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Zachary’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Zachary’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Zachary Valtschanoff’s Followers (14)
535 books
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100 friends
1,034 books
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134 friends
178 books
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33 friends
130 books
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24 friends
1,656 books
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338 friends
1,041 books
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447 friends
88 books
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25 friends
150 books
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44 friends
More friends…
Zachary Valtschanoff
Goodreads Author
Born
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, The United States
Website
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Member Since
January 2020
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Ebook Giveaway
Dear friends,
this is my first post here. I'm running a giveaway today (14. May) and tomorrow (15. May).
I’m giving away free Kindle e-book copies of three of my books: “Book Of Feast”, “Book Of Famine” and “Echoes of Reason and Madness”
You can get the books here:
Book Of Feast
Book Of Famine
Echoes Of Reason And Madness
If you want to read all three, I suggest reading them in that order.
If you read the Read more of this blog post »
this is my first post here. I'm running a giveaway today (14. May) and tomorrow (15. May).
I’m giving away free Kindle e-book copies of three of my books: “Book Of Feast”, “Book Of Famine” and “Echoes of Reason and Madness”
You can get the books here:
Book Of Feast
Book Of Famine
Echoes Of Reason And Madness
If you want to read all three, I suggest reading them in that order.
If you read the Read more of this blog post »
Zachary’s Recent Updates
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Zachary Valtschanoff
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Zachary Valtschanoff
liked
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quote
“Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.” Ocean Vuong |
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Zachary Valtschanoff
liked
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“If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming.”
Ocean Vuong |
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Zachary Valtschanoff
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Zachary Valtschanoff
rated a book it was amazing
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"Modern Man in Search of a Soul" is an excellent, approachable and highly enlightening book that I would recommend to anyone interested in Jungian psychology. In contrast to many of Jung's works, as a layman, I found this book to be relatively easy to ...more |
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Cassandra Nicole Walker
is on page 306 of 328 of The Castle
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Zachary Valtschanoff
started reading
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Zachary Valtschanoff
rated a book really liked it
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| I received a recommendation for Sun and Steel, which was to be my second encounter with a work by the brilliant, troubled and controversial Yukio Mishima. Years ago, I had given up on the "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" as I found it too difficult, b ...more | |
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Invisible Cities
― Invisible Cities
“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
― Invisible Cities
― Invisible Cities
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Invisible Cities
― Invisible Cities
“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons- 'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made.
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”
― Tolkien On Fairy-stories
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons- 'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made.
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”
― Tolkien On Fairy-stories
“Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain-
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satify me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence.
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar-
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher,
Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.
Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That Nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that improbable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too earger to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?”
― Sun & Steel
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain-
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satify me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence.
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar-
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher,
Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.
Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That Nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that improbable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too earger to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?”
― Sun & Steel
