The Princess Bride

William Goldman

Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.

Because, my friend Yeste, you are very famous and very rich, and so you should be, because you make wonderful weapons. But you must also make them for any fool who happens along. I am poor, and no one knows me in all the world except you and Inigo, but I do not have to suffer fools.
You are an artist, Yeste said.
No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be.

A rare case where the movie was better. The book is bitter, maybe too satiric. But how can I say anything more that isn't praise? It's The Princess Bride after all.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Douglas Adams

Friend! croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a kind of dry crackle and flakes of rust fell out of his mouth. You'll have to excuse me while I try and remember what that word means. My memory banks are not what they were, you know, and any word which falls into disuse for a few zillion years has to get shifted down into auxiliary memory backup. Ah, here it comes.
The robot's battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.
Hmmm, he said, what a curious concept.
He thought a little longer.
No, he said at last, don't think I ever came across one of those. Sorry, can't help you there.

Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained for, is it? I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience, or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits

Likewise.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Douglas Adams

Lallafa had lived in the forests on the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.

I had written a long and interesting discourse on the fundamental truth that lies behind Douglas Adams' great literary failure, but since it would ruin these otherwise wonderful novels for you, I am not going to lay it out here. Just take my word for it that the whole Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is a childish joke and nothing more (well, I guess it's told with a quaint English accent which actually makes it pretty damn good).

St. Francis

Nikos Kazantzakis

The following day he came across a novice who was unknown to him. This novice was exceptionally pale, with shriveled cheeks and enormous eyes. He was bent forward, poring avidly over a book which he held in his hands. God, for him, had disappeared, the friars had disappeared, the entire population of the world had disappeared. Nothing remained between heaven and earth except this young man and his book.

Not enough! That is what He screamed at me. If you ask, Brother Leo, what God commands without respite, I can tell you, for I learned it these past three days and nights in the cave. Listen! 'Not enough! Not enough!' That's what He shouts each day, each hour to poor, miserable man. 'Not enough! Not enough!' 'I can't go further!' whines man. 'You can!' the Lord replies. 'I shall break in two!' man whines again. 'Break!' the Lord replies.

You can, you can! You had the courage to say you couldn't, and that means you can! The heart is closer to God than the mind is, so abandon the mind and follow your heart: it and it alone knows the way to Paradise. And now undress yourself and don the robe. You remember the coats you gave us, don't you, the ones used by your shepherd? We modeled our frocks after them--they are the color of clay. Brother Ruffino, dress yourself in clay!

Yes, you did. You said that whoever dwells among wolves must be a wolf and not a lamb. That's what you said, Brother Leo; that's what all sensible people say. But God presented me with a madness, a new madness, and I say that whoever dwells among wolves must be a lamb--and not care a jot if they eat him!

Because whoever has joined forces with God obtains three great privileges: omnipotence without power, intoxication without wine, and life without death.

Francis laughed. You have my blessing, Brother Juniper, he said. I'd rather we be taken for lunatics than for saints. That is the true meaning of holy Humility.

Listen to me, my sisters, and forgive me if I tell you about a caterpillar that just came again to my mind. This is not a story, it's true--truer than truth itself....Well, once there was a caterpillar which crawled and crawled, until finally in its extreme old age it arrived before the gates of heaven. It knocked and a voice came from within: 'No caterpillars allowed here! You're in much too much of a hurry, it seems to me.'
'What shall I do, Lord? Command me,' answered the caterpillar, and it curled up into a ball, it was so afraid.
'Suffer some more, struggle some more, transform yourself into a butterfly!'
The caterpillar returned to earth accordingly and began its journey all over again from the beginning.

It doesn't matter. Tomorrow. This is a large city: somewhere, in some house, there will be a piece of bread the housewife baked just for us, and it will be waiting.

This is a textbook for a madman. If you wish to become a lunatic, follow the steps outlined in these pages, become like the foolish king who danced naked in the streets, become like the crazy little girl who danced in the back of the church, welcome to the new insanity.

