Ataraxia

  The End of The World News by Anthony Burgess, the author of the magnum opus A Clockwork Orange, adapted for the big screen by glorious Stanley Kubrick and made into another chef d’oeuvre, my note on this is at https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-clockwork-orange-by-anthony-burgess.html where I have a few thousand reviews   7 out of 10   The End of The World News sounds like a magnificent book, and perhaps it is, after all, this is on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list, where Anthony Burgess has the aforementioned A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/10/earthly-powers-by-anthony-burgess-was.html   If A Clockwork Orange was such a delight, enchanting masterpiece, I must say that I was not overwhelmed by the other two, first The Earthly Powers was not up to my high, if irrelevant standard, and now The End of World News started fine, and I thought the what, four hundred and seventy pages will be a delight… But I was wrong and had

  Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, divine author of Glasperlenspiel aka The Glass Beads Game – my note on this is at   https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-glass-bead-game-by-herman-hesse.html   10 out of 10   “Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.” This is attributed to Truman Capote and it came to my mind because of the Hindu say it does not exist part, which appears in this magnum opus   It is interesting to find that Herman Hesse has three books on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, the aforementioned Glasperlenspiel, Steppenwolf https://realini.blogspot.com/2020/09/steppenwolf-by-herman-hesse-10-out-10.html and Narziss and Goldmund, but not Siddhartha, which seems to be the best known work of his Indeed, I plan to read Narciss and Goldmund again, for I remember it was such a delig

  Jesus, a Jewish Galilean A New Reading of the Jesus Story by Seán Freyne, you may want to check this other note https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/05/jesus-christ-superstar-by-andrew-lloyd.html a different view on the subject   8 out of 10   Last night, Iran has attacked Israel with a barrage of ballistic missiles, and what better moment to look at A New Reading of the Jewish Galilean than this…I am joking, it does not look as if I will deal with the book, except to say that it seems inert resting, it is the time to learn more about Jesus and the Jews right now…   The apocalypse may soon be coming, what with World War III so close, so we need to see what is going on there, and the millennia that we have in the background, and the way that we could go up in smoke, or the mushroom cloud, nonetheless, before that, I wonder what the price of oil is now, and what the reaction will be The pundits on CNN and BBC last night were very catastrophic, some of them, a former Israeli

  Straight Is The Gate by Andre Gide, author of Les Caves du Vatican, my note on that is at https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/01/les-caves-du-vatican-by-andre-gide.html where I have a few thousand other reviews   8 out of 10   Andre Gide was ‘judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti’ a statement that I reject, for what about Marcel Proust or Albert Camus, the former is my absolute favorite, and not that it matters, Gide is so far one that I do not get, albeit La Porte Etroite was better than the Caves   I have also tried The Immoralist https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-immoralist-by-andre-gide-winner-of.html and the experience was disappointing, whereas Straight Is The Gate at least has started much better and I could read through about half of it, after which I tried to jump through the lines and then finished… Well, in a manner of speaking, his own life inspired the narrative, wherein Jerome is the narrator and main ch

  Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain   9 out of 10     Trying to start with a joke, I would call this   CS Lewis meets Freud, or something along these lines, because for yours truly is more in awe with the author of Surprised by Joy https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/09/surprised-by-joy-shape-of-my-early-life.html than with Sigmund Freud   Indeed, it seems that Freud is more respected as a story teller today – in fact he took a prize, I think it was the Goethe, for his literary prowess, and he was told he is the first psychoanalyst to take it, and he responded, there had been none before – than for his work in psychology, ground breaking as it is, historically crucial… However, the focus on sex in the babies, castration, is misplaced for most psychologists in the present, yes, there are ‘Freudians’, but in smaller numbers if I am not mistaken, in fact, CS Lewis is debating him, and in one stage, when they start taking about sex, the writer is right in pointing out

  The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin, author of Exit Music – my note on this is at https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/exit-music-by-ian-rankin-one-of-1000.html along with a few thousand other reviews   8 out of 10   Ian Rankin has three books included on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list, two are mentioned above and the third is Black and Blue, maybe a note on that will be forthcoming, sometime soon, Insha’Allah   The Hanging Garden is an enticing read, I was thinking that crime novels fulfill one condition set by Aristotle https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/aristotle-in-ninety-minutes-by-paul.html for dramas, which was the need for a climax, a reversal like we have in Oedipus Rex, wherein the king finds he has killed his father In the Sophocles play, the hero married his mother as well, though he was unaware that the man he was fighting was his parent, and the woman he would have children with him was his own mother https://realini.blogspot.com/2017/03/oedipus