Obviously I have been reading a lot more than usual lately so I am going to just include two or three books in my famous book review posts at a time as to not overwhelm you. I have been putting off doing a book post for a while because I am a bit overwhelmed myself. Over the past month or so I have blazed through a staggering eleven, yes eleven, books. It is a personal record that I doubt I will ever beat. Geez, I hope I don’t ever have another opportunity to beat it. Anywho, lets get started shall we?
Everyman – Philip Roth
“Yet, what he learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one’s painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”
This is the first Philip Roth novel for me. I knew that he was some brilliant, widely quoted, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and from what I read off the book’s cover, a recipient of a Penn/Faulkner award, but I avoided reading him because I got the impression he was all doom and gloom. As you can tell from that little sample, he sure is. This novel is about an average man, an everyman if you will, struggling with his own mortality while looking back over his life and measuring his failures against the good that may have come from his unextraordinary life. Despite that fact that I am not an old Jewish man approaching death I connected with this book. There seemed to be this detached panic that comes from knowing and accepting death will triumph and that idea sinking in while knowing you are completely powerless against it that seemed pliable enough to relate to any difficult situation where you know eventually you just have to bite the bullet. Maybe that’s just me. Regardless, after some time passes and I start to forget about this book and my reevaluated thoughts on death subside when my attention is given to the new fall TV lineups, I think the following quote will remain with me as enduring and poignant:
“There is no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.”
The Painted Word – Tom Wolfe
This I picked up in the Art Theory section of the National Gallery’s bookstore in DC. I took my bad mood and sulked over to this book and away from my mother who was picking out Kandinsky prints for her
classroom. What a fantastic little book! I loved it. The idea of the book is based on the following:
“Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial – the means by which our experience of the individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”
I know what you are thinking : YIKES! Forget that because he breaks it down in this funny social criticism where he uses his enthusiastic voice to sift through all the art world rhetoric. Though Wolfe is an expert on contemporary art theory, he writes as if he is an outsider or an anthropologist of the art world which he refers to as le monde. Best of all, this book is just over a hundred pages. All books on art should be so concise.
Everyman – Philip Roth
“Yet, what he learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one’s painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”
This is the first Philip Roth novel for me. I knew that he was some brilliant, widely quoted, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and from what I read off the book’s cover, a recipient of a Penn/Faulkner award, but I avoided reading him because I got the impression he was all doom and gloom. As you can tell from that little sample, he sure is. This novel is about an average man, an everyman if you will, struggling with his own mortality while looking back over his life and measuring his failures against the good that may have come from his unextraordinary life. Despite that fact that I am not an old Jewish man approaching death I connected with this book. There seemed to be this detached panic that comes from knowing and accepting death will triumph and that idea sinking in while knowing you are completely powerless against it that seemed pliable enough to relate to any difficult situation where you know eventually you just have to bite the bullet. Maybe that’s just me. Regardless, after some time passes and I start to forget about this book and my reevaluated thoughts on death subside when my attention is given to the new fall TV lineups, I think the following quote will remain with me as enduring and poignant:
“There is no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.”
The Painted Word – Tom Wolfe
This I picked up in the Art Theory section of the National Gallery’s bookstore in DC. I took my bad mood and sulked over to this book and away from my mother who was picking out Kandinsky prints for her
classroom. What a fantastic little book! I loved it. The idea of the book is based on the following:
“Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial – the means by which our experience of the individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”
I know what you are thinking : YIKES! Forget that because he breaks it down in this funny social criticism where he uses his enthusiastic voice to sift through all the art world rhetoric. Though Wolfe is an expert on contemporary art theory, he writes as if he is an outsider or an anthropologist of the art world which he refers to as le monde. Best of all, this book is just over a hundred pages. All books on art should be so concise.
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