Only counting books I read (or soon-ish will have read) in their entirety…
Below are starting dates, titles, authors, and some quotes / comments that I could think of. :p Hopefully I have not typo-ed up the quotes too badly.
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18-Jan-2023: 1. Journey to the centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Fave! And a re-read.
"'No, my dear Axel, and I would gladly come with your uncle and you, if it weren’t that a girl would only be in the way.'
'You mean that?'
'Yes, I mean it.'
Oh, how hard it is to understand the hearts of girls and women. When they are not the most timid of creatures, they are the bravest. Reason has no part in their lives."
JFC AXEL, THE 1800'S CALLED
"When this ceremony was over we sat down, twenty-four in number, and therefore literally one on top of the other. The luckiest had only two children on their knees.
However silence fell on these little people at the arrival of the soup, and the taciturnity natural to Icelanders, even in childhood, resumed its sway. The host served out to us a soup made from lichen and by no means unpleasant, then a huge piece of dried fish swimming in sour butter which was twenty years old and therefore, according to Icelandic ideas of gastronomy, vastly preferable to fresh butter. With this there was some skyr, a sort of clotted milk, accompanied with biscuits and seasoned with the juice of juniper berries; and to drink we had a thin milk mixed with water, which they call blanda. Whether this strange food was wholesome or not, I am not in a position to judge; all I can say is that I was hungry, and that at dessert I drank a thick buckwheat broth down to the last spoonful."
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2-Feb-2023: 2. Brobyggarna by Jan Guillou
Fave!
"Och snart var Oscar inne i en hatfull utläggning om engelska mördare. Han menade att inför historien, när kriget var slut, skulle det bli svårt att fastställa vilken som var den lägsta mänskliga formen, belgaren eller engelsmannen. Mycket talade förstås för belgarna. Det fanns numera uppgifter om att de mördat mer än sex miljoner människor i Kongo under den avskyvärde Leopold II:s dagar. Sex miljoner mördade! Det brottet skulle mänskligheten aldrig glömma. I inget annat europeiskt land vore sådant barbari tänkbart, framför allt inte i Tyskland och de skandinaviska länderna."
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8-Mar-2023: 3. With the end in mind: How to live and die well by Kathryn Mannix
Fave!
"There are so many roles in medicine that there is a home for every interest. Indeed, at medical school, which is usually a five-year university course in the UK, we play at predicting where our fellows will end up, and follow each other's professional development with interest, amusement, or even envy. My own class, which holds regular reunion weekends every five years or so, has produced a smattering of international superstars, some splendid research scientists, a galaxy of dedicated clinicians in general practice and in a variety of hospital specialties, plus several priests, a mountaineer, a philosopher and a forestry expert. We spotted the psychiatrists during our first year: eclectic or flamboyant taste in clothing, a tendency to introspection, and possessed of a vocabulary that always made conversations fizz. The surgeons were starting to declare themselves by halfway through our training: decisive and self-assured, prone to defending sometimes indefensible opinions, and often living among dismantled motor vehicles or domestic appliances that they enjoyed reassembling with variable success.
And then there are the anaesthetists. The people who can hold their nerve when the stakes are high. They often have terrifying hobbies: hang-gliding, motorbike racing, deep-sea diving. They like 'kit'. They like risk. And they often prefer their own company, in thoughtful silence or intense concentration. At work, some prefer their patients to be asleep, as in an operating theatre or an intensive care unit; some love the thrill of high-risk surgery, when an anaesthetist with a steady nerve is an essential member of the surgical team working deep inside a patient's chest, abdomen or brain; some use their intricate knowledge of nerve pathways to gravitate towards pain management; and others work in applying their knowledge of supporting patients' breathing during operations or in ICU to those people living at home whose lives can only be maintained by relying, either partly or entirely, on a ventilator to support their breathing. This is known as home ventilation.