Monsignor Quixote

Graham Greene

You don't seem to realize, father, what a grave crime you have committed. You've freed a galley-slave.
Poor fellow. All he got was my shoes and they were not much better than his own. He was doomed to failure. I always feel that those who always fail--he even ran out of petrol--are nearer to God than we are. Of course I shall pray to my ancestor for him. How often the Don knew failure. Even with windmills.

Man has learned many important things from the beasts: from storks the enema, from elephants chastity, and loyalty from the horse.

By this hopping you can recognize love.

Fact and fiction again, Father Leopoldo was saying, one can't distinguish with any certainty.

How wrong you were, Sancho. I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God, but doubt is not treachery as you Communists seem to think. Doubt is human. Oh, I want to believe that it is all true--and that want is the only certain thing I feel. I want others to believe too--perhaps some of their belief might rub off on me. I think the baker believes.

I think, you know, professor, that when one has to jump, it's so much safer to jump into deep water.

Once again the random order of books is not so random; and of course this plays into the distinction (or lack) between fact and fiction--which leads me, like a nose in a book I read just before, but differently, also like the nose of an old hound dog, searching, sniffing, crawling the ground with my nose to smell out...
I'll try and start again: how is it possible that one book read because a teacher said to, because its author wrote another book about another myth, that I should find questions asked out of the misery of my at-the-moment life that are answered in the form of yet another myth-inspired book by some unrelated author I had never yet heard of?
And once more: I think I am beginning to understand the meaning of my name. All the writing and storytelling I have ever done (I think I've done a fairly copious amount of bad storytelling by this point) has taught me that names always mean things. And yet I have always felt that my name didn't quite fit. I have always wondered why my name, with its soft phonetic beginning and harder end--why this name, why such a soft name? And in truth, a part of me has despised it. Well, maybe despised is a hard word. Disliked? Yes, I have at times truly disliked my name. And horses? Until today I had never thought I should have anything to do with them.
And once more: The myth of Chiron. Having read it numerous times, in numerous forms, why should it appeal to me today? Why should all-of-a-sudden Chiron loom up? I thought he was dead--he died for Prometheus' sin, right? So what is he doing here and now telling me about...

...loyalty from the horse.

I am interested, because of my close personal association, in failure. Failure and foolery, fiction, fact, and of course philip. But it's the letter before 'f' that is important here: Graham Greene. Never read him before, found this first venture absolutely fabulous.

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie

(But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe - I continue now - that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children's Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)

Men of worth have always roamed the desert.

What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but to finish with them.

Don't fill my head with all this history, he had once told Ayooba-the-tank, I am what I am and that's all there is.

What you were is forever who you are.

It's not fair, the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, It's not fair, and again, and again.

Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.

Fate and Destiny are terrible ideas; the thought that we have an end that cannot be avoided, that we are pursuing a course already marked out, that we are worse than rats in a maze--that we might not even be able to say no to the cheese--these are thoughts heavy enough to be toxic.
But worse: Doom. I have always wondered if there are people in this world who are doomed. Not in the Calvinist sense of predestination and election, but in the sense of children with Down syndrome. Have you ever wondered how it works that some people are born as physical wrecks? Where is equality there? Where is fairness? Where is justice? But it gets worse, for what of those who are born with crippled luck? What of those who are born failures? At least the child of physical ruin can be clearly seen to be in need of a little bit more help than others. But who hasn't known someone who seems to find life harder than everyone else? These sorts of people are the Midnight Children.
If Saleem's father Ahmed was doomed to take wrong turns at every fork in his life, what am I? When the currents of all the streams bubble along, having their rough times and their chattering, giggling good times, why does it seem that some streams are forced to run unnatural courses over rock and through fields? I wonder sometimes if it is simply by virtue of where the creak began. Anyhow, Midnight's Children's narrator seems convinced that there are those whose souls and minds and personalities are the broken products of faulty fetuses.
As far as technicalities go: It seems Mr Rushdie has composed a great wandering parenthetical statement. I admire the style he chose, but there are quite a few times when one wonders if he isn't carrying it a little too far. The tongue and cheek method of hinting at the future and impishly demanding the readers full credulity are taxed to their fullest by Mr Rushdie. Also, having read one of his other works before (The Ground Beneath Her Feet) I was shocked by the similarities, not only in action but also in the relationships between his characters. Mr Rushdie's mother must have been a very formidable character.

