Algernon > Recent Status Updates

“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

thank you, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929 - 2018

Merry X-Mas everyone!

RIP Brian Aldiss - one of my most cherished authors. I've started this one about a week ago, and today I read that he has passed away. Thanks for the wonderful journeys.

This is taking forever! It's about equal parts amazing and annoying.
I have just come across a self-referencing joke in one of the footnotes that captures the experience perfectly:

"Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object"

For the moment I'm hanging in there and even laughing (when I'm not checking how many pages are left before I finish the damn book)

... because it's Christmas, and because there have been too many atrocities and wars going on in 2015.

I have just lost about 60 friends from my list, due to Goodreads bizarre decision to forece me to follow "authors" without any input from me. I was too angry to review individual users, and basically went on a rambpage on the new authors following list. I'm truly sorry I might have lost contact with some great people here through no fault of their own.

thank you, Sir Terry, for making me see the world with "new eyes and extra colors."

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman poet Abdullatif Celebi, better known as Latifi, called each of his books in his library "a true and loving friend who drives away all cares."

The essence of time is flux, dissolution of the momentarily existent; and the essence of life is time. In his mercy, in his love for the forms of time, this demiurgic man of men [Viracocha] yields countenance to the sea of pangs; but in his full awareness of what he is doing, the seminal waters of life that he gives are the tears of his eyes.

My hope is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the
present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas: "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names."

I keep starting new books instead of reviewing the ones I finished. The whole debacle about censoring reviews has thrown me off my stride, and I spend hours reading about incensed goodreaders instead of writing something down.

to paraphrase Calvino, this is one of those Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them

I love it so far.

"Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to dam a river with a tennis racket."

I'll be visiting Andaluzia for the first time in September, and this will hopefully ease my impatience to see Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, Malaga. Plus, Perez-Reverte is one of my favorite authors.

Gotta love his opening gambit:
The title of this novel is a metaphor, not a recipe. The author is not in any way advocating or condoning the boiling of frogs. Not if there's a perfectly healthy cat available, anyway.

I couldn't stay away from this one. I was planning to let some time go after the first book, but the gril with the black painted eyelids kept beckoning me back in her night garden.