For after all, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of […]
Tag Archives: Fiction
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
A classic for a reason and a bargain at 127 pages. The style fits the story. Hemingway’s prose never breaks character. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea […]
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Milan Kundera
I tip my bowler hat to Mr. Kundera. This was artful. While I’ve never been a romantic, perhaps I even learned something about love in this novel. The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to […]
Cat’s Cradle (1963) Kurt Vonnegut
A beautifully cynical and philosophical satire. Vonnegut skewers both science and religion, and caps it off with the apocalypse. A fitting fiction for a time of pandemic. Science “Will this bother you as a scientist,” I inquired, “to go through a ritual like this?”“I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make […]
King Rat (1962) James Clavell
Quotes “True there are degrees of honor — but one man can have only one code. Do what you like. It’s your choice. Some things a man must decide for himself. Sometimes you have to adapt to circumstances. But for the love of God guard yourself and your conscience — no one else will — […]