My anaesthetist colleague from the home ventilation team asked to talk to me. This was somewhat unusual. A man of few words but enormous passion, he had not been keen to embrace the concept of palliative care, so I was intrigued about what he might want to discuss. He offered to make me coffee when I arrived at his office, so matters were clearly serious."
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25-Mar-2023: 4. Dandy by Jan Guillou
Fave!
"Detta var ändå 1900-talet. Tekniken skulle avlasta människan från så mycket trälande att muskelkraften befriades och all energi kunde riktas mot det sköna i livet som alla människor innerst inne strävade efter, men kanske bara en procent hade tid och råd med. Den nya tekniken skulle skapa en ny och mer jämlik människa, de tyska socialisternas idéer skulle förmodligen segra. Allt förnuft talade för det. Ändå var det oroande att så mycket enfaldig ondska kunde frodas mitt i ett välorganiserat modernt samhälle. Som alla dessa Londonredaktörer som rimligtvis var respekterade medborgare, levde ett anständigt liv enligt konstens alla regler och på intet sätt uppfattades som de bestar de var när de skrev, eller snarare vrålade ut sitt hat. Och dessa goda, anständiga, måttfulla, respektabla medborgare representerade den politiska makten. Vad hände om ingenjörsvetenskapen försåg denna politiska majoritet, alltså makten, med maskiner som kunde uträtta häpnadsväckande ting? Vad med en plöjmobil som kunde ta sig fram överallt, skulle de bepansra den och sätta in den på slagfälten? Vad med framtiden för de elektriska motorerna, skulle den politiska makten kräva att de blev avrättningsmaskiner för att rädda samhällsorganismen från degeneration?
Nej, det var bara mardrömmar. Även om nu den engelska borgarklassen var galen så gällde det sannerligen inte Tyskland. Albies far hade haft helt rätt när han pekade på att Tyskland var Europas morgonrodnad."
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5-Apr-2023: 5. Feral: Rewilding the land, the sea, and human life by George Monbiot
Fave! A must-read. Not the fishing stories, mind. D: Fish are friends, not food.
"There is, we believe, powerful circumstantial evidence suggesting that many of our familiar European trees and shrubs have evolved to resist attacks by elephants. The straight-tusked elephant, related to the species that still lives in Asia today, persisted in Europe until around 40,000 years ago, a mere tick of evolution's clock. It was, most likely, hunted to extinction. If the evidence is as compelling as it seems, it suggests that this species dominated the temperate regions of Europe. Our ecosystems appear to be elephant-adapted."
"In the enclosure I visited, the researchers had noticed that robins and dunnocks follow the boar around, feeding where they have overturned the ground. It could be that the robin evolved alongside the boar, rather as the oxpecker has evolved alongside large mammals in Africa, and that in the absence of boar it has now adopted human gardeners, who provide the same service."
"Worse, perhaps, from the point of view of rewilding, is public spending which sustains monocultures in places which would otherwise be reclaimed by nature. This is what happens in the nation I am using as a case study of the monomania which blights many parts of the world. Here another monoculture has developed: a luxuriance, an infestation, a plague… of sheep.
I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep. It occupies many of my waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them. Perhaps I should clarify that statement. I hate not the animals themselves, which cannot be blamed for what they do, but their impact on both our ecology and our social history. Sheep are the primary reason – closely followed by grouse shooting and deer stalking – for the sad state of the British uplands. Partly as a result of their assaults, Wales now possesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of Europe. Their husbandry is the greatest obstacle to the rewilding I would like to see.
To identify the sheep as an agent of destruction is little short of blasphemy. In England and Wales the animal appears to possess full diplomatic immunity. Its role in the dispossession of many of the people who once worked on the land, as the commons were enclosed by landlords hoping to profit from the wool trade, is largely forgotten."
