these were giants relative to the inhabitants of the microscopic realm, the parasitic fungi and the bacteria - perhaps ten million of them in this handful of soil. The blind compulsion of these organisms to consume and excrete made possible the richness of the soil and therefore the plants, the trees, and the creatures that lived among them, whose number had once included ourselves. What I thought might calm me was the reminder that for all our concerns, we were still part of this natural dependency, for the animals that we ate grazed the plants which, like our vegetables and fruits, were nourished by the soil formed by these organisms. But even as I squatted to enrich the forest floor, I could not believe in the primary significance of these grand cycles. Just beyond the oxygen-exhaling trees stood my poison-exuding vehicle, inside which was my gun, and thirty-five miles down teeming roads was the enormous city on whose northern side was my apartment, where a madman was waiting, a de Clerambault, my de Clerambault, and my threatened loved one. (224-225)

(1997. New York: Anchor Books, 1999)

The Demon in the Freezer: The Terrifying Truth about the Threat from Bioterrorism by Richard Preston

It's really frightening to think that the entire human population is vulnerable to a disease that spreads quickly through tiny droplets in the air and kills at the very least 30% of all who become infected. Even the older folks like our parents who may have been vaccinated against it are no longer immune -- the vaccine is only good for about 7 years. And as ex-bioweaponeers in this book say: we are naive if we think that smallpox is reposited in only two places on earth. This description of the different forms is especially gruesome (so of course I have to quote it):

Smallpox virus interacts with the victims' immune systems in different ways, and so it triggers different forms of disease in the human body. There is a mild type of smallpox called a varioloid rash. There is classical ordinary smallpox, which comes in two basic forms: the discrete type and the confluent type. In discrete ordinary smallpox, the pustules stand out in the skin as separate blisters, and the patient has a better chance of survival. In confluent-type ordinary smallpox, which Los had, the blisters merge into sheets, and it is typically fatal. Finally, there is haemorrhagic smallpox, in which bleeding occurs in the skin. Haemorrhagic smallpox is virtually one hundred per cent fatal. The most extreme type is flat haemorrhagic smallpox, in which the skin does not blister but remains smooth. It darkens until it can look charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets. Doctors in the old days used to call it black pox. Haemorrhagic smallpox seems to occur in about three to twenty-five per cent of the fatal cases, depending on how hot or virulent the strain of smallpox is. For some reason black pox is more common in teenagers.

The rims of Barbara Birke's eyelides became wet with blood, while the whites of her eyes turned ruby red and swelled out in rings around the corneas. Dr William Osler, in a study of black-pox cases he saw at the Montreal General Hospital in 1875, noted that 'the corneas appear sunk in dark red pits, giving to the patient a frightful appearance'. The blood in the eyes of a smallpox patient deteriorates over time, and if the patient lives long enough the whites of the eyes will turn solid black.

With flat haemorrhagic smallpox, the immune system goes into shock and cannot produce pus, while the virus amplifies with incredible speed and appears to sweep through the major organs of the body. Barbara Birke went into a condition known as disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), in which the blood begins to clot inside small vessels that leak blood at the same time. As the girl went into DIC, the membranes inside her mouth disintegrated. (50-51)

As the end approaches, the smallpox victim can remain conscious, in a kind of frozen awareness - 'a peculiar state of apprehension and mental alertness that were said to be unlike the manifestations of any other disease' (52)

The IL-4 gene holds the recipe for a common immune-system compound called interleukin-4, a cytokine that in the right amounts normally helps a person or a mouse fight off an infection by stimulating the production of antibodies. If the gene for IL-4 is added to a poxvirus, it will cause the virus to make IL-4. It starts signalling the immune system of the host, which becomes confused and starts making more antibodies. But, paradoxically, if too many antibodies are made, another type of immunity goes down -- cellular immunity. Cellular immunity is provided by numerous kinds of white blood cells. When a person dies of AIDS, it is because a key part of his or her cellular immunity (the population of CD4 cells) has been destroyed by HIV infection. The engineered mousepox seems to create a kind of instant AIDS-like immune suppression in a mouse right at the moment when the mouse needs this type of immunity the most to fight off an exploding pox infection. An engineered smallpox that triggered an AIDS-like immune suppression in people would be no joke (280-281)

