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The journey begins….

A flawed, imperfect and ordinary man faced with the odds of an extraordinary time… as the winds swirl, his steadfast nature, stoic competency and empathy illuminate a dark era… as the country tears itself in pieces, paying for its sins in dust and blood, the specter of death not just hovers, but walks among the living, taking its prizes.. hell has found it’s way to the land of the living

“I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation. I never considered complicity, or the obligation to guard against it in yourself.” Hmph… the delusions we live with.. our aspirations for bravery, for moral clarity… all whispers when the time comes, and the winds swirl…

War, anguish, and the cost of power… as dynasties get crushed under the wheel of fate… it continues to turn, spinning its rich tapestry, with pithy mortals nothing but yarn, specks in the wool…Dense, thought provoking and a ruminating probe on the metaphysical and philosophical insight of one of India’s greatest epics, a treat so far..

That’s the problem with wealth and power Eh? Like sugar…. Addicting, unrestrained, immortal highs, and crushing, numbing, sleepy lows… hmph… the shackles our world ties to wrists… the foolishness of it all…

Power is always misunderstood… the common belief is it corrupts… but rarely is the world so simple… power is the light in the dark… it is an illumination of our best and our worst … it is the streetlight as the feral dog howls… scarfing down scraps, in a world where food is only for the humans…. The more food it obtains the hungrier it gets, it bites more, it’s tail wags even more aggressively…

The Clown is dead! Long Live the Clown!

Thought I’d give Mantel a shot, after reading glowing reviews of her prose in the obituaries of the National newspapers.. and it’s rather illuminating look into a forgone era… you get to see the political intrigue and tribulations of Reformation England with all of its boils and warts, unvarnished in the eyes of our erstwhile narrator, the ambitious and impertinent Thomas Cromwell..

“He was also guided by a belief in repetition; over and over he would convey to employees and friends a version of the same idea: if you say something often enough, it becomes true. “ We live in the wreckage of this worldview now… where no rationality, no common sense, no truth exists… the sky is green, the world is purple, and everything that isn’t complimentary is fake… god help us all…

A riveting revisionist take on the infamous Munich Conference. As the world stands on a precipice and the winds dangerously swirl, Robert Harris crafts a historical thriller that has the reader re-evaluate their views on the dust and blood of an era gone by.. Chamberlain, Halifax, Dunglass all walk amongst the living once again….

A fascinating examination of power, frivolity and the cost of empires….through the lens of one of India’s most venerated Epics.The beauty of the Mahabharata lies in the ability for its horrors to be expressed through multiple viewpoints, one story births ten more. Every moment in it starts a new rollercoaster. Ved Vyasa could have never have dreamed how far this old story has come…

The stylistic beauty of this novel has not been over exaggerated… it’s beautiful prose… every word is an ice cold sip of Green River Lime Soda… and for those that know my eclectic taste in beverages … it’s high praise indeed

The King walks again, reimagined and reassembled for the 21st century, out of his old fables and stone edicts, freed from his contradictions and mystique, rebuilt by Sealy’s prolific prose. A beautiful journey already

Jon Karl’s caustic cynicism is rather refreshing I must say…

This is a story of pain…. Of trauma, it’s permanence through generations… the haunting specter of it traveling through decades, coalescing, growing more powerful as time goes on. In immigrant societies, We all come from ancestors whose seemingly unendurable suffering enables us to live our present lives. They survive, so we can live.. there lies a powerful dichotomy in those two ways of life…

Maybe I shouldn’t be reading this on an ambling Amtrak train to St.Louis, but what the hell, I need to unwind, and reading is how I do it.. even books that are too similar to the real world that they make me rather unsettled…

Virgil was right…. The descent to hell IS easy….

The trepidation is building in my spirit, as Mae goes deeper and deeper into the utopian society of the Circle, captivated by the allure of psuedo-morality and the rationalizations of a world deluded in their quest to “do good”… no… I don’t like where this is headed, I can see the end of the cliff, and I dread to think how many will jump off of it…

Unsettling with how uncomfortably similar it is to the world around us, an indication of the mastery of Eggers’ craft….