Tag: reading

Quotes from East of Eden by John Steinbeck

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast. – page 4

Page 55

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them. Page 133

.. Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread hatred around like butter on hot bread. Page 144

Well, a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does. Page 145

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. Page 268

… People are only interested in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen… A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting – only the deeply personal and familiar. Page 270

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. Page 270

… With rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt – and there is the story of mankind. Page 270

.. If rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. Page 270

The human is the only guilty animal. Page 271

Couldn’t a world be built around accepted truth? Couldn’t some pains and insanities be ripped out if the causes were known? Page 271

… A woman who knows all about men usually knows one part very well and can’t conceive other parts, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. P. 322

At this time I had to return the book to the library. Then I borrowed it again, but this time from a different library, and it was part of John Steinbeck: Novels 1942 – 1952 from The Library of America.

An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable in our times. p. 589

“It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.” p.708

A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?” p.747

Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill? p 747

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest with ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world. p 749

Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. p. 815

“I guess this personal hide-and-seek is not unusual. And some people are ‘it’ all their lives – hopelessly ‘it’.” p. 824

“Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn’t in time.” p. 835

“All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies… And we’re so overbrave and over fearful – we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time afraid of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic.We are mundane and materialistic – and do you know of any other nations that acts for ideals? We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture…” p. 913

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

… Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come back to life.

Page 85

So I finished this book. It’s like all human flaws were crammed into a few characters and you watched it play out like a slow train crash. The most logical-seeming person was also the worst. The most convoluted narrative was the most innocent character. The character that seemed to have something going for him, whose life looked like it was just beginning… Well, I’m not going to spoil it. The whole book is just tragic.

Question of the week from Jared Diamond

If we succeed in examining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn’t it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore be futile to try to change the outcome today?

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies

I picked this book up 10 years ago but got too busy to read the whole thing. Here’s to another try.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

I finished this book a couple of months ago but forgot I had written down some stuff from it!

“If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.” – p. 186

“Our possessions outlasts us,… we have to live up to them, as they will be our witnesses when we are gone.” p. 54

“You need to write everything down, he tells his people. Distrust yourself. Human memory is fallible.” p. 63

Do you know why they say, ‘There’s no smoke without fire?’ It’s not just to give encouragement to people who like fires. It’s a statement about the danger of chimneys, but also about the courts of kings – or any space where trapped air circulates, choking on itself. A spark catches a particle of falling soot: with a crackle, the matter ignites: with a roast, the flames fly skyward, and within minutes, the palace is ablaze.” p. 141

“But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pray for crimes, but not necessarily their own.” – p. 729

NASA is a busy place

I’m reading NASA’s launch schedules and it is fascinating!

Artemis I will be the first integrated test of NASA’s deep space exploration systems: the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first in a series of increasingly complex missions, Artemis I will be an uncrewed flight test that will provide a foundation for human deep space exploration, and demonstrate our commitment and capability to extend human existence to the Moon and beyond.

… the DART spacecraft will slam into the asteroid Dimorphos at roughly 4 miles per second, attempting to slightly change the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be accurately measured using ground-based telescopes. The world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards…

The first flight of NASA’s X-57, a small, experimental airplane powered by electricity…

All of these can be found on the Upcoming Mission Events page.

Thoughts and an excerpt from East of Eden by John Steinbeck

So I’m reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I read it when I was 13 years old in middle school and at that time, I remember it as a continous puzzlement of mentally pleading to the characters, “Noooo, don’t do that!” over and over again. I felt like everybody in the book was a slow moving train wreck and when I finished it, I felt “bothered” by it but wasn’t sure how. It felt like a Grimm’s fairy tale with no happy ending. I didn’t understand how people worked (and probably still don’t; see: autism) in the book and couldn’t compare it to real life because no one acted that way in my small 13 year old world. I realize now that no 13 or 14 year old would “get” it, not in a “been there” way.  I believe there is a time to read certain things (but I wouldn’t forbid anyone reading, though).

I’d recommend reading East of Eden with at least 30 years’ of life experience. Reading this book in my 40s is another thing entirely. Now, I feel like I understand it. And I wonder if all the women in Steinbeck’s life were “suspicious of fun”, “had no spark of humor and only occasionally a blade of cutting wit”, “a pale inside-herself woman” on which “no open laughter raised the corners of her mouth”. We haven’t even gotten to Cathy yet. I’m on page 132, and I don’t remember what happens next. I’m hoping there is a woman that isn’t miserable or evil or drab, a woman with strength, personality, joy, openness, warmth, and a moral compass. I want to tell Steinbeck that women can have all of those qualities and it wouldn’t threaten anyone’s masculinity, but this could be the 2020s talking to the 1950s. Anyways…

This is a beautiful and introspective book at times. The writing is snappy, flavorful, and sensory. The language is nowhere near as hard as Ulysses (I’m still working through that one). It’s very palatable if one wants a see a master of description at work. The setting and the characters are drawn so well that I can sense their essence. What really is worth reading are the small sections of… Ponderance?