(London: Headline, 2003)

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents, and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that 'Don't paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo' is good advice but 'You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail' is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience. The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about morality and about human nature. And, very likely, when the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children -- nonsense as well as sense -- using the same infectious gravitas of manner. (205)

If there is no God, why be good? Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: 'Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.' As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.' (259)

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that. (399)

(2006. New York: Mariner Books, 2008)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Sheer brilliance. Took an entire summer to get through this tome -- it's the kind of work you read slowly and with relish because every single sentence becomes ever more heavy-laden with references to previous events (historical as well as fictional) and metaphors, using artful ways of describing the mundane or the grotesque: tears down a face become mollusc slime, and sniper bullets are (at first) seemingly innocent, distant bees buzzing at the edge of a field.

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. (4)

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. (121)

Obviously enough (because otherwise I should have to introduce at this point some fantastic explanation of my continued presence in this "mortal coil"), you may number me amongst those whom the war of '65 failed to obliterate. Spittoon-brained, Saleem suffered a merely partial erasure, and was only wiped clean whilst others, less fortunate, were wiped out; unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.

Tears -- which, in the absence of the Kashmiri cold, have absolutely no chance of hardening into diamonds -- slide down the bosomy contours of Padma's cheeks. "O, mister, this war tamasha, kills the best and leaves the rest!" Looking as though hordes of snails have recently crawled down from her reddened eyes, leaving their glutinous shiny trails upon her face, Padma mourns my bomb-flattened clan. I remain dry-eyed as usual, graciously refusing to rise to the unintentional insult implied by Padma's lachrymose exclamation.

"Mourn for the living," I rebuke her gently, "The dead have their camphor gardens." Grieve for Saleem! Who, barred from celestial lawns by the continued beating of his heart, awoke once again amid the clammy metallic fragrances of a hospital ward; for whom there were no houris, untouched by man or djinn, to provide the promised consolations of eternity -- I was lucky to receive the grudging, bedpan-clattering ministrations of a bulky male nurse who, while bandaging my head, muttered sourly that, war or no war, the doctor sahibs liked going to their beach shacks on Sundays. "Better you'd stayed knocked out one more day," he mouthed, before moving further down the ward to spread more good cheer. (397-398)

(New York: Penguin Books, 1980)

Medic! The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War by Ben Sherman

"This is a strange place, Bubba. I don't understand their religion or their culture or a damn thing about these people. One time, I patted a baby-san on the head. It was natural, like 'nice kid,' y'know? And this mamma-san came flyin' at me, cussin' with that whiny voice." He lit another cigarette and handed me his lighter. "I couldn't figure out why she was screamin' at me." He paused and filled his lungs with smoke. "But y'know what, Bubba? Every baby-san has an angel sittin' right on his head." He traced a ring with the fingers holding his cigarette, the smoke trailing a thin halo around his head. "A little angel, y'know? Protectin' 'em from dangers 'n curses." He stared at the ground. "And goddammit Bubba, when I patted this little baby-san, I knocked off his angel."
"Bad move."
"Nobody tells us shit like that." (180-181)

(New York: Ballantine Books, 2002)

Golden Urchin by Madeleine Brent

I read all 10 of Brent's adventurous gothic romance novels as a girl and loved every one of them, but Golden Urchin was my favorite story about a young Irish girl brought up by Australian aborigines to whom she is a tolerated outcast. She runs away at 14 in the hopes of finding people like herself and ends up saving the life of a white man wounded in the outback. In gratitude, he brings her home with him to his wife and they teach her English. From there the story takes many twists and turns and is just... really hard to put down. There is plenty of intrigue and a colorful cast of characters, and even though parts of the plot were a little too transparent, it was still a really fun read. Brent's novels always have a strong heroine and a mysterious, oftentimes tortured love interest, but even though they're billed as romance novels, they're really more like exotic adventure tales with people who happen to fall in love with eachother. Interesting little aside: Madeleine Brent is actually the nom de plume of Peter O'Donnell -- something nobody knew, not even the publisher, until the early ninties.

