Good morning,
BOOK CORNER
We are living in a golden age of great literature, great authors, clever premises, and rich language. There are a number of recent books that warrant your consideration:
Allison Gingold. “Just finished The Candy House. There are so many thought provoking issues in this novel - it’s about this technology media company, Own your own unConscious, where people can download all their memories to access later and share with others, basically creating a collective of everyone’s memories. We follow the lives of numerous characters before this technology through to near future. So much to think about.”
I liked—but didn’t love—the book. I loved her novel Manhattan Beach. This one I thought tried to do too much and with too much literary gymnastics and changes in style. But here is the quote of one character cited by Allison, who ponders the “gifts” of this service: “tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer’s and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies—which, people now knew, having roamed the odd twisting corridors of one another’s minds, had always been hypocritical.”
There is a lot to ponder about individual privacy v collective consciousness. https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/books/fiction/2022-08-28-sue-de-groot-reviews-jennifer-egans-the-candy-house/
Our book club recently read The Netanyahus, last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner. It is not really about Benjamin Netanyahu. Rather, it is a beautifully written book about American academia, a lone Jewish family in the midst of Northeastern Protestantism, the interplay of diaspora vs. Israeli Jews, whether race is a stain that can never be erased, antisemitism, the different strains of Zionism and a whole host of either ideas. The circumstances vary from serious to light-hearted.
I just finished Let the Great World Spin. It is not unlike the movie Crash in its premise—that seemingly unrelated and disparate people and circumstances all can orbit around a single incident, tying lives together. In the movie, the lives were quick literally thrust together. In this case, the interactions of the protagonists are much more nuanced—sometimes almost in passing. This makes it better than the movie. They are loosely tied together by the plight of acrobat walker Phillipe Petit, who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. New Yorkers all are engaged in their own balancing acts of moral dilemma and shared humanity. a quotation from the book: “He was pureness moving. . . . He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air.” https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/books/review/Mahler-t.html
THOUGHTS ON GRATITUDE AND OPTIMISM
As we head into Thanksgiving and the holiday season, some appropriate thinking on the subject:
“This is a wonderful day; I have never seen this one before.” –Maya Angelou
“I woke up this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“For my part I am almost contented just now, and very thankful. Gratitude is a divine emotion; it fills the heart but not to bursting; it warms it but not forever.” –Charlotte Bronte
“Gratitude is riches; complaint is poverty.” –Doris Day
“Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is wonderful in others belong to us as well.” –Voltaire
“When eating fruit, remember the one who planted the tree.” –Vietnamese proverb
Have a great day,
Glenn
From the archives:
Glad you enjoyed “Let the Great World Spin”.