Thursday news
Today is the 7th of April, 2022. A book recommendation list, and yesterday’s visuals.
As far as I don’t have other news to share only a new legal novella following which I can’t quote any article related to the discussion of the “special operation”, Russian military or government, I will post my second list of 5 book reviews (first one is here). Enjoy the reading, share your thoughts. Let’s inspire each other.
I will start with the light stories and finish with serious stuff. I don’t share literature for the sake of the literature. Books I mention really moved me, gave me a better angle on a problem that I could ignore before or had no idea about, taught me some tricks, changed me.
It’s not just a list of recommendations, it's also my journey back in time. I rediscovered myself writing for you, reflect on my own life through literary memory. And that’s a pretty amazing, I must say. The journey fills me with light and with gratitude to life itself, and who knows, maybe it will have the same effect on you as it has on me. Make your own lists, share them with me. That might be very interesting and healing.
“God Is My Broker” by Christopher Buckley and John Marion Tierney
Christopher Buckley is the guy responsible for the “Thank you for smoking” cynicism. I recommend the book first of all because that’s how I’ve opened the author for myself. Though if you are a devotee of Deepak Chopra, Stephen Covey, Robert Kiyosaki, or any sort of self-help literature, or if you are very serious about the church, don’t start here. That is the book that gave birth to the fraze “The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one”. And in the centre of it is a Catholic Church popularisation, economy and therefore hypocrisy. The text is hilarious but also interesting as it opens the schemes, mind tricks, compromises between spiritual and material matters. Sarcasm and satire at its best. Short and easy reading.
Here’s a plot. Brother Ty wasn’t successful at Wall Street, losing the sense life he found a place where he seems to fit quite well. He becomes a monk in an upstate New York monastery Cana. The place is literally falling apart financially, to save it he decides to listen to God and follow his signs, looking for buy and sell signs in his breviary comparing those to the business rumours. The Abbot at the same time is desperate enough to rely more on the business guru's advice than on the Lord’s will. Together they are able to pull out the business, run a marketing campaign around the wine they got to substitute their own awful production. Success attracts too much attention, and the Vatican sends their inspector to check the reasons for a financial miracle in that hole.
“A week in December” by Sebastian Faulks
Strangely, I've chosen the most difficult to describe stories today. That book is impossible to put into a few words, because that was a challenge to look at the world, life, life mission (even that), love, obsession, profession, passion, lifestyle and interests, determining vision ideas through the eyes of ten characters. Every day of the Christmas week they live, think, reflect their stories, dreams, expectations from the future. The action isn’t the aim, there’s no sense to look at the result of the week other than to see how each of them will finish their year, and with what on their mind they will enter into the new year.
It's a fusion of “Vanity Fair” and “Ulysses”. Hedge funds, virtual reality games (pre- Meta Universe), pre-IGIL kind of radicalisation of the young disillusioned generation, rich and poor worlds interventions, working class and intellectual snobbism with zero sense of existence, definition of prestige, meaning of love, marriage, relationships inside family. A slice of multilayered cake of contemporary London. Though I think it could be any big city. Very personal, for that reason sometimes difficult to understand if your knowledge of economics or computer games or literature as a subject of creation are superficial. Mine were super superficial, so some pages I needed to skip. But it’s good. Really very good. At times it’s satirical, sometimes actual drama, a touch of detective, a lot of melodrama. Just as our own days really.
“La possibilité d'une île” (“The Possibility of an Island”) by Michel Houellebecq
If the previous book was impossible to describe, that one I simply don’t want to describe, because it will spoil the joy of discovery. What do you want to achieve in your life? What if you have it all? The fame, money, love, then you don’t know what to have. If you tried everything and lost the sense of it all, what will come next? What if you have the opportunity of eternal life? Not as yourself, but as clones with the access to the memories of each of the previous generations of clones till the original life? Isolation that was a tired hedonist’s choice became isolation for life. The civilization was destroyed, the rest of humanity regressed into the wild primal form, and you, as a clone, is the only memory of humanity. The last one. Because even the clones of other people are gone, unable to maintain the senseless existence when even a human touch is something you can only imagine. The nature of sex becomes less important than nature of love and later the nature of the whole human existence.