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges

Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.

If Kurt Godel had been a writer of short stories, he would have been Jorge Luis Borges. Borges specializes in creating stories and feeding them back into themselves. Be careful and keep your eyes open when you enter his world, it is a labyrinth that you will miss entirely if you don't think, but you have the opportunity to get lost in it forever if you court Borges in the proper manner.

The Restaurant At the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams

After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.

And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.

Not that good.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all parts of the Galaxy, and it is in order that this situation should not be in any way exacerbated that the following facts will now be revealed in advance.
The planet in question is in fact the legendary Magrathea.
The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defense system will result merely in teh breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of somebody's upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale.
In order that some sense of mystery should still be preserved, no revelation will yet be made concerning whose upper arm sustains the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.

Look, said Arthur, would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

Douglas Adams might be the second most influential author I have ever read. All seafood was gratis.

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

What's burning? asked Natasha. Oh, yes. Moscow.

He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it. Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and to find occupation. It was too dreadful to be under the burden of these insoluble problems, so he abandoned himself to any distraction in order to forget them. he frequented every kind of society, drank much, brought pictures, engaged in building, and above all - read.

Those questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.

To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away. You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I don't know. Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don't know, but from her is taken away, and everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her. Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a sterile flower, you know - like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her, and sometimes I think she doesn't feel it as you or I would.

This legitimate peculiarity of each individual, which used to excite and irritate Pierre, now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other people. The difference and sometimes the complete contradiction, between men's opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and evoked from him an amused and gentle smile.

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in teh satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth - that there is nothing in the world that is terrible. He had learned that, as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and not free. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores - his footgear having long since fallen to pieces.

There is far too much in War and Peace to even begin with. Read it if you dare! No right-mind could call that collection of words a novel, but then I haven't really any idea what it is. Do not doubt that there is a very intriguing story in War and Peace; there are about thirteen very intriguing stories inside, but there is also a very, very lengthy discussion of the philosophy of history, which towards the end, I guess the last two hundred pages or so, was a bit dull.
Despite Tolstoy's ruminations on history and how every historian up till his day has misunderstood it, there are two characters in particular who engrossed me. The first is Pierre. He is one of the three or four central characters who are present throughout the whole book. The second, fifth, and sixth quotations from above are about Pierre. If ever a man struggled in life, if ever a man took a long time getting round to understanding something, it is this man. But as he neared his breakthrough into clarity, his smooth path after so much turmoil, I couldn't help but thinking that it isn't the smooth part of his life that is interesting at all. And this thought gets me back to Daoism. Maybe they had it right afterall? The way is the important part. We don't enjoy reading stories about figures who understand everything or have gotten it all right, we enjoy reading about the path a man takes on his way to understanding. We enjoy watching a man stuggle towards his epiphany--but the moment of clarity itself, like the back cover of a book, is only necessary to prove that it happened. I think I have a deep affinity to characters like Pierre--outcasts who go their own ways and in terror finally find some peaceful pasture.
The second character I have an affinity towards is Sonya. She is an orphan of some sort taken in by the Rostov family (a chief family in the book). I don't remember what exactly the technicalities of Sonya's position are (there are so many technicalities in War and Peace, you'll not begrudge me a few) but she is the person who the fourth quotation above speaks. She seems to sacrifice everything, to give everything constantly and consistently and never receives a thing in return. Her life is hollow and empty by the end of the book, in fact Tolstoy pretty much forgets to say anything more about her. She just drifts away, an empty middle-aged woman. And if it weren't for that small discussion about 'He who hath much...' I would have thought Tolstoy had simply not found a better way to get rid of her. But he makes me think she is perhaps the key to much in the book. Pierre has much and is given more, Sonya has little and even that is taken from her. I don't claim to understand this mystery, but I would recommend those interested in it, take a look at War and Peace.