Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Based on a recommendation from a friend I just finished Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title, which has a certain hint of self help to it, doesn't necessarily reflect the thesis behind the book.

It is, not dense but, philosophical in a Platonic sense. It poses a lot of questions and forces the reader to make personal assertions. I had a tough time getting through the first 100 but after that the book made for some smooth sailing. Although I suppose there is a "plot" there is no Save the Cat! moment. Merely people trying to do their best for a number of years. Kundera reflects on sex, love and politics and even saves a several thousand word chapter on "shit" for the end.

This is the kind of book that may not knock your socks clean off after your first reading but I am certain this is one that I will re visit at a later date. And I am pretty sure it will be some time before this one disappears from my consciousness.

Don DeLillo - Falling Man

Don DeLillo's Falling Man is a modern classic. The greatest living American author writing a book about the seminal moment in modern American history.

The book itself is a story about how New Yorker's woke up on the twelfth of September 2001 and are forced to continue their lives.

I was especially blown away after recently seeing Extremely Loud, Incredible Close. A movie based on a novel about how a child who has Aspberger's deals with the death of his son.

That movie, unfortunately I haven't read the book, felt like a string of events meant to evoke an emotion in the viewer. Here DeLillo presents us with a couple recently separated and we watch as, from the rubble, they try to hang on to some semblance of normal.

The book I loved, I would recommend it, as a matter of fact, I would recommend anything Don DeLillo has written.

Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

I decided, once again, to try to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and again landed somewhere around the 100 page mark and bailed. I don't know if I don't have the intes

tinal fortitude to get through such a challenging book or I just have so much other stuff I know I want to read tempting me away from
such a tome. Anyways, once I hit the wall I picked up paper back version of this Palahniuk book and had a blast.

The book is about witchcraft and spells and other absurdities but all grounded in the idea that we are all mentally intoxicated, all of the time, by the constant inundation of media into our lives. I have to admit this is my first Palahniuk book. I do hear though that this is a theme he revisits often. The book was breezy with a narrator just interesting enough to keep me enthused. Palahniuk populates the story with some other personas that might be considered cliche but his play on our fear of quiet, our fear of thought, was definitely enough to keep me turning the pages.

Well done Chuck. Until we meet again.

Albert Camus - The Stranger

I read Albert Camus' The Stranger after I fell in love with one of his later works The Plague.

The Impostor - Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau's The Impostor is a depressing book that paints a portrait of people attempting to establish themselves, to put it in a cliche 'to find themselves,' during the horrors of World War I. Much like the two books I read in the week following this it ends traumatically with the protagonists gruesome death.
The book was a short, quick, relatively dull read but the foundation it laid for the later French magnates of literature (Camus, Sartre) is very evident. In the end an important book that didn't move me much nor, would I necessarily recommend it to a friend.

Welcome to Summer.

Last night, re-capped: Jim Beam, Arctic Monkeys Show, Newcastle, New Jazz Quartet, Sam Adams, Super Mario Brothers, Eclipse, Roof Bar, Arctic Monkeys, Budweiser, Uncharacteristic Fit of Masculinity, McDonalds, Skyline, Home, Sleep.

Welcome back Summer, its good to see you again..

Thank God, Jesus Wasn't A Republican.

One of the most influential moments in human history took place about two-thousand years ago when a young man named Jesus of Nazareth gave a sermon on a mountainside. He would later be arrested, suffer, die and be buried because of the beliefs he would summarize on that mountainside. Jesus was not political but he scared politicians. Jesus was not a clergyman but he exhausted the clergy.

Some four hundred years later Jesus's teachings would substantially slow the amount of executions in the Roman state, provide basic necessities for those unable to provide for themselves, and be-rid the age old Roman stigma of those that matter and those that do not. In the eyes of the new Christians everyone mattered.

Unfortunately America is regressing back to the days when there were the ones that mattered and the ones that did not. It is now, as it was then, that those that do not matter not only appear to be but are expendable. Albeit, death in a battlefield or death because you detract from a health insurers bottom line. No longer is power won with steel, as it was in Jesus's era, but now it is won with money. So hopefully, soon, someone will teach us that humanity is more important than the shekel.