Two Lines in Some Manner About a Book! #3

The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of Global Order, Samuel P. Huntington
Fantastic book-look into the nature of politics at an unimaginable scale: global. Trace the lines of civilizations and look into the machine that is global politics (there are critiques out there, but for the semi-initiated, this is needle and thread with which to seam ideas).

Ulysses, James Joyce
yes, yes. How long have I been reading this book about Bloom's day and I'm still not finished, perhaps never will be, but when I'm in it it's a delight simply for the words (and I guess Hemingway and Joyce were pals at a time and there were some written flourishes in the former that seemed particularly Joycian).

Twentieth-Century Mystics and Sages, Anne Bancroft
A book about the great kind of people. The individuals that colour experience and shed light on our own minds.

Sanity, Madness and the Family, R. D. Laing
A look at 11 schizophrenic daughters and their families. This is a disorder difficult to pin down (at the time?); read this and discover how families can be messed up and craziness may emerge out of situations, not just minds.

In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami
Sex, violence, and violence in the Tokyo "underworld" of sex and violence, but mostly the pathetic-ones let loose upon by a foreign beast man; part misunderstood man; part robotic animal man. Spatterings of social critique among the blood.

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, Chris Ware
"I could flip through this book all day," I said. The artwork is brilliant and so is the story, though be prepared to have it engage you, for it will define your mood.

Maus, Art Spiegleman
Highly talked about, and indeed, a great read, likely an honest, a grisly honest read, but I wasn't engaged in the reading and looking so much as by the thinking it inspired. I hardly want to think those things, let alone to have endured them.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, Lynne Truss
This a half-amusing drly cycnical book about punctuation and how careless computers make us. No--we are careless to begin with, but I too like to punctuate (though I don't know if I'd pass any tests), meaningcanbeaboutsoundsandspaceandreallydowewanttowritelikethis?

Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
This book uses the tools of economics to tell a story of how things are: "[i]f morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world;" statistics tell us things profound, though it seems in retrospect. One more question for the book of questions: does knowing statistics change statistics (eg. an intact family is not a meaningful measure of a child's performance in school--does knowing this affect an outcome)?

Special section to Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway
Got me started on the tough, the stubborn refusal to give in, the existential of male, of man. A wonderful read, curt in its descriptions, sparse with its words; a good introduction.

The Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemmingway
This time around, killing things in the jungle, and as such involved me less--maleness has changed, though I can still understand the appeal. Though, the laws of the jungle weren't written with rifles in mind, were they?

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway
Practically a manual for dying; a beautiful ode to fate and love (never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee). Hemmingway writes with a heavy hand, but can be so subtle and graceful at times, those times he seems to know.

To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemmingway
A collage book of three stories, none of which compelled me to keep reading. A violent and questionable hero struggling to survive in a story lacking substance (though not without a few bright passages by the great writer).

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemmingway
This book gave me the most insight into Hemingway, no longer enamoured, I was, but more critical, and finding this time a desire in myself to read more motivation, more feeling, but alas: "it's hard to see inside the head of the brave" (126). But an ending such as this book has, in a way as all Ernest's books, brought me around, and I was the one moved (read the first explicit male tear in E.H.).

Men Without Women, Ernest Hemmingway
I read a few of these short stories, but I find I'm just not a fan of the short story medium. So I put it down; maybe another time (In Another Country I liked for images of men manipulated by machines).