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November
11th, 2003
I am beginning to read Charles Dickens' "Bleak
House." I love it already. The characters are wonderful
and the style like no other!
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October
28th, 2003
I just finished "The
Cheese Monkeys." It was a really cool read with
a lot of fun language and different ideas. I'm going
to have to re-read some parts; the ending happened pretty
quickly and I was left a bit confused.
Quotes that I liked:
(The professor explaining the difference between Commercial
Art and Graphic Design): "The difference is as
crucial as it is enormous-as important as the difference
between pre- and postwar America. Uncle Sam ... is Commercial
Art. The American Flag is Graphic Design. Commercial
Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Desing
gives you ideas. One natters on and on, the other
actually has something to say." |
October
18th, 2003
I finished "A Fine Balance"
today after spending quite some time on it - it is about
600 pages long. I enjoyed it for the most part. It was
about 4 main characters who lived in a big city in India
during the corrupt years of Indira Gandhi. The best
result of reading this book was learning about India
a bit more. I would like to pick up the Indira Gandhi
biography sometime. It's wierd; when I worked at Atticus,
the bookstore in New Haven, CT, I saw the book on Gandhi
and figured that she was a great and fair minister.
What an assumption to make! I probably made it because
she was a woman. After reading this book, I felt very
foolish for my assumption that a woman ruler would be
wonderful no matter what.
I think that this book is a fitting one to be the first
one I comment on for 3 feet of visibility. It's plot
moves quickly and you can't really predict what will
happen in the next chapter. The instability of the country
and the outrageousness of the government made it impossible
for the characters to plan their lives or rely on the
fortune or misfortune of the present day. They could
only rely on the moment. Any bit of information could
shape the next day and, in this book, perhaps change
some minds about drastic actions taken.
Quotes that I liked:
"My mother collects string in a ball...We usd to
play a game when I was little, unravelling it and trying
to remember where each piece of string came from."
(from part XIV)
"...although [he] depicted life as a sequence of
accidents, there was nothing accidental about his expert
narration. His sentences poured out like perfect seams,
holding the garment of his story together without calling
attention to the stitches. Was he aware of ordering
the events for her? Perhaps not - perhaps the very act
of telling created a natural design. Perhaps it was
a knack that humans had, for cleaning up their untidy
existences - a hidden survival weapon, like antibodies
in the bloodstream." (from part XVI) |
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