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Pg 73 - [he called for the working man] "to be aware that his patriotic sentiments were being exploited for the material gain of the ruling classes. the poem concluded:
throw your machine gun onto the pavement.
the oil is theirs, the blood is yours.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose :(

Pg 11:
The guitarist then offered to drive to the spa, entice the nurse out on the highway, and run her over with his car. "Nobody could prove it wasn't an accident," he said.
The guitarist was the youngest member of the band; he loved Klima and Klima was moved by his words: "You're very nice," Kilma told him.

Good lord... some of this 60s / 70s Czech Literature is... really not aging well. Geeze.

How does someone write like this...

"..or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night." (pg 46)
"the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear." (pg 47)

Read this ages ago . On a whim brought it with me on a trip . Not sure I am really enjoying it that much unless Skvorecky really does something with the last 1/3 of the book .

This kind of geekiness is beginning to bug me:
"but i'd have to build a consistent centrifuge. How would I do that? I can spin something in the zero-g environment of the lab easily enough, but how do I spin it at a constant rate across multiple experiments?
Ooooh! I don't need a constant rate! I just need a string with a mark in the center!" (page 208).

enjoying it :)
The plot design with him having amnesia and recalling things gradually via flashbacks was pretty clever.

Pg 77 / 1990s neo-nazis & skinheads involved in violence against their perceived enemies "dark-skinned foreigners, leftists, gays, homeless and Gypsies"
Pg 78 / "would not hesitate to support a new Fuhrer who would [unite] the plethora of rival neo-Nazi groups."

Often when I read German history.. i get confused... wondering if I'm not reading 2026 history... from somewhere else...

the main character, the boy, is very flat... but this is a fun enough thriller

From a technical perspective, there is a totally valid attempt here to tell the backstory of growing up with the dad, counter-pointed against the present-day chase through the woods after the dad.
From an emotional perspective, the whole thing just comes across as "thin." so so thin. I realized this is a "thriller" , not literature, but wow it's thin.

Reading this because I wanted to see how modern/popular writers handle outdoor adventure story-telling.

on one hand... this is kind of dry war reporting... "we did this and then did this and then did this.."
on the other hand... this is history... and Mowat's first hand accounts and experiences really paint a picture that shouldn't be lost... of how brutal war was and what these young men had to do... what they endured.. even when they weren't actually in the middle of a battle.

Ohhhh... that's why Stalin had most Polish communists killed or jailed in the 1930s ... they weren't the right type of communists... they were Trotsky-ites. Never really seen that explained before. (page 87)

It's kind of perplexing... but while I a) acknowledge that this is just a beautifully and sumptuously written book, i also b) can't really get into it!

very sophisticated and suave storytelling and style. don't capital "L" love it so far... but wow, Towles can write prose.

Kind of struggling with this book. It's more a collection of 2 to 4 page essays on travel and traveling (and the human body) than it is a novel.

really not enjoying this. it's all preamble. the hundreds of tiny little moments that led up to the firing on Fort Sumter.

He's precariously close to losing me. Book has a lot of "bloat" and side-stories which, sure , have some relevance, but isn't really needed.

In the foreword, he quotes from Nazi regulations prohibiting jazz: #8 of the ten regulations begins... "plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality."
#3.. "the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation."
Fascists sure are afraid of people being free and enjoying life.

As with some other re-reads over the last while, not enjoying this one as much as I did when I read it 20+ years ago.

While I don't remember much... I remember loving this book when I read it (around 30 years ago!). First few pages makes me think I was right back then:
There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one's dreams until some improbable future (pg 4)