Book Quotes of the Week

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask  him what books he reads." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else." Neil Gaiman

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me." C.S. Lewis

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exist, a life-rat and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead." Caitlin Moran, "The Book Habit"

"If I'm going to be stranded, I hope it's inside a bookstore." Tere Arigo aka Thresca

Find more book quotes here.

Joyce, James "Ulysses"

Joyce, James "Ulysses" - 1922 

I loved the writing but the story was quite overwhelming despite reading "The Odyssey" first which everyone recommends and I would, too. Having a lot of explanations helped but if you generally don't like classics very much, I wouldn't start with this one.

Still, this is the most difficult book I have ever read. It is hard to follow the stream of consciousness, actually it is hard to follow the stream at all. A lot of books are easier once you get into them, not this one. I had the feeling with every chapter it got more confusing.

As in "Odyssey" we have three parts: The Telemachiad, The Odyssey and The Nostos (Coming Home). In the Telemachiad, you can still follow the teacher Stephen Dedalus in his classroom and understand what he is trying to teach. Then all, of a sudden, the story changes and you encounter the protagonist of the story, Leopold Bloom. We are supposed to follow him around for the day. And follow we do but we don't always have an idea where this is guiding us. Starting at the breakfast table, we attend a funeral, go to a restaurant and end up in the middle of a play.

The best example why we need punctuation is the last paragraph where Bloom's wife Molly tells us her thoughts about her life in general and her marriage to Leopold in particular. Over forty pages and no punctuation. At all. No comma. No full stop. No paragraph.  You can't even take a break.

However, the longer I distance myself from this novel, the more it makes sense and the bigger an impact does it have on me. I am glad I read it.

If you still are in doubt, consider this quote by William Faulkner:
"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.
 
From the back cover:

"For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishing wide-ranging allusions confirms its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that Ulysses is 'an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'"

Top Ten Tuesday ~ Top Ten REWIND! Top Ten Most Memorable Secondary Characters

"Top Ten Tuesday" is an original feature/weekly meme created on the blog "The Broke and the Bookish". This feature was created because they are particularly fond of lists at "The Broke and the Bookish". Since I am just as fond of them as they are, I jump at the chance to share my lists with them! Have a look at their page, there are lots of other bloggers who share their lists here.

February 25: Top Ten Tuesday REWIND! (Pick from previous topics that you want to do again or may have missed)

As I have only joined this less than half a year ago, there are a lot of subjects I have missed. Therefore, I have chosen the following subject:
August 27: Top Ten Most Memorable Secondary Characters (originally done May 2011)

Alcott, Louisa May "Little Women" - Theodore "Laurie" Laurence
Austen, Jane "Emma" - Harriet Smith
Eliot, George "Middlemarch" - Fred Vincy
Frazier, Charles "Cold Mountain" - Ruby Thewes
Hislop, Victoria "The Return" - Miguel
Kingsolver, Barbara "The Lacuna" - Frida Kahlo
Lee, Harper "To Kill a Mockingbird" - Jem Finch
Steinbeck, John "The Grapes of Wrath" - Rose of Sharon Joad Rivers
Stowe, Harriet Beecher "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - Eliza
Tolstoy, Leonid "War and Peace" - Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky

Eggers, Dave "The Circle"

Eggers, Dave "The Circle" - 2013

Ever wonder how 1984 goes on in 1985 up to today. Read this book. We all know about it, we are on Facebook, Google+, read Blogs etc. There are thousands of different kinds of information about us out there.

To start with my review, this is not going to be my favourite dystopian novel, that is still and probably will be for quite a while "The Handmaid’s Tale". "The Circle" does have its points, though, and maybe will be seen differently in the not so far future. It is, however, a reflection of the fears we have in our digital age. "Nineteen Eighty-Four", was worried about too much transparency already, whatever George Orwell feared has happened in a similar if not quite so bad way, we are transparent, even if we don't sign up with Facebook, Google+, Whatsapp or whatever social network we might prefer.

The book is written quite simple and you can read it in no time, maybe the author wanted to reach a wide readership which I don't blame him for but some of the characters could have been a little more three-dimensional, the plot a little more varied, with a little more suspension.