"Strong as the case for change may be, agricultural hegemony is so potent that to challenge farmers and landowners is almost taboo. In Wales, farmers (both full- and part-time) account for 1.5 per cent of the total population and 5 per cent of the population of the countryside. / … / Yet the countryside is governed and managed almost exclusively for their benefit. Many of the ideas and perspectives which dominate rural policy arise with farmers' unions, which are often governed by the biggest and richest landowners. The views of the majority of rural people who are not farmers / … / are marginalized. / … / Rural politics throughout Europe and in much of North America suffer from the same blight: their primary purpose appears to be to keep the farmers (or foresters or fisherfolk) happy, though everywhere they are a small minority."
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7-Apr-2023: 6. Candide by Voltaire
An audiobook narrated by Jack Davenport, who has THE SECOND OR THIRD BEST VOICE IN THE WORLD! o_O It was pretty funny. :p
"I grew old in poverty and dishonour, having but half a bottom, yet always mindful that I was the daughter of a pope. A hundred times I wanted to kill myself, but still I loved life. This ridiculous weakness for living is perhaps one of our most fatal tendencies. For can anything be sillier than to insist on carrying a burden one would continually much rather throw to the ground? Sillier than to feel disgust at one's own existence and yet cling to it? Sillier, in short, than to clasp to our bosom the serpent that devours us until it has gnawed away our heart? In the countries through which it has been my fate to travel and in the inns where I have served, I have seen a huge number of people who felt abhorrence for their own lives. But I've seen only a dozen voluntarily put an end to their wretchedness: three Negroes, four Englishmen, four Genevans, and a German professor called Robeck.
In the end I finished up as one of the servants in the household of Don Issacar the Jew. He gave me to you, my fair young lady, as your maid. I have become involved in your destiny and been more concerned with your adventures than with my own. Indeed I would never have mentioned my misfortunes if you hadn't provoked me to it a little, and if it were not the custom on board ship to tell stories to pass the time. So there you are, Miss. I have lived, and I know the world. Just for fun, why not get each passenger to tell you the story of his life, and if there is one single one of them who hasn't often cursed the day he was born and hasn't often said to himself that he was the most unfortunate man alive, then you can throw me into the sea head first."
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28-Apr-2023: 7. Mellan rött och svart by Jan Guillou
Fave!
"En måttlig inflation hade inte varit oförmånlig. Alla affärsbekanta på Herrenklub mitt emot riksdagshuset var förtjusta i början. Skulder kunde regleras på det mest gynnsamma sätt, exporten gynnades. Men snart började det gå överstyr. När en dollar stod i kursen en miljard mark drog han öronen åt sig. När en dollar kostade biljoner rämnade Tyskland.
Inom Lauritzengruppen måste man beräkna löner med multiplikatorsystem, dessutom betala ut lön en gång om dagen. Ena dagen skulle den fastställda lönen multipliceras med 27 biljoner, andra dagen det dubbla och tredje dagen med 67 biljoner. Tjänstemännen inom företagsgruppen gjorde alla på samma sätt. När de fick lön mobiliserade de sin familj med skottkärror och paketcyklar och handlade mat för allt, potatis, rökt kött, mjöl."
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11-May-2023: 8. The light we carry: Overcoming in uncertain times by Michelle Obama
Fave!
"Sasha attempted to fix us a couple of weak martinis – Wait, you know how to make martinis? – and served them in water glasses, first laying down a couple of newly purchased coasters so that we wouldn't mark up their brand-new coffee table with our drinks.
I watched all this with some astonishment. It's not that I'm surprised that our kids have grown up, exactly, but somehow the whole scene – the coasters, in particular – signaled a different sort of landmark, the type of thing every parent spends years scanning for, which is evidence of common sense.
As Sasha set down our drinks that night, I thought about all the coasters she and her sister hadn't bothered to use when they were under our care, all the times over the years I'd tried to get water marks out of various tables, including at the White House.
But the dynamics had changed. We were at their table now. They owned it, and they were protecting it. Clearly, they had learned."
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21-May-2023: 9. Att inte vilja se by Jan Guillou
Fave!
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3-Jun-2023: 10. Why we get sick: The new science of Darwinian medicine by Randolph M. Nesse & George C. Williams
Fave!