There are sentences that I do agree with and ones I don’t. But I just had to share this whole section – I have no recollection of reading this in middle school; it probably went over my head – but now these are my favorite parts.

Faster Growth, Fairer Growth

The Niskanen Center is an interesting place to read articles supporting a unique viewpoint that rejects the dichotomy of leftist or rightist. So far, their Faster Growth, Fairer Growth Agenda is an interesting read, showing how our past affect our present and how today is not yesterday. Be aware, it’s long.

Over the past several decades, the American Dream has been caught in a pincer movement. On the one hand, deep-seated social forces have combined to slow down growth and accelerate inequality. At the same time, sustained and dramatic changes in public policy have worked not to counteract those forces, but to exacerbate them.

Brink Lindsey and Samuel Hammond from the Niskanen Center

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell

“Beneath every history, another history.” – p. 61

“It matters what name we choose, what name we make.” – 165

“There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible… The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were before.” – 189

“A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hands and the unguessed-at expression of his face.” – 331

The fate of people is made like this, two men in small rooms… This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase… ” – 566

Books I’ve Finished or Read Since January 1, 2022

Circe by Madeline Miller
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Piranesi by Susanna Clark
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Stars are Not Yet Bells by Hannah Lilith Assandt
Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephensen
Light by John M Harrison
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
The Impossible Climb by Mark Synnot

Light by M. John Harrison

“… Somewhere between waking and sleeping, ‘rents’ had become ‘tears’ and this, he felt, summed up the life of his whole race.” page 15

“Circus was in the streets. It was inside people’s heads. Eat fire? Everyone was a fireeater. Everyone had geek genes and a story to tell. Sentient tattoos made everyone the Illustrated Man. Everyone was high on some flying trapeze issue of their own.” page 163

“The more you deny the forces inside, kid, the more they control you.” page 224

“They’d driven themselves past the norms of their relationship, they had no idea what to make of each other. He didn’t want her to be healthy. She didn’t want him to be reliable or good-natured.” page 241

The Year of Mind, Body, and… Wallet

Without really meaning to, I’ve decided to try to make this a year (or more) of mind, body, and wallet. Meaning that during the same time frame I’ve somehow decided to 1) focus more fully on fitness, 2) read at least 10-20 books of “literature” for 2022, and 3) limit my spending.

The fitness backstory: 2021 was a year of surprise medical problems. From the months of March to May in 2021, during what I felt was a giant positive upswing in my fitness journey (I was looking fit, toned, and strong; I was using my Olympic weight set), I started bleeding. Like, a lot. I was hemorrhaging. I had to go to the Emergency Room twice because the first time, I’d lost a quarter of my blood volume and the second time, I was well on my way to losing half my blood. Both ended up in hospital stays. I got put on different medicines to try to stop the bleeding. They never worked completely. In May, I underwent a hysterectomy and everything that was wrong in that part of my body was taken out. And after I healed (3 whole months for full healing), I had to deal with weakened muscles that ended up in back pain for which I went to physical therapy. After a few more months, I finally felt ready to start my fitness journey over. But during these months, I had gotten out of shape and weak. I wanted to be strong again. I really started rock climbing regularly and did some light weights to start, but it was in December that I felt strong enough to really take my 20- and 30-pound dumbbells seriously. So for 2022 I decided to finish what I’d started 1.5 years ago.

Reading: 2021 was also a year of loss. Like I mentioned before, I inherited a few old books from someone who was gone too soon due to Covid and never visiting the doctor, like, ever. Reading Ulysses (I’m now halfway through it) has ignited within me a desire to read more literary fodder, as in anything that’s not a “quick airport book from a tiny newsstand.” The types of books that you don’t have to think about. I do enjoy the relaxed non-heavy read. But, it’s not like I’ve never read anything substantial. I went through a beatnik phase and a William Faulkner phase. I had a Tom Robbins phase. I took Philosophy classes in college (which forced me to read Plato, Aristotle, Hume, etc.) and I read stuff like Bertrand Russell for fun. My high school had me read a lot of classics because it was 3 years of Honors English and 1 of AP English. But there were still books that were out of my reach or kind of slippery because I was simply too ADD to focus on them. But now I’m 2 decades older, my ADD is controlled, and I have the time and the life knowledge to tackle books I’ve missed. Which books? Well, I’m not sure yet. There are lists of books all over the place. My first thought is to balance the reading so that I’m not reading War and Peace and Anna Karenina at the same time, that there is a difference in time, place, author, and culture. I’d also like to read across genres and points of view. Variety is the spice of life, they say.