"We want to tell you something about yourself, Meg," he said, "but I'm going to begin with a question. Why do you think your skin is white?"
I was puzzled, for I had explained this before to Rosemary. "It's because I'm not a true person," I said. "I wasn't born like real babies. A totem-spirit made me, and Manyi found me."
Luke said, "That's all quite wrong, Meg. Quite wrong. You were born in exactly the same way as all babies in the world are born."
"But...I am sure I did not come from Manyi's body," I said, baffled. "Her baby had just died, so I could not have come from her so soon."
"No. You came from the body of a white woman." Luke looked directly at me for a moment. "Your mother was a white woman. Your father was a white man." He gave a small shrug. "And one of them doubtless had red hair, not that it matters."
I put a hand to my head, trying to think. Then I said, "My father? You mean the chief man of the family?"
"Well, I suppose so. But really I mean the man who... who..." Luke took a big breath and looked at Rosemary. "How do I say it?" he asked.
Rosemary gave him a sympathetic smile and turned to me. "Meg, we must speak of things now that we would not speak of if other people were present, because it would be bad manners to do so. But while you and I and Luke are alone it is not bad manners, because you are like our child and we must teach you."
I said, "Is it about lying with a man?"
"Well yes, dear, partly." She stared as if struck by a new thought. "Have you done this thing yourself?"
I shook my head. "No. All the other children of ten summers and more did when they played together, but nobody wished to lie with me because I was not a true person."
Luke looked at the ceiling, and for the second time I heard him mutter something to Jesus." (40-41)

(New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1986)

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's first novel, somewhat comparable to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in portraying the restlessness and isolation of the so-called "lost generation". Amory is an intelligent, selfish, arrogant young man who spends a few blissful years at Princeton, serves in the army during World War 1, returns unscathed, and ultimately finds himself floating through life like a buoy, never knowing what his calling is, never getting over the one girl he ever truly fell for, and never knowing just how to relate with the rest of humanity. I really disliked him for most of this novel -- probably because I saw more of myself in him and his egotism than I wanted to see. Also, I cannot believe how modern this book felt... published in 1920, and yet it lives and breathes immediacy with an unflinching honesty that left me breathless.

"We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with the particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them --"

He paused only to get his breath.

"And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely. I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads [...]" (160)

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. (184)

A conversation that Amory has with himself as both the questioned and the questioner:

Q. - Do you want a lot of money?
A. - No. I am merely afraid of being poor.
Q. - Very afraid?
A. - Just passively afraid.
Q. - Where are you drifting?
A. - Don't ask me!
Q. - Don't you care?
A. - Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide.
Q. - Have you no interests left?
A. - None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. that's what's called ingenuousness.
Q. - An interesting idea.
A. - That's why a "good man gone wrong" attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in delight - "How innocent the poor child is!" They're warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark again. Only she feels a little colder after that.
Q. - All your calories gone?
A. - All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue.
Q. - Are you corrupt?
A. - I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all any more.
Q. - Is that a bad sign in itself?
A. - Not necessarily.
Q. - What would be the test of corruption?
A. - Becoming really insincere -- calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood -- she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again." (195)

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light -- and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . ." (213)

(1920. New York: Dover Publications, 1996)

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The novels that touch me the deepest are the ones of which I often have the least to say. This one... oh this one is untouchable. It left me bereft in so many places. Reminded me quite a bit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, just in the way the characters and relationships are so throroughly developed and how quickly and strongly I became attached to them. I picked this unforgettable scene because it is what springs to mind everytime I think about this book:

Then I saw Baba on our roof. He was standing on the edge, pumping both of his fists. hollering and clapping. And that right there was the single greatest moment of my twelve years of life, seeing Baba on that roof, proud of me at last.

But he was doing something now, motioning with his hands in an urgent way. Then I understood. "Hassan, we --- "

"I know," he said, breaking our embrace. "Inshallah, we'll celebrate later. Right now, I'm going to run that blue kite for you," he said. He dropped the spool and took off running, the hem of his green chapan dragging in the snow behind him.

"Hassan!" I called. "Come back with it!"

He was already turning the street corner, his rubber boots kicking up snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. "For you a thousand times over!" he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner. The next time I saw him smile unabashedly like that was twenty-six years later, in a faded Polaroid photograph. (66-67)

(2003. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004)

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

One of the most beautiful, lyrical little books I've ever read. Each new page sunk me contentedly ever deeper into the couch. A real gem, well worth the time (only takes an hour). [On a personal note: it's hard to believe just how deeply comforting this archaic style of English is for me, with its hiiiighly-recognizable cadence and use of similes. Despite being a complete atheist, I can't ignore that an entire childhood of enforced, continual biblical study makes me feel somehow that anything written like this is from the mind and voice of God.]

"But as he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets" (3-4)

"How often have you sailed in my dreams, and now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.
Ready am I to go, and my eagerness with sails full set awaits the wind.
Only another breath will I breathe in this still air, only another loving look cast backward,
And then I shall stand among you, a seafarer among seafarers.
And you, vast sea, sleepless mother,
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean." (5-6)

"[...] let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyeous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow." (16-17)

"You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?" (27)

"Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
[...]
Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments." (34-35)

(1923. New York: Random House, pocket ed., 1962)

Breathing the Fire by Kimberly Dozier

Incredible, lucid account of a reporter's torturous recovery after being nearly obliterated by a car bomb in Iraq during a fairly routine embed. This must have been big in the news a few years ago... she was with CBS, although I don't remember it at all. Her cameraman and soundman, only steps ahead of her, and the captain leading them around, all died there in the street. These horrible events happen all the time over there, but we're all so jaded by reading about car bombs and suicide attacks in the news to even care anymore. I read the blurbs and wince at the numbers and then click on a Batman review and immediately forget. terrible.

"I'd lost more than half my blood at the bomb scene, and it kept leaking out. The doctors pumped in 30 to 40 units -- that's more than one adult's worth. Between Farrar, Reed, and me, we'd literally bled the blood bank dry." (53)

"The jagged, burning chunks of shrapnel had done major damage to my quadriceps, the four major muscles that power my upper leg. So many muscles were shredded that by the time the dead tissue was painstakingly removed from the living, my broken femur bone was exposed. In later surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the remaining muscle had to be rearranged to cover it. And then doctors could only hope the grafts they put on the massive burn, a foot and a half by 8 inches, would take. If they couldn't cover the femur again, they'd have to consider taking the leg off. [...]

In order for my muscles to heal and for those later grafts to take, the surgeons at Landstuhl knew they had to clean the area of the damaged flesh, dirt, and bacteria that the blast had blown in. Otherwise the area would contaminate any future grafts and slow or stop healing. So, according to my mom, every day at Landstuhl, surgeons would powerwash the dirt and dead, burned tissue from my legs. Picture strapping a patient to the operating table and turning a fire hose on her at full blast. It was Nancy's bandage change on overdrive. These "washouts" were so painful they had to be done under full anasthesia and each one counted as surgery. by the time I was discharged from the last hospital weeks later, the surgeons had lost count of how many procedures I'd undergone. The guesstimate was 'at least two dozen.'" (77-78)

(Des Moines: Meredith Books, 2008)

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

"Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress." (35)

"Perhaps the grim reaper of anatomical designs is only Lady Luck in disguise. Or perhaps the actual reasons for survival do not support conventional ideas of cause as complexity, improvement, or anything moving at all humanward. Perhaps the grim reaper works during brief episodes of mass extinction, provoked by unpredictable environmental catastrophes (often triggered by impacts of extra-terrestrial bodies). Groups may prevail or die for reasons that bear no relationship to the Darwinian basis of success in normal times. Even if fishes hone their adaptations to peaks of aquatic perfection, they will all die if the ponds dry up. But grubby old Buster the Lungfish, former laughingstock of the piscine priesthood, may pull through -- and not because a bunion on his great-grandfather's fin warned his ancestors about an impending comet. Buster and his kind may prevail because a feature evolved long ago for a different use has fortuitously permitted survival during a sudden and unpredictable change in rules. And if we are Buster's legacy, and the result of a thousand other similarly happy accidents, how can we possibly view our mentality as inevitable, or even probable?" (48)