"There comes a point where the expense of an arms race is so great that the organism, political or biological, is hard put to meet other basic needs, but the cost of losing it is so great that enormous expenses may nonetheless be maintained. We are in a relentless all-out struggle with our pathogens, and no agreeable accommodation can ever be reached."
"Viennese physician Ignaz Semmelweis noted in 1847 that women in a clinic staffed by medical personnel contracted childbed fever three times as frequently as those in a clinic staffed by midwives. On investigating, he found that doctors came directly from doing autopsies on women who had died from childbed fever to do pelvic examinations on women in labor. Semmelweis proposed that they were transmitting the causative agent and showed that infections were less frequent when examiners washed their hands in a bleach solution. Was he thanked for his wonderful discovery? No. He was dismissed from his post for suggesting that doctors were causing the deaths of patients. He became more and more frantic in his efforts to save the thousands of women who were dying unnecessarily, but he was ignored, and finally, at age forty-seven, he died in an insane asylum. Nowadays, we all accept the need for hygiene in hospitals, but whenever it becomes lax, conditions are perfect for selecting for increased virulence."
"Timothy John's book notes the interesting possibility that inadequate exposure to everyday toxins may leave our enzyme systems unprepared to handle a normal toxic load when one occurs. Perhaps with toxins, as with sun exposure, our bodies can adapt to chronic threats but not to occasional ones."
"[I]magine a world in which senescence is eliminated, so that death rates do not increase with age but remain throughout life at the level for eighteen-year-olds, that is, about one per thousand per year. Some people would still die at all ages, but half the population would live to age 693, and more than 13 percent would live to age 2000!"
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4-Jul-2023: 11. Blå Stjärnan by Jan Guillou
Fave!
"De ödelade sina liv utan att ens riktigt förstå det, man inbillade dem att upprättelse och hjältemedaljer hägrade efter segern. Det var inte sant av två mycket enkla skäl. För det första var de underklass och för det andra var de kvinnor. Efter segern skulle de bara betraktas som förbrukade horor vars tjänster inte längre efterfrågades av Krigsmakten. Och vilket nytt anständigt arbete skulle de då erbjudas? Inget. / … /
Efter segern skulle de alla vara fördömda. Hela operationen var självklart hemligstämplad på sjuttio år, enda chansen till upprättelse var efter döden. Att underrättelsetjänstens hallick däremot genast befordrades och fick hänga Svärdsorden runt halsen kunde lätt förklaras med att han, om än inte personligen, men genom sitt genialiska ledarskap, skaffat fram en stor mängd väsentlig information under krigsåren. Hur det gått till var hemligt, det låg i underrättelseverksamhetens natur.
Kort sagt var det en historia som någon förr eller senare borde sätta i händerna på en Vilhelm Moberg."
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14-Jul-2023: 12. Feel by Chris Heath
Robbie Williams bio.
"He never asks what I am writing, either because he knows, or he doesn't want to know, or isn't interested right now, or is content that he will know in due course. What is unsaid but understood is that it will be unvarnished and unembellished; the world as it happens, the words as they are said. That is not what most people are used to reading about others, especially about the famous, and I hope readers take that into account. For each occasional intemperate outburst or careless opinion or rough and cruel turn of phrase or misfired joke that I choose to note or record, imagine for a moment how your own life might appear, documented like this, if someone were with you all the time, encounted after encounter, day after day, as you mingle and deal with people you love and people you tolerate and people you dislike and people you fear, at your highest and at your lowest, at your most timid and your mostly [sic] carelessly, recklessly outspoken, at your drowsiest and at your most caffeinated, at your most thoughtful and when you couldn't care less about anything at all."
"This was Take That's regular London hotel, until the hotel management banned them. It wasn't anything they themselves did – it was the fans, who would wait outside day and night. It wasn't even just the regular noise the fans made, and the general nuisance they caused, that made Take That's residency impossible. It was because the girls were so determined not to miss a single Take That entrance or exit that, rather than leave their post, they would both piss and shit in the hotel's flower beds."