Granted, the slogan "Secrets are Lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is Theft." is catching and a lot of the "activities" (like "smiles" and "frowns" sound awfully familiar but I still think we are not there where the author wants us to go. And I doubt we ever will.

Not a bad read, a good idea, certainly an idea we should follow up but I'm not sure whether this is the right approach. I am sure a lot of people will agree with the worries of this book but it's a little more sci-fi than dystopian for my liking. I am sure the author will get a good movie deal for this.

From the back cover:

"The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of 'A Hologram for the King', a finalist for the National Book Award.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge."

Roth, Philip "Zuckerman Unbound"

Roth, Philip "Zuckerman Unbound" - 1981

I had read the first Zuckerman story "The Ghost Writer" not that long ago and found the story fascinating. Partly autobiographical, partly alternate history, love and war, a perfect combination of all those topics and a very challenging but also entertaining read.

I therefore had to read how it goes on with our friend Zuckerman. I was a little disappointed. Not about the writing, not about the story as such, but that so much time had passed between the first and the second book. Not just many years but a lot of things happened during that time to the protagonist. The author fills us in on the major parts that happens but you still have the feeling that something is missing. As if you meet an old school friend after decades and don't really know who he is anymore.

Still, the story is as interesting and forthcoming as the first one. Nathan Zuckerman has more or less developed into the writer we expected him to become, his private life certainly leaves nothing wanting.

From the back cover: "The sensationalizing sixties are coming to an end, and even writing a novel can make you a star. The writer Nathan Zuckerman publishes his fourth book, an aggressive, abrasive, and comically erotic novel entitled Carnovsky, and all at once he is on the cover of Life, one of the decade's most notorious celebrities.

This is the same Nathan Zuckerman who in Philip Roth's much praised The Ghost Writer was the dedicated young apprentice drawing sustenance from the great books and the integrity of their authors. Now in his mid-thirties, Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his fame, ventures out on the streets of Manhattan, and not only is he assumed to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?"), but he also finds himself the target of admirers, admonishers, advisers, and would-be literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Nathan Zuckerman to wonder if "target" may be more than a figure of speech.

Yet, streetcorner recognition and media notoriety are the least disturbing consequences of writing Carnovsky. Against his best interests, the newly renowned novelist retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother and his family. Even when finally he lives out the fantasies of his fans and enjoys an exhilarating night with the beautiful and worldly film star Caesara O'Shea (a rather more capable celebrity), he is dismayed the following morning by the caliber of the competition up in the erotic big leagues.

In some of the novel's funniest episodes Zuckerman endures the blandishments of another New Jersey boy who has briefly achieved his own moment of stardom. He is the broken and resentful fan Alvin Pepler, in the fifties a national celebrity on the TV quiz show "Smart Money." Thrust back into obscurity when headlined scandals forced the quiz show off the air, Pepler now attaches himself to Zuckerman and won't let go--an "Angel of Manic Delights" to the amused novelist (who momentarily sees him as his "pop self"), and yet also the likely source of a demonic threat.

But the surprise that fate finally delivers is more devilish than any cooked up by Alvin Pepler, or even by Zuckerman's imagination. In the coronary-care unit of a Miami Hospital, Nathan's father bestows upon his older son not a blessing but what seems to be a curse. And, in an astonishingly bitter final turn, a confrontation with his brother opens the way for the novelist's deep and painful understanding of the deathblow that Carnovsky has dealt to his own past."

Philip Roth received the Booker International Prize in 2011.

Book Quotes of the Week

"Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood." John Green

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die." Anne Lamott 

"I am simply a book drunkard." Lucy Maud Montgomery

"Book lovers will understand me and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence." Jan Morris

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack." Virginia Woolf 

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Collins, Suzanne "The Hunger Games"

Collins, Suzanne "The Hunger Games" - 2008 

I don't think I would have ever read this if it hadn't been for my facebook migraine group. I like dystopian novels but I think this had just too much hype.

It was more or less as I expected, a novel more directed at young people who enjoy reading about a different kind of world. Not to compare with "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "Brave New World",  "Fahrenheit 451", "The Handmaid’s Tale". We find in each of these four brilliant dystopian novels the fear of a different generation, explained through their tale. I don't think "The Hunger Games" quite reach that goal, it's probably more written to get a good movie deal and I think the author was successful with that.

From the back cover:

"In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love."