The reading is easy and quite provoking not just thinking, ideas, self-reflection, but also emotions are changing with the character’s degradation and evolution. It's an incredible book.
“The crimson petal and the white” by Michel Faber
This book is huge and fundamental in the approach to the time and historical society reconstruction, the intimate “soul movements” though the soul there lives in the same place as mind. The piece is made absolutely beautifully and thoroughly. It’s dark, cynical, clever, purest even when it discribes the darkest sexual perversions, desires backstaged at the filthiest corners of Victorian London. And it woke up empathy in quite unexpected places because you can’t say you really like the characters. A selfish middle age fabricant, his spoiled broken doll-like wife, a prostitute, that passed a hell and mentally superior her lover and actually everyone, including the reader, I guess. I could say it’s about women’s part in the society and in the family, their roles, their faiths. The window into the past before feminist’s movement changed it all. I could say it’s about the mental and sexual abuse and norms for men and women. It’s about the history of commerce, fashion, the lifestyle and wellbeing culture roots. About language. Sexual desires, extremes and their roots. The taboos. The borders you can or cannot cross to succeed. Or to earn. Or to survive. About the madness. And the acceptable and unacceptable behaviour then and now. About freedom. Its definition for different people. And cages. About the need for acceptance and respect. The nature of the talent and the responsibilities. About love, use, selfishness. Ugliness and beauty. Inner and superficial. About kindness, cruelty, tenderness, indifference, anger, justice. Exploitation, manipulation and devotion. Honesty and lies. It’s about angels. On earth. In dust.
It’s Dickens and Thackeray, staged by Joel-Peter Witkin under the supervision of Ayn Rand. It makes me think about “Les Bienveillantes” by Jonathan Littell and “A Little life” by Hanya Yanagihara, as another piece of the puzzle in the explanation of our time diseases. Though it’s 800 pages I couldn’t stop reading. And I’m glad the author rewrote the ending and left a hope on something bright.
“Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese
That is the book that leaves you in the quietness of an insight. You can’t divide the literature from the story itself so truthful and vivid it sounds. It starts in Ethiopia and the country is not just a background it’s also a rightful hero. Siam twins were separated at birth by their father, a genial surgeon that chose to work in the middle of nowhere, in dirt thought he could be a star in the Western world. It’s a historical operation. But for their father it’s nothing more than that. At least it looks like that for a very long time. Twins were adopted, they grow in the family where humanitarian values are as political and as essensual as they can be.
It’s an epoc picture drawn in detail by Marion, one of the twins. There’s his love of medicine and thoughts about the mission every person should have. His vision of women, their strength, dependency and independence as their choice and price they need to pay. The sense of love and use of the body or feelings for anything else but love. He tells the tragedy that is always part of women’s faith, no matter what was in the beginning or in the middle, in the end. Violence, war, medicine, the purpose of it, human rights, national identification and racism, immigration, need to resist and fight than to flee and redefine normal life - all that he opposes to love in all its senses and projections.
The history of the country reads as another tragedy and even if you are far from the politics you can’t ignore the need to face the moral choices and to witness the crack between people caused by beliefs, social injustice, ideology, racial issues, political vanity or hunger for power. Medicine for society doesn’t exist. They should self-heal themselves. Is it possible?
A digest from my feed for April 6th, 2022
6.00am zakharova_kaetano Good morning 🌞 How are you today? #haveagoodday I’m looking at those #paintings by @kshstudioagain. Though they are idyllic I can’t resist the wave of anxiety that covers me. Like a silence before storm or an escape place. A border space unreachable or unnoticeable. We see it only when we self-reflect. Desired peace. #artasinspiration#beautyofart #morninginspiration #morningmood#goodmorningpost #goodmorningart
11.30pm zakharova_kaetano #goodnightandsweetdreams #nightmood#beautyeditorial #fashioneditorial #fashionportrait #SergeLutensphotography, styling and makeup. #artoffashion#fashionasinspiration #artasinspiration #beautyoffashion#artofphotography #historyofstyle #historyoffashion
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