So far this year I’ve finished Circe by Madeline Miller and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. (One of those was deeper than the other.) I’ve got Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino*, All Systems Red by Martha Wells*, Dune, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier* on rotation. And of course, Ulysses. From the library I have one Neal Stephenson book, Fall, or Dodge in Hell. On my “next” list is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu*, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. On my bookshelf are Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. There are even more books in my Kindle and on my ebook “to read” list. My intention is to pick books that can make me pause and think, but sometimes, I’m not sure every book I pick will do that. Circe was a lot simpler read than I had thought; it was good but not as dense as I thought it would be. (I’d recommend Galatea by Madeline Miller as a more thoughtful read). In any case, I’m sure I’ll write about the things I read.

The wallet: Suddenly one day I pondered if I could do an entire year of “no spending”. This was after the splurging I did in November and December to set up my workstation at home with 2 4k monitors and a docking station. I also bought a bookshelf. Not to mention everyone’s holiday gifts. Then one day after Christmas, it hit me that I could try to do a “no spend” month where I didn’t buy anything on impulse or that I didn’t really need. I wondered how much money I could save. I thought about what were “approved” spends and “bad” spends — and if you’ve never thought of this before, it is an enlightening exercise. For people doing this, the first thing they must do is to make lists of what’s a “need” versus a “want”, what’s okay to spend on, and what isn’t. (One can look up “no spend year” and find a million links and social media about the topic.) I read this Forbes article to start.

What’s nice about the No Spending thing is that it’s personalized, for the most part. I, for instance, do not need the latest game console or video game, because nothing I do depends on that. Someone else might. Someone else might not need shampoo and conditioner, but I do, or else my hair turns into a giant, out-of-control tumbleweed. I can broadly put down in the “approved” list things like medical bills, medicines, things for health maintenance, insurance, and things for health improvements. Other “approved” spending includes food (nothing carb-loaded or deep fried), gifts (dollar limits depending on what the gift is for), car maintenance, house maintenance, vacation, and replacements for things I already own if they are used up or worn down, like soap. It’s easy to write “No late-night Amazon browsing” and remember it, hence, cutting out the possibility of ordering something half-asleep. Also, it’s easy to remember “no more clothes” and “no impulse buying”. This past week, this “resolution” has reared up at Target, Best Buy, and the grocery store, successfully convincing me to not buy something just for the sake of buying it. It was both difficult and empowering. Once January is over, I’ll try February. I’m hoping that eventually, this will turn into a habit and my wallet will be happier for it.

*Books that are ebook or library loans will have priority.

Words from Madeline Miller’s Circe

You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

Page 99

… perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

Page 325

He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

Page 406

Momentary

I’m on page 3 and I already want to weep.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

–Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Reading in 2021

I’m now up to page 108 in Ulysses and I’ve decided to read it like a literary novel; somewhat slower and more aware than if I were reading the mass paperbacks they sell at airports, but a lot faster than when I started on page 1. Basically, I’ve stopped looking up everything beyond my understanding: all the foreign language phrases, bits of history, bits of everyday slang that isn’t slang anymore, references to life in Dublin in the 1900s that just goes over my head because I’m not in Dublin in the 1900s, etc. It was just taking too long to just move along. Instead I’m just underlining some things and writing down some others (not all!) on Post-Its. Even then, my normal reading speed (usually a 600-page book per day speed, if it’s Jack Kerouac and I’m really into it) has dropped to a paltry 50 pages every few days. (I do have to remind myself that I’m reading Dune at the same time, and am really into logic puzzles and crosswords at the moment). Anyway, looking things up in 2021 makes me wish that I had the internet when I was in Honors and AP English a very long time ago (too long ago– my birthday is coming around again, in 2 days!). Although we all slogged through English classes (lots of Shakespeare) with rarely the help of a Cliffs Notes (remember those? are those still around?), we did understand somewhat of what we were reading. Finding guides to books were really difficult if you didn’t have access to a bookstore, or a bookstore that didn’t have any literary guides. But now, I can’t imagine the difference the internet would have made so that Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, or Midsummer Night’s Dream are easier to process! So while looking on YouTube for the subject matter of “Ulysses Joyce”, I found a movie? documentary? movie-mentary? about the book. I don’t have words for what this film is. Mishmash is the closest I could come to it.

The film/movie/work is titled James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1987) and at first I thought it was just the book made into a film. But about 5-10 minutes through what feels like movie scenes from the book, one gets scenes of actual professorial types, sitting on flowery couches in some office, explaining some of the background and themes. Not only those, there are scenes of James Joyce writing the book and bouncing ideas off others. The film itself is both about the book and the book itself. Kind of like Ulysses being every day life and describing every day life. Is it self-referential? And while the film would be completely boring to me for any other aspect of my life, and to lots of people that I know at any time, I thought it helped me quite a bit in visualizing the book and bringing attention to other ideas that would not have occurred to me (e.g., the musicality).