“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”

- from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

- from Adam’s Diary by Mark Twain

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.

-from How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

- from Love in the Time of Cholera‎ by Gabriel García Márquez

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

-from American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Here’s something new I am going to try out. Every couple of months, I’ll give a brief update on what I’ve been reading – not everything, of course, but the books that I feel compelled to share. I’ll provide a brief synopsis along with a (mostly meaningless) star rating out of five. Most importantly, the comments section of this post can be used as a jumping point for discussion not only for the books that I have noted, but for what you have read lately as well. Feel free to leave your thoughts on these, your thoughts on anything that you have read lately, as well as any recommendations you might have for anyone. Hopefully we can get some discussion going. Cheers!

The Graveyard Book (2008)
Author: Neil Gaiman
Synopsis: “Somewhere in contemporary Britain, ‘the man Jack’ uses his razor-sharp knife to murder a family, but the youngest, a toddler, slips away. The boy ends up in a graveyard, where the ghostly inhabitants adopt him to keep him safe. Nobody Owens, so named because he ‘looks like nobody but himself,’ grows up among a multigenerational cast of characters from different historical periods … As he grows up, Bod has a series of adventures, both in and out of the graveyard, and the threat of the man Jack who continues to hunt for him is ever present.”
Star Rating: * * * * *

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Author: George Orwell
Synopsis: “Orwell’s first published book, it contains essays in which actual events are recounted in a fictionalized form. The book recounts that to atone for the guilt he feels about the conditions under which the disenfranchised and downtrodden peoples of the world exist, Orwell decides to live and work as one of them. Dressed as a beggar, he takes whatever employment might be available to a poverty-stricken outcast of Europe. In Paris he lives in a slum and works as a dishwasher. … Dressed as a tramp, he travels throughout England with hoboes and migrant laborers.”
Star Rating: * * * *

Salt: A World History (2003)
Author: Mark Kurlansky
Synopsis: “Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. Today we take salt for granted, a common, inexpensive substance that seasons food or clears ice from roads, a word used casually in expressions (‘salt of the earth,’ ‘take it with a grain of salt’) without appreciating their deeper meaning. However, as Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates in his world-encompassing new book, salt—the only rock we eat—has shaped civilization from the very beginning. Its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind.”
Star Rating: * * * *

The Razor’s Edge (1944)
Author: W. Somerset Maugham
Synopsis: “The Razor’s Edge tells the story of an American, Larry Darrell, who, traumatized by his experiences as a fighter pilot in World War I, decides to search for some transcendent meaning in his life. … The story begins through the eyes of Larry’s friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the War. His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune.”
Star Rating: * * * * *

Factotum (1975)
Author: Charles Bukowski
Synopsis: “One of Charles Bukowski’s best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.”
Star Rating: * * * *

Rabbit Redux (1971)
Author: John Updike
Synopsis: “The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, and sexy story. Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America’s most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves or further complicates his problems makes for a novel of the first order.”
Star Rating: * * * *

American Rust (2009)
Author: Philipp Meyer
Synopsis: “Buell, Pennsylvania lies in ruins, a dying – if not already dead – steel town, where even the lush surrounding country seethes with concealed industrial toxins. When Isaac English and Billy Poe – a pair of high-school friends straight out of Steinbeck – embark on a starry-eyed cross-country escape to California, a violent encounter with a trio of transients leaves one dead, prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. American Rust is Philipp Meyer’s first novel, and his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams, elevating a book that otherwise might be relentlessly dour to the level of honest and unflinching storytelling.”
Star Rating: * * * *

“You are cynical.”

“Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It’s not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while, you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that matters is putting some turds in the toliet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘I’m God,’ I’d say, ‘Show me your badge.’”

-from Rabbit Redux by John Updike

In my mind, I’m probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw. Sometimes I can think of very crumby stuff I wouldn’t mind doing if the opportunity came up. I can even see how it might be quite a lot of fun, in a crumby way, and if you were both sort of drunk and all, to get a girl and squirt water or something all over each other’s face. The thing is, though, I don’t like the idea. It stinks, if you analyze it. I think if you really like a girl, you shouldn’t horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you’re supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It’s really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.

-from The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

“And after that? What are you going to do with all this wisdom?”

“If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.”

-from The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

“You attach more importance to money than I do.”

“I can well believe it,” I answered tartly. “You see, you’ve always had it and I haven’t. It’s given me what I value almost more than anything else in life – independence. You can’t think what a comfort it’s been to me to think that if I wanted to I could tell anyone in the world to go to hell.”

“But I don’t want to tell anyone in the world to go to hell, and if I did, the lack of a bank balance wouldn’t prevent me. You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.”

-from The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

I managed to read quite a few books this year. My list of favorite books that I read over its course is a bit more diverse than last year, managing to mix the must-read classics with high political fantasy, modern pop lit, and even a non-fiction argument against the existence of god, a book that convincingly goes so far to say that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion. As always, feel free to recommend me any books to add to my ever-amassing collection of “must reads” that are piling up next to my already full bookshelf. If only I could be like Larry in The Razor’s Edge, loafing around for years in exotic countries reading for ten hours a day, maybe I would be able to get through them all within a couple of years.

Don’t forget to check out last year’s list also. Like I mentioned, it’s not quite as diverse, with Cormac McCarthy making the list an unprecedented four times.

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It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

-from Factotum by Charles Bukowski

by Jonathan B. in Literary Quote, Literature 

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There’d always been something about the boy, he was smart and stupid at the same time. As if he was meant to do everything the wrong way. Junior league ball, the boy was twelve, they subbed him in for the pitcher, good arm but he chokes, eight runs straight, loses the game. Afterward acting like nothing happened. It made no sense. The feeling that gave you, watching your son lose the game, but he just shrugged it off, didn’t care.

-from American Rust by Philipp Meyer

I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants’ toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder – there was not a crime I did not commit… Thus I lived for ten years.

-from Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Hello, I am Wanda June. Today was going to be my birthday, but I was hit by an ice-cream truck before I could have my party. I am dead now. I am in Heaven. That is why my parents did not pick up my cake at the bakery. I am not mad at the ice-cream truck driver, even though he was drunk when he hit me. It didn’t hurt much. It wasn’t even as bad as the sting of a bumblebee. I am really happy here! It’s so much fun. I’m glad the driver was drunk. If he hadn’t been, I might not have gone to Heaven for years and years and years. I would have had to go to high school first, and then beauty college. I would have had to get married and have babies and everything. Now I can just play and play and play. Any time I want any pink cotton candy I can have some. Everybody up here is happy — the animals and the dead soldiers and people who went to the electric chair and everything. They’re all glad for whatever sent them here. Nobody is mad. We’re all too busy playing shuffleboard. So if you think of killing somebody, don’t worry about it. Just go ahead and do it. Whoever you do it to should kiss you for doing it. The soldiers up here just love the shrapnel and the tanks and the bayonets and the dum dums that let them play shuffleboard all the time – and drink beer.

-from Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

-from Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

I have no special regard for Satan; but, I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English, it is un-American; it is French.

-from Concerning the Jews by Mark Twain

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

-from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho