Miss Clueless

I read Sapiens last year, and I still think about it sometimes. Especially these lines... The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plo...

I think 59 is a decent number; no speed-reading here, just enjoyment. Here's my list of 59 books I read in 2024. How many do we have in common? ;) A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara 😭 Pachinko, Min Jin Lee 😍 Yellowface, R F Kuang  Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev  Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 😍 Post Office, Charles Bukowski  The Book Thief, Markus Zusak 😍 Kafka On The Shore, Haruki Murakami🙂 Middlemarch, George Elliot  To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 😍 Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones🙂 A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger🙂 Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie  Later, Stephen King  Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky  All Systems Red, Martha Wells  The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy  The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut  Piranesi, Susanna Clarke🙂 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain To the Lighthouse, Virginia Wo...

I read Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the Booker Prize winner for 2024, and here are a few lines worth remembering from the book, at least for me! .............. She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between, none of the usual gossip, the he-said-she-said, the ups and downs; there is a lot of round and round. The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself—his eye at the view-finder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. I love the moon as it is, she said. Yes, yes, he'd answered, me too, but all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn't come from their goodness, you didn't ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they're alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They're beautiful because there's a light in their ey...