"Most of us are not naive enough to believe the old myth that scientists are paragons of unprejudiced objectivity, equally open to all possibilities, and reaching conclusions only by the weight of evidence and logic of argument. We understand that biases, preferences, social values, and psychological attitudes all play a strong role in the process of discovery. However, we should not be driven to the opposite extreme of complete cynicism -- the view that objective evidence plays no role, that perceptions of truth are entirely relative, and that scientific conclusions are just another form of aesthetic preference. Science, as actually practiced, is a complex dialogue between data and preconceptions." (244)

(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990)

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

I really, reeeaaally enjoyed this book....

"We formed a procession down our path to Elm Street, then left to Porlock, where our church is, our old white-steepled church, stolen intact from Christopher Wren. And we were part of a growing stream, and every woman in passing had delight of other women's hats.
'I have designed an Easter hat,' I said. 'A simple, off-the-face crown of thorns in gold with real ruby droplets on the forehead.'
'Ethan!' said Mary sternly. 'Suppose someone should hear you.'
'No, I guess it couldn't be popular.'
'I think you're horrid,' Mary said, and so did I, worse than horrid." (105)

"There must be ritual preliminaries to a serious discussion or action, and the sharper the matter is, the longer and lighter must the singing be." (113)

"A strange and seeing time, the front steps of sleep." (255)

"[...] the sky is falling and a piece of it fell on my tail." (255)

(New York: Bantam Books, 1961)

Uncommon Sense: the Heretical Nature of Science by Alan Cromer

In this, Cromer argues that the development of modern scientific thinking and procedure was a fluke that arose from a single culture (the Greeks) at a specific period of time which defied the typical thinking of our egocentric "tradition-bound, irrational"(19) race.

"Human beings, after all, love to believe in spirits and gods. Science, which asks them to see things as they are and not as they believe or feel them to be, undercuts a primary human passion. [...] Science is the heretical belief that the truth about the real nature of things is to be found by studying the things themselves." (18)

"These three aspects of science -- its recentness, the completeness of some of its fundamental knowledge, and its intrinsic unity -- mean that for the first time in human history we have true knowledge of the nature of existence and of our place in it. This fundamental fact is often ignored. Since science is necessarily tentative and uncertain at its growing edge, the great foundation of certainty that currently exists is seldom emphasized. Atoms and genes have changed from hypothetical notions into concrete objects whose existence is as certain as objects we can see and touch.

Academics cringe at the words truth and certainty. They believe that truth and certainty aren't possible because philosophers have shown that neither empirical nor deductive knowledge can be made error free. But in the case of a finite number of discrete entities, such as the chemical elements or the human genes, certainty is an appropriate word. And in any event, our knowledge of atoms and genes is as certain as our knowledge of tables and chairs, and a lot more certain that our knowledge of human behavior." (17)

I just liked this:

"We know little about planet formation except that it is a very complex process, involving the segregation of the heavier elements (oxygen, silicon, iron, etc.) from the hydrogen and helium that constitutes over 98 percent of matter in the universe. So many factors are involved -- mass, temperature, chemical composition, and so forth -- that every planet will be different. Neither the earth nor any other planet in the solar system can be considered typical or even likely." (175)

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Quiet, contemplative, reminiscent musings of an aging father for his very young son. I was really touched by this book... the narrator is a pastor, but he treats every subject he dwells on (including his own religion and life's work) with an even-handedness that happily surprised me.

