Mockingbird is a powerful novel of a future dying world of no children, no art, no reading. Where people would rather burn themselves alive than endure, but some still refuse to surrender. Those that survive spend their days in a narcotic bliss or choose a quick suicide rather than slow extinction. Humanity’s salvation rests on the last human who can read, the last robot who can think, and the last independent woman.
I love this novel novel because it depicts so intelligently the process of reading and of learning to read.

One more book I will probably recommend to a friend is “All the Sad Young Literary Men” by Keith Gessen. It’s the story of three male just out from college wondering what they will do with their lives. The book portrays what most young adults face; confusion, not knowing who you are and what you’ll be and the sadness all of us feel. What I do like about this novel is its message, that despite all the pain, the suffering, the broken dreams, despite the bleakness o0f living, we still have to live and continue living because there is hope and the uncertainty that maybe, we can have what we have always dreamed of.

here’s a link to a review of “All the Sad Young Literary Men”: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21316

The book is a love triangle set in 1870s New York. Newland Archer is a wealthy lawyer who is about to marry May Welland who comes from the respectable Mingott clan. Enter Countess Olenska, May’s cousin, who just fled her husband in Europe. Newland’s world is shaken up when he falls for the unconventional Countess, a kindred spirit who shares his contempt for the hypocrisy and shallowness of upper-class New York.

It could have been just another melodrama about a man caught between two different women, about choosing between societal obligation and personal fulfillment. But Wharton wrote it so skillfully, luring the reader into Newland’s world which is actually not at all familiar to us now living in a place that’s freer, less prudish. Wharton paints so lucidly the trappings that Newland wants to reject – from the ornate ballrooms and theatres, the blur of jewels and ballgowns, to the gardenias in men’s lapels. You can’t help but be transported to that era and be similarly gagged by its rigidity and propriety. But what captivates you further are the unspoken, the imagined conversations and contemplations, that define the characters and their actions. All those nuances, which are most delicious when read slowly, the movies cannot capture as acutely, even when suggested by a Joanne Woodward or Day-Lewis voice-over.

The Earth gets demolished to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. A highway of sorts, if you must. An Earthman, Arthur Dent, survives with the help of a long time friend, Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien with a very helpful knack for hitching rides in spaceships.

1. It’s divided into very brief chapters for easy reading. There’s something new to imagine every five to ten pages or so to keep you from getting bored.

2. The author, Doug Adams, employs this clever wordplay that brings the inter-galactic hitchhiking to life and tries to make you grin in the process. There’s the Infinite Improbability Drive (which makes the fantastic starship Heart of Gold run), the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (the alcoholic drink of choice), and the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness (verbatim).

3. You will love Marvin the Paranoid Android. He’s this charming little robot with the brain the size of a planet, and he’s always depressed. I like him so much, I got me some quotes:

“Do you want me to sit in the corner and rust, or just fall apart where I’m standing?”

“Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?”

“Why stop now just when I’m hating it?”

“Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”

4. If you should happen to travel the galaxy and back, then bring a towel. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it perfectly complements the next item.

5. This book provides The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. And that answer is 42. Yes, as in the six times seven kind of forty two. Unhinged, isn’t it? But it gets better.

6. They created a supercomputer, the Earth, in order to come up with the Ultimate Question to The Ultimate Answer. It was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial bypass five minutes before The Ultimate Question was revealed.

6. See, the author’s crazy. Nope, not the institutionalized kind of crazy (that’s de Maupassant, love him), but he’s the laugh out loud kind of crazy that gets people invited to parties. His book’s a riot in consequence. And it’s divided into very brief chapters for easy reading.

7. It’s got a movie adaptation. Which meant it had a profitable readership. Which meant it was good enough to buy. Still is, but in between the movie ticket and a paperback copy, I’d go with the book. On account of the movie sucked a nut.

8. The book had the proper sense to keep away from nuts, and so it didn’t suck one.

I remember I just read this one three months after buying it, which was two years ago, and I should have started right after paying for it. Although there aren’t many original books nowadays, I find a sense of novelty in it.

