“Our way of conducting business has outgrown our planet. Our organizations contribute on a massive scale to depleting natural resources, destroying ecosystems, changing the climate, exhausting water reserves and precious topsoils. We are playing a game a brinksmanship with the future, betting that more technology will heal the scars modernity has inflicted on the planet. […]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for […]
Several chapters from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were instrumental in my undergraduate thesis, but I never got around to reading the whole book until now. This is a grand and fascinating journey through the history of ethics, fueled by MacIntyre’s argument for a modern renaissance of Aristotelian thought. He begins with this assertion: The language […]
“For the Vinny Costellos of the world, love is bullshit they murmur into your ear to get sex. For girls––me, anyway––sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 70 “‘Power is lost or won, never created […]
“‘What if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or…’ Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bars sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, ‘Sleep tight don’t let the bedbugs […]
“You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.” ––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, pg. 212 “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. […]
“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.” ––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, pg. 117 “Practices must not be confused with institutions. Chess, physics and […]
“I still hear the sounds of the falls on the Columbia, always will––always––hear the whoop of Charley Bear Belly stabbed himself a big chinook, hear the slap of the fish in the water, laughing naked kids on the bank, the women at the racks…from a long time ago.” ––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by […]
“There’s something strange about a place where men won’t let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks he’ll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new […]
After being blown away last year by Hanya Yangihara’s second novel, A Little Life, I resolved to read her debut as well. In many ways, it’s hard to imagine two stories that have less in common. But both books are clearly the product of an intellect sharpened with the language of disgust and brutality. Yanagihara’s […]