This part made me laugh, for reasons you'll understand:

"...we ate our supper in the parlor -- it turns out that whoever brought the trays brought one for each of us. Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life's problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You'd have thought I'd died. We saved it for lunch." (127)

"I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve." (162)

"He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. 'For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?' In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us." (197)

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

Tender and funny tragi-comedy about a family of children, raised in Jamaica and sent back to England on a ship that gets waylaid by pirates. Hughes is one of my favorites for that unique bawdy British humor and he really hits on what creatures we all were as children as he describes all of their thoughts and reasonings and games with one another. I loved this little book.

After the kids have a laughing attack:

"...the group presently broke up. But they had all to avoid each other's eye for a long while, if they were not to risk another attack.
It was Laura who was cured the quickest. She suddenly discovered what a beautiful deep cave her arm-pit made, and decided to keep fairies in it in future. For some while she could think of nothing else." (289)

The kids are about to be banished from the pirate ship forever. Little Rachael cannot part with her "babies".

""My babies! My babies!" she shrieked, and began running all over the ship, routing out bits of rag, fuzzy rope-ends, paint-pots ... her arms were soon full.
"Here, you can't take all that junk!" dissuaded Otto.
"Oh but my darlings, I can't leave you behind!" cried Rachael piteously. Out rushed the cook, just in time to retrieve his ladle -- and a battle-royal began." (322)

:) (below)

"A shy little boy of about her own age, with brown eyes and a nice smile, his long hair brushed smooth as silk, his clothes neat and sweet-smelling, sidled up to Rachel.
"What's your name?" she asked him
"Harold."
She told him hers.
"How much do you weigh?" he asked her.
"I don't know."
"You look rather heavy. May I see if I can lift you?"
"Yes."
He clasped his arms round her stomach from behind, leant back, and staggered a few paces with her. Then he set her down, the friendship cemented." (327-328)

(New York: The Modern Library, 1932)

The Magus by John Fowles

This was unlike any book I've ever read... such a strange, convoluted tale. It demands the curiosity and doggedness of the reader as much as it does the eagerness of Nicholas to want to know and experience more. I loved the whole idea of this microcosmic, isolated journey of a man towards self-knowledge, how it was by turns hopeful and frustrating, graphic and sweet, so intellectually rewarding, and ooooh my goodness now I want to clamber all over an uninhabited Grecian island in all of its harsh and unforgiving beauty. Thanks Nolan!

"She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice." (30)

"It was not only the solitude -- it was Greece. It made conventional English notions of what was moral and immoral ridiculous; whether or not I did the socially unforgivable seemed in itself merely a matter of appetite, like smoking or not smoking a new brand of cigarette -- as trivial as that, from a moral point of view." (59)

"I had guessed, as she had talked, what was missing from her account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination... the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point -- all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attemps to tame. She set little boundaries, almost like snares, to see if one understood -- behaved, advanced, withdrew, as she wanted. Yet behind it all I foresaw an eventual place without boundaries, where she would one day allow me anything..." (374-375)

"I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved. The dry trees in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical." (467)

"...that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers' staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occured to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless . . . speciesless." (584-585)

(1978 revised edition. New York: Dell, 1985)

Atonement by Ian McEwan

"There were illuminated points in her vision, little pinpricks, as though the worn fabric of the visible world was being held up against a far brighter light." (60)

"Her memories of the interrogation and signed statements and testimony. or of her awe outside the courtroom from which her youth excluded her, would not trouble her so much in the years to come as her fragmented recollection of that late night and summer dawn. How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime." (162)

"'And do you get along all right with your landlady?'
He could think of nothing better, and feared the silence that might come down, and the awkwardness that would be a prelude to her telling him that it had been nice to meet up again. Now she must be getting back to work. Everything they had, rested on a few minutes in a library years ago. Was it too frail? She could easily slip back into a kind of sister. Was she disappointed? He had lost weight. He had shrunk in every sense. Prison made him despise himself, while she looked as adorable as he remembered her, especially in a nurse's uniform. But she was miserably nervous too, incapable of stepping around the inanities. Instead, she was trying to be lighthearted about her landlady's temper. After a few more such exchanges, she really was looking at the little watch that hung above her left breast, and telling him that her lunch break would soon be over. They had had half an hour." (193)

