“‘Perhaps the savages will always be in control,’ Philip said gloomily. ‘Perhaps greed will always outweigh wisdom in the councils of the mighty; perhaps fear will always overcome compassion in the mind of a man with a sword in his hand.’” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 15284
There was a time when I thought Michael V. Hayden and his ilk were scum, but, as Hayden himself acknowledges: “You can only dehumanize an enemy from a distance” (238). Once I let Hayden into my head, he gave my liberal, civilian ass a serious reality check. Despite its nonlinear format and a bevy of […]
“A sense of doom swamped Aliena. This was to be their fate, then: Richard would avenge Father, and she would take care of Richard. For her it would be a mission of revenge, for if Richard became earl, William Hamleigh would lose his inheritance. It flashed across her mind that no one had asked her […]
“‘Highborn people make poor servants. They are disobedient, resentful, thoughtless, touchy, and they think they’re working hard even though they do less than everyone else––so they cause trouble among the rest of the staff.’ He shrugged. ‘This is my experience.’” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 6638 “We make much in […]
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 […]
“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
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 […]
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 […]
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes: Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it […]