Monday, July 14, 2014

Books and their hooks

I've started to queue some books to read.. I just re-read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read it years ago, long enough to want to read it again. I'm kind of into dystopian fiction.. Now I'm reading her series Oryx and Crake.
Here are some I want to work my way through in the near future:

1.The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac

"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling."

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
"Perhaps a lunatic is just a minority of one."

3.The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
"This is a good place," he said. "There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.

4. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

5. Money - Martin Armis
"when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes."

6. The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart
"But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen."



6 comments:

  1. I'm feeling good having three of the 6 already on my shelf with well worn spines. The dharma bums 50th anniversary hardcover edition is on its way to me now. Looking forward to seeing if it deserves to be on any list with George Orwell

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  2. well, orwell and hemingway. duh. and money, a suicide note. I think you could have guessed that those three would be in most peoples collection.

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    1. I was certain on Hemingway and Orwell.. I want sure about the third. How is Money? Worth reading?

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  3. because of John Self. mid 30s director who is riding the momentum of his addictions to smoking, drinking, junk food and nude magazines, plus a few other products of the dependence industries - television, dope, gambling, hitting women, synthetic confidence and, supremely, money. Until his EPIC fall. how have you not read this?!

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    1. Reminds me of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full..

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