It is about a father and his son, living in an ashen world filled with burnt corpses and carcasses, and they are journeying for the sea coast. It is a story of survival that is too much for me to handle. Most of the things in that world are dead, and while reading their story, you only get gray visions of the environment, the characters’ faces, and their lives.

You hope for the characters to make it until the end of the journey despite the slim chances that they have. They have no food, no water, and all they have are the other survivors of the worldwide tragedy who are either out there to kill them or to eat them, and each other.

I think I have to say something about the son. At many times, that boy brought me to tears. He is indeed someone you might call an angel, and I will never find out where he is able to gather such a nature given the scenarios in their post-apocalyptic world. I admit that he might never be real in this world, but I still hold on to the idea of this boy walking around somewhere or in another plane of existence.

The conversations that they have, which were devoid of quotation marks that made me feel like I could hear them right inside my head, are so compelling. All the love and the care that they have for each other must be enough to motivate them through all that pointless walking and hiding, but still they go on, hoping against all the odds.

Upon finishing the book, which was I think around 4 AM, I was never able to get my sleep. I could hear the clock ticking away with my heartbeat. I was stunned and shaken. When I think about their story, I am not able to give my best description. There is so much in only about 200 pages. It is not a long story, but it still haunts me up to now.

It should be read by others before the movie comes out. I don’t know when it will come out, but anyway, the novel is about enduring when you think you have no reasons to go on, about the savage side of human nature and how worse it could get, and about the tremendous strength of the spirit.

It must be entitled that way because of all the walking. After all, it is only through walking that one can discover and rediscover the patterns in life and make something out of it.

It is a hefty book – my copy runs to a little over a thousand pages – but I finished it in a week. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep (or much work done) then.

Brodie’s Report is a great introduction to the author’s uncanny body of works, written when he was almost at the sunset of his life, seventy years but never void of magisterial power. Borges can turn simple anecdotes into a fascinating account of history. He is a brilliant wordsmith–the register of words kicks right into the heartlessness (or perhaps the absurdity) of the stories, and the way his personal life blurs the fictive nature of his anecdotes is enough to leave you in a state of awe, if not honest appreciation. My favorite piece is “The Gospel According To Mark,” a stunning recreation of a biblical story, but distinctly human and compelling.

I also love The Aleph and Other Stories. This collection is comprised of seventeen shorts from The Aleph, first published in 1949, twenty-three musings on history and future from The Maker, and a pair of perplexing thoughts from Museum. I am a slow reader; I finished it in around five days. The peculiar heaviness confuses me which world I am in right then, because there are too many. The register of words, again, is supernatural; it’s surprising, the thought how an arrangement of letters and words can easily move one’s frame of mind.

Further readings on Borges will lead you to Ficciones and The Book of Imaginary Beings, which are both wonderful and fascinating.

I enjoyed reading the book a lot because it talked about 2 men who had different fates, but eventually their lives were interwoven from the series of events that came about. Think Montague and Capulet, or take it closer to home, Marcos and Aquino. Archer told the stories of these 2 men, so gripping, that at 15, I wondered how life can be at Europe. I was mystified how power and money can take control of one’s life and destiny and I was challenged to discover more about life outside the confines of my comfort zone (I was sooo idealistic and naive at 15).

If you are into power-grabbing, money-hungry characters in an amalgam of circumstances, Kane and Abel is the book for you. I haven’t seen that book in years so I better find it and devour on it again.

When I first picked up the book, what discouraged me from reading it was the very Irish-ness of the book: the tone, the language, and the perpetual gloom of the atmosphere. But eventually, it drew me in its beautiful tale of two young men struggling to find freedom not only for themselves but also for their country. O’Neill managed to weave issues of self-identity and national consciousness in one epic love story.

While some might see it as a perverse excuse for promiscuity and point out its many moral flaws, I think that those who’d keep an open mind will see that the real message of the novel is to magnificently reveal that the struggle for freedom and acceptance is common in all of us.

It really twists your heart in more ways than one.