In answer to a stray question, this is one of my piles o' books that are on-hand at the moment for reference and pleasure. Currently I'm about 4/5th the way through Raymond Chandler's short story "Red Wind".
A few quotes from the story:
"Bright, brittle, shallow eyes like the eyes of a lizard."
"The girl floated in the air, somewhere behind him. Nothing was ever more soundless than the way she moved. It wouldn't do any good though. He wouldn't fool around with her at all. I had known him all my life but I had been looking into his eyes for only five minutes."
"His chin came down and I hit it. I hit it as if I was driving the last spike on the first transcontinental railroad. I can still feel it when I flex my knuckles."
The man could write.
9 comments:
Hang on to that Borges book. It is getting hard to find the Norman Thomas DeGiovanni translation. They are far superior to the later translations by Hurley. I've got that book.
Is there a reason these are all old books?
Atlas Shrugged seems really relevant to the current situation. Being forced to witness the destruction of your country and unable to do anything about it because the majority of the people are happy to go along with it. Is there anything you can do but fantasize about leaving all the horrible people to wreck things to their hearts content while you just go somewhere else that they can’t touch? Do you look for books that are relevant to your current concerns, or is that just a coincidence?
I've read the Borges, the Brunner, and the Rand. One of my favorite gedankenexperiments nowadays is, what would Rand have to say about Trump? Based on her characterizations of Jim Taggart and Orren Boyle, she ought to have recognized that flimflammery within Trumpism, but I understand that she dismissed the Libertarian Party as "a bunch of hippies."
Just read Vonnegut. He saw it all coming
These are old books because I have a *lot* of books and have had them for a long time. Many of them I found at used book stores, so older still. I read them for all kinds of different reasons: some as just reading, some for reference.
I've never managed to finish Atlas Shrugged. I made it all the way to the radio speech once. I'm old now, and won't bother to try again. Life's too short
I read The Glass Teat in the 70s. Ellison talking about TV. I read about half of Atlas and gave up. She can really write, but the three pages of plot and three pages of propaganda finally wore me out.
Rand wrote to excuse rich people's abuses, personal and political, and to justify the Great Depression as not being rich people's fault. She knew where the money was. Her ability to write was only passable, and even then she could have hired a superior editor.
Josephus? Now that's a bit out of the usual fare for light reading!
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