Books I RED

 I just read Orwell's 1984 and here's what I have to say about it.  Like with Animal farm , I believe 1984 is an overrated work. One of the most protruding and annoying element was the love story between middle aged Winston Smith (the main character) and Julia, a young almost adolescent girl-like woman, who for one reason or the other is barren. I get Nabokov vibes even though I am yet to read Lolita . I imagine, having seen a picture of Orwell himself, that Winston Smith is him. I find it disgusting that Orwell might have imagined himself through the main character having a love affair with a much younger woman, Julia. The one nice comment the main character makes about a stout obese mum from the lower class doesn't make it more okay for him to go on fulfilling the literary fantasies of endless love making on fields of flowers and bug infested beds. In many ways 1984 is gross, it's a vile display of cruelty and evil power, and it almost makes one think, is Orwell in o...

  Book 17 for year 2023 is  Study for Obedience  by Sarah Bernstein. I finished it yesterday and I have many thoughts about it. It was good first of all, and brilliant in the way that the characters and story lives on even though the text was short. Once a man told me that if you can't explain you thesis on one single paper then it's not worth writing.  Bernstein's thesis is that a woman can feel odd and out of place where her brother would turn such a feeling of being misfit into his personal triumph. We never find out the name of the main character, the sister, she travels to a unknown place up "north" to care for her brother who is ill and dying. In the beginning the brother is still capable of traveling and doing his business and so he goes on a journey leaving the Sister to care for his estate. During her time of solitude she reflects on her life and work always stumbling over her own person. I'm reminded of my favorite passage in Alice in the Wonderla...

Well...this is a book blog, not a political news bulletin, but I know what Charly Salonius-Pasternak said, he said something of significance and some people tried to say, it's nothing, or he is exaggerating. But for a year now, most clever Finns have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I hope it won't. The thing I had to say about Jansson's book from 1940's Vi ville inte dö (eng. We didn't want to die) was that Finland has many lessons to learn from history, but like with mankind usually, the lessons are not taken, and History has a tendency to repeat itself, and somehow still, it is we, people, who repeat it. I have a lot of examples in regards of this situation but as I said this is not a political blog. It's a sad thing having a clear sense of the world and education that makes one think on things from a broader point of view and yet having no power to change things. Today I was thinking, has a writer ever changed the world by a novel? Prayer is more...

I forgot that before Stoner I actually read Wuthering Heights. I kind of get why the novel was named so, Catherine and Heathcliff soaring to heights of love and passion but unable to stand steadfast in loving each other. The bitterness of Heathcliff's childhood then destroying him, was he a monster? Was he misunderstood? Was he a Victorian psychopath or what in modern words would be called a narcissist? I think he wasn't any of those things, unlikable yes, but not a monster. Catherine understood him, she loved and adored him, why did she then marry another? She wanted stability and in her pursuit caused Heathcliff to his ultimate vendetta. This is what i had written down in my reading journal about W.H. after reading it in August 2023.  "A story of one mans annihilation by his own vanity, wrath and passion. Avenge belongs to God because man is often destroyed through his own avarice: the wish and pursuit to avenge himself" I recognized someone I love in Heathcliff...

Currently I am reading about the Winter War in Finland anno 1939, the year my grandmother was born, it's a first hand account of events that happened and the book is written by Gunnar Johansson, title Vi ville inte dö (Swedish trans. We did not want to die) it's a beautiful blue hardcover book, a pearl I found at the give and take shelf of my local library, I'm almost finished with it and I'll give a few comments on it now: unfathomably hard fighting between a nation of 180 million against 4 million people, who survived and overcame. The scene is set in dark wintery forests of -35 c. winter blizzards and shooting from behind rocks and in between trees, some of the men as young as sixteen years of age, trying to defend their country. The main hero of the story was himself 15 years of age in the prior war and now, a grown man, gone to war as a commander, when he parted from his wife the couple said only one thing to each other "forgive me" for marriage and life ...

On New Year's Eve 2022 I finished reading Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait . A fictive story of Lucrezia Di Cosimo de 'Medici from Florence. She was allegedly poisoned to death by her husband Alfonso in 1560's Medieval Italy. The story was essentially asking the question "How can a woman be free?" Lucre was barely sixteen when she was murdered - the theme of the book much the same as in Handmaid's tale a question that remains to this day, universally unanswered. In a Discord group I participated in the January 2023 read, The Woman in White. The take away from this saga of female heroism and love was ultimately this: death can be a punishment or a reward. There's much to say about the plot and as always in classics many angles to view the story from. For me the group reading experience was rewarding. Joel Haahtela, a doctor turned to a novelist turned into an Orthodox Christian has written some shorter novels of which i read Adèlen k...