(2001. New York: Anchor Books, 2003)

The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

The Dead Father is a giant, a god who is almost but not quite dead. He is dragged through the countryside to his burial plot by a small group of humans who taunt and flirt with Him by turns. Barthelme uses a variety of experimental literary techniques to communicate the story, including long pages of short, random dialogue and paragraphs of clipped sentences conveying the actions and thoughts and words of each character. Absurdist humor abounds, along with biblical mimicry and detailed/weird sexual deviations in the bushes and it had me laughing most of the way through. The only parts that I found dull were the long pages of random snatches of wildly different conversations that really had very little to do with anything. Occasionally they were entertaining though, as here (italics mine):

"Sitting on some steps watching the tires of parked cars crack.
Shame, which has made marmosets of so many of us.
Mandrills watching from the sidelines with their clear, intelligent eyes.
Very busy making the arrangements.
Appeals to idealism.
Grocers wearing pistol belts.
It's perfectly obvious.
I was astonished to discover that his golden urine has a purple stripe in it." (150)

Two other weird snippets of conversation I liked:

"Animals in which the brain strangles the esophagus." (153)

"Tears some meat from his breast and puts it on a bun." (155)

It is evening, the party comes to a halt by the road side to make camp for the night. The Dead Father is contentedly strumming his guitar, the men are preparing trout for dinner:

"Waning or demise of sun. The projector is set up for projection of the pornographic film. Thomas decides that the Dead Father is not allowed to view the film, because of his age. Outrage of the Dead Father. Death of the guitar, whanged against a tree, in outrage. Guitar carcass added to the fire. Thomas adamant. The Dead Father raging. Emma regnant. Julie staring. Trout browning. Thomas walks to the edge. Regards the edge. Aspect of one about to hurtle over the. Thomas retreats from the edge. Slivered almonds distributed over various trouts browning in various skillets. Projector casts image upon screen (collapsible/portable). The Dead Father led away and chained to an engine block abandoned in a farther field. Revilings by the Dead Father. Damn your eyes, etc. Ignoring by Thomas. The film." (21)

The men pulling the cable attached to the Dead Father are starting to have misgivings, and ask Thomas if they're doing the right thing:

"An occasion. Thomas rising.

Your questions are good ones, he said. Your concern is well founded. I can I think best respond by relating an anecdote. You are familiar I take it with the time Martin Luther attempted to sway Franz Joseph Haydn to his cause. He called Haydn on the telephone and said, "Joe, you're the best. I want you to do a piece for us." And Haydn just said, "No way, Marty. No way."

You have got the centuries all wrong and the telephone should not be there and anyway I do not get the point, said Edmund.

You see! Thomas exclaimed. There it is! Things are not simple. Error is always possible, even with the best intentions in the world. People make mistakes. Things are not done right. Right things are not done. There are cases which are not clear. You must be able to tolerate the anxiety. To do otherwise is to jump ship, ethics-wise.

I hate anxiety, Edmund said. He produced a flask and tilted it.
Have some? he asked Thomas.
What is it?
Paint thinner with a little grenadine.
I'll pass thanks, Thomas said." (92-93)

Nolan, this one is for you. At the beginning, Julie and Thomas are arranging a time to meet for clandestine activities:

"Nine o'clock?
Ten o'clock.
I have to have bed check for the men at ten o'clock. What about eleven o'clock?
I think I can make eleven o'clock. Let me look in my book.
She looked in her book.
"Eleven o'clock, then, she said, writing a note in her book. Under the trees?
Under the stars, said Thomas.
The trees, said Julie, looks like rain.
If no rain, then the stars, said Thomas. If rain, then the trees.
Or the hedge, said Julie. Wet and dripping. Mulchy.
What are you arranging? asked the Dead Father. Could it be an assignation?
Nothing, said Julie. Nothing you should concern yourself about, dear old soul.
The Dead Father flang himself to the ground.
But I should have everything! Me! I! Myself! I am the Father! Mine! Always was and always will be! From whom all blessings flow! To whom all blessings flow! Forever and ever and ever and ever! Amen! Beatissime Pater!
He is chewing the earth again, Julie observed. One would think he would tire of it.
Thomas began singing, in a good voice.
The Dead Father stopped chewing the earth.
That is one I like, he said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his golden robe.
For thine, Thomas sang, in a good voice, is the kingdom, and the power, and the glo-ree, for-EVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV-er...
That is one I like, said the Dead Father, I have always liked that one.
Thomas stopped singing. " (156-157)

