re: The OT Book Club & Literary Society, week of 1-7

I'm halfway through Pynchon's latest book Bleeding Edge, and I find it to be a bleeding pile of shite.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss - Awesome if you're into fantasy, dude is a brilliant writer, incredibly use of imagery and language.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein - Very interesting, quick read.

The Gentlemen's Hour by Don Winslow - It's by Don Winslow so it was fvcking awesome.

Blood Song by Anthony Ryan - Probably the best book I've read in a year.

Current political climate inspired me to re-read Darkness at Noon and That Hideous Strength

quote:

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“Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen,' said Rubashov.
'Have you got prison vouchers?'
'My money was taken from me on my arrival,' said Rubashov.
'Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.'
'How long will that take in this model establishment of yours?' asked Rubashov.
'You can write a letter of complaint,' said the old man.
'You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil,' said Rubashov.
'To buy writing materials you have to have vouchers,' said the warder.”
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It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.”
? Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

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quote:

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"The third problem is man himself."
" Go on, this interests me very much"
"Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest."
" What sort of thing have you in mind? "
" Quite simple and obvious things, at first-sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races, selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain. A new type of man: and it's people like you who've got to begin to make him."-Lord Feverstone
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"Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us--to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is." -Miss Hardcastle.
? C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

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That Hideous Strength is the culmination and in my opinion the best of Lewis's three part science-fiction trilogy. His acute perceptions of the future implications of then current opinions and thought is simply amazing. What was fantasy then seems plausible today. He also makes a case that tyranny and totalitarianism at their core are apolitical. Two socialist ideologies, German National Socialism and Russian Soviet Communism were engaged in a war to the death when Lewis was writing this novel. Both ideologies,fascist at their core, exhibited collectivist totalitarian solutions of ends justifying means and the elevation of the state over the individual.

Darkness at Noon expresses Koestler's, a formerly ardent communist, disillusion with communism in the Soviet Union following the purges of the 1930s and the starvation of the Kulaks during agricultural collectivization. It is brutal and explains in some measure what Koestler perceived as the fatal, and perhaps, inevitable flaws inherent in communism.

Great thread. Can't believe I have missed it previously. Thanks for the links to the previous threads.