Where Books and Readers Come Together
”The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.”
In most of Cormac McCarthy’s books there is usually a male character on some sort of quest.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson illustrate the child-ego’s attempt to mature and understand its own mortality in a world often found morally strange and ridiculous, a world that adults eventually learn to accept as normal.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
A Review of a Review
The Masks of God, Vol. III: Occidental Mythology (1964) by Joseph Campbell casts a large net over what it is to hold a Western faith in distinction from an Eastern faith and how such distinctions developed among the varied belief systems over the ages.
‘What we call a novel,” writes Foster, ”would nearly everywhere in non-Anglophone Europe be a roman. That term derives from romanz, the universal term for lengthy narratives in verse prior to the age of print.
The 39 Clues (2008) by Rick Riordan is a mystery/action-adventure series for young teens and is quite a fun and insightful read.
The Stranger or L’Etranger (1946) by Albert Camus (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957) is translated from the French in my edition of the book by Matthew Ward.
Fowles is able to do what most other authors only dream of with the two narrative voices that are as distinct and profound as the other, illuminating the story from mere words on a page to a true memory that is just as haunting in one form of action as it is in its recondite social commentary.
“There was nothing to do about his father, and he had thought it all through many times. The handsome job the undertaker had done on his father’s face had not blurred in his mind and all the rest of it was quite clear, including the responsibilities.”
Tolstoy writes: ”But what is this beauty which forms the subject-matter of art? How is it defined? What is it?
”As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception conveyed by a word, with the more aplomb and self-assurance do people use that word, pretending that what is understood by it is so simple and clear that it is not worth while even to discuss what it actually means.”
Coffee in Vietnam is also focused around growing Robusta and Arabica, two of the major kinds of coffee favored in the world market.
The Masks of God: Vol. II, Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell is again one of those marathons of the mind.
From there, the reader follows Mercier as he sways a German named Halbach to spy against his country. By book’s end, Mercier is able to smuggle top secret documents out of Germany but is promoted as punishment and ordered out of the country.