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975)

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

The climax of this story was a little too neat and far-fetched (very very close friends don't normally murder eachother over personal affronts...) and also predictable from miles away because McEwan aludes to how a pact made between two men in the first half of the story is going to have repercussions later. That sort of took the wind out of these sails. Even so, I did enjoy reading it and especially loved when the composer, Clive, heads out into nature in an attempt to find inspiration for his final symphony. The reasons for seeking the outdoors and the initial timidity of confronting a world so different from the one we are accustomed to is something most of us can relate to.

"During the first hour or so, after he had turned south into the Langstrath, he felt, despite his optimism, the unease of outdoor solitude wrap itself around him. He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to be overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. A sense of scale habituated to the daily perspectives of rooms and streets was suddenly affronted by a colossal emptiness. The mass of rock rising above the valley was one long frown set in stone. The hiss and thunder of the stream was the very language of threat. His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him that it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake.

Clive kept on because the shrinking and apprehension were precisely the conditions -- the sickness -- from which he sought release, and proof that his daily grind --crouching over that piano for hours every day -- had reduced him to a cringing state. He would be large again, and unafraid." (83)

(New York: Doubleday, 1999)

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz

Four very simple agreements to make with yourself:

1) Be impeccable with your word
2) Don't take anything personally
3) Don't make assumptions
4) Always do your best

"We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make. And this is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimize us, abuse us, and blame us as we do ourselves. So even before others have a chance to reject us, we have already rejected ourselves." (75)

(San Rafael: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997)

Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

Such an imaginative journey! It's fascinating to recall the strides that have been made in geology since the writing of this novel. Wegener hadn't even proposed the idea of continental drift until the early 1900's, and plate tectonic theory wasn't developed until the late 1960's, so it's rather humorous to read about a descent into the earth where every layer is in its appropriate and predestined place, and the deeper you go the older the rocks become; as though it were only natural to find completely preserved coal seams and untouched fossils from the Silurian at 30 leagues below the surface of an island. No subduction zones, no metamorphism, no recycling of rock, no sea-floor spreading, no hot viscous mantle... this was a fun one to read :)

"Well, said I rather surprised, "this discovery will astonish experimental philosophers. It was never suspected."
"Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring," replied my uncle dogmatically, "science has fallen into many errors -- errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the stepping stones to truth." (152)

The uncle, Professor Von Hardwigg, is a riot:

Harry: "In any case, we can never regret having come thus far. It is worth the whole journey to have enjoyed this magnificent spectacle -- it is something to have seen."
His uncle: "I care nothing about seeing, nor about magnificent spectacles. I came down into the interior of the earth with an object, and that object I mean to attain. Don't talk to me about admiring scenery, or any other sentimental trash." (166)

"About twelve o'clock a distant sound as of thunder fell upon our ears. I make a note of the fact without even venturing a suggestion as to its cause. It was one continued roar as of a sea falling over mighty rocks. [...]

Three hours passed away without any sign to indicate what might be before us. The sound began to assume that of a mighty cataract.

I expressed my opinion on this point strongly to my uncle. He merely shook his head. I, however, am strongly impressed by a conviction that I am not wrong. Are we advancing towards some mighty waterfall which shall cast us into the abyss? Probably this mode of descending into the abyss may be agreeable to the Professor, because it would be something like the vertical descent he is so eager to make. I entertain a very different opinion." (173-174)

(1864. United States: Aerie Books Ltd., no publishing date)