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 […]
“The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 485 “If you’ve heard voices in your head once, you’re never sure again if a random thought is just a random thought, or something more.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 549
“Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us?” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 405
As a newcomer to the world of business, I don’t possess the background or knowledge base to properly critique this book. I learned some interesting information and strategies, but am not sure how useful they will be until I’ve implemented them. Who is very accessible and easy to understand, and it seems like the authors did their […]
“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 390
“Love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the […]
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 […]
Any novel should be cut a little slack to adjust for the historical context in which it was written. Even knowing this, I failed utterly in my attempt to give Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a fair reading. Try as I might, I couldn’t dispense with my modern viewpoint enough to enjoy Kesey’s classic, […]