Books I RED

Mr. Gatsby is greater than the author of his story and greater than the book itself. Gatsby is a very real character. I much enjoyed listening to the free audiobook provided by the app Books on my iPhone. Leslie Odom Jr. was just the perfect person to read this story, his voice, very enchanting.  About the story I'd comment that the tragedy of two lovers torn apart is the same Rome & Juliet story that is here clothed as Daisy and Mr. Gatsby. If Heathcliff is an abominable character in literature then Tom Buchanan is much more so, the epitome of everything ugly concerning white masculinity. Besides I have sympathy for Heathcliff but non for Mr. Buchanan.  I could write in great lengths about how Fizgerald describes Daisy and I don't really appreciate how mindless he made her on the "pages" of the story. But I could appreciate the saga of Mr. Gatsby who had a million friends when things went well and none at his burial site.     

 A perhaps post-apocalyptic science fiction about one woman's stride across earth spaces in a world where she is the only one left behind. It's a story of survival in the sense that surviving is to keep going, keep pressing on, keep looking for life on a barren land. At the very beginning I found it hilarious that Harpman writes (the book came out in 1995 in French) that the captive women only had vegetables to eat and how this was a sign of total depravity. For those modern day perhaps ultra feminist readers who might have taken upon themselves a vegan way of life, I smile at the thought of that circle of readers. Non the less, the main character who is nameless, later finds frozen meat of various kinds and together with her survived companions eat the meat for strength, so much for veganism.  I've understood that this particular book as it came out in English in 1997 and later again in 2019 has in the past year 2023 by chance of book-Toc and other online phenomena became ...

A book about The Mother Wound and how it takes shape in the author who calls herself Anna throughout this semi autobiography, it's about her life, her failed marriages and her insatiable lust for sex. Ultimately it's about a neurotic and loveless mom and how it inflicts a seemingly incurable wound in the daughters self. The book is insightful and well paced, Thorvall was a good writer. The book is a Swedish classic and it caused it's uproar in late 60's because it broke taboos by allowing a well known female author to show the brutal, truer side of herself. She was known for writing children's books and shorter stories for youth and she worked predominantly as a  journalist alongside being an author.  Personally I had many take-aways from the story, many helpful insights and I'm grateful that she shared her story in the format that she did. In the 80's she'd already written the words that she wanted on her tomb stone, but I googled and I saw that her son...

Well, I seem to have plunged into the heart of the matter that I formerly addressed, namely classic male authors who don't understand the nature of women. It is hard to say weather Nathaniel Hawthorne understood women in The Scarlet Letter however D.H. Lawrence in his afterword on the work clearly did not. I quote "As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by a man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force, She can't help herself." D.H. Lawrence basically describes woman as evil and Hester Prymme in particular, as a witch. That's not original, it's a common response, however Hester was not a witch. O how many women have burned and died in vain for a similar mindset like his. I think that The Scarlet letter is about a woman who stands alone. She is an outcast of society and she's an alone mother. Her daughter Pearl, so precious yet so peculiar awakens the suspicions of the society as well, they wonder "is she the ...

 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...