"While Rob goes next door, [the doctor] grins and asks, shamelessly, 'Two spare tickets for the concert?'
'We can sort something out, I've no doubt,' says Pompey through gritted teeth. Doctors and dentists almost always ask for something. You might imagine these would be jobs in which professional pride and principle, and the desire to set people at ease when they are feeling vulnerable and need care, would counteract any daftness in the face of celebrity, but it does not. Rob has become used to doctors coming round to give him a medical with their doctor equipment and a stack of calendars for him to sign, or to be sitting in a dentist's chair and be asked whether the dentist can use his name in promotion of a particular mouthwash."
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18-Aug-2023: 13. Äkta amerikanska jeans by Jan Guillou
Fave!
"På andra dagens expedition blev allt förstört. Jag smög mig nära en nyutflugen koltrastunge som satt och gömde sig intill stammen på en gran. Jag siktade noga för att pilen skulle sätta sig med ett dirr i trädstammen alldeles intill fågeln, så nära att en hjort utan tvivel hade träffats i hjärtat.
Redan när jag släppte pilen förstod jag vad som skulle hända. Pilen satte sig i trädstammen som beräknat. Men med en ynkligt pipande koltrastunge genomborrad och fastnaglad.
Fågeln dog när jag drog ut pilen. Den flämtade några sekunder i min hand innan de små fina gråa ögonlocken sakta slöt sig och den blev helt stilla, fortfarande alldeles varm.
Verkligheten blev omöjlig att fantisera bort. Jag var alls ingen indian på hjortjakt i Nordamerika, jag var en dumt utklädd Eric Lauritzen i Sverige som på pin kiv dödat en liten trastunge."
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3-Sep-2023: 14. The ancestor's tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of life by Richard Dawkins & Yan Wong
Fave! And a re-read, although this was an later edition.
"A world without rodents would be a very different world. It is less likely to come to pass than a world dominated by rodents and free of people. If nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats. I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside. When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactively enhanced mutation-rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated save for occasional lucky raftings: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within 5 million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabretoothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists eventually organise careful archaeological digs (gnaws?) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporarily tragic circumstances that gave ratkind its big break?"
:D
"I suppose we should take comfort from the change that has come over our attitudes during the intervening century. Perhaps, in a negative sense, Hitler can take some credit for this, since nobody wants to be caught saying anything that he said. But what, I wonder, will our successors of the twenty-second century be quoting, in horror, from us? Something to do with our treatment of other species, perhaps?"
"Most deceptive of all – indeed probably holding the record for animals not looking remotely like the thing that zoologists know them to be – are the parasitic barnacles, such as Sacculina. Sacculina is not what it seems with a vengeance. Zoologists would never have realised that it is in fact a barnacle, but for its larva. The adult is a soft sac that clings to the underside of a crab and sends long, branching, plant-like roots inside to absorb nourishment from the crab's tissues. The parasite not only doesn't look like a barnacle, it doesn't look like a crustacean of any kind. It has completely lost all trace of the armour plating, and all trace of the bodily segmentation that nearly all other arthropods have. It might as well be a parasitic plant or fungus. Yet, in terms of its evolutionary relationships, it is a crustacean, and not just a crustacean but specifically a barnacle. / … / Sacculina's branching root system is not indiscriminate in its invasion of the crab's tissues. It heads first for the crab's reproductive organs, which has the effect of castrating the crab. Is this just an accidental by-product? Probably not. Castration not only sterilises the crab. Like a fat bullock, the castrated crab, instead of concentrating on becoming a lean, mean, reproducing machine, diverts resources towards getting larger: more food for the parasite."
"Fungi are closer to animals than to plants, and taxonomists place us together in a huge group called the opisthokonts."
:)
"While you prepare dinner, tearfully ponder on the fact that onions (Allium cepa) have a genome five times larger than humans."
:')
"'Pilgrimage' implies piety and reverence. I have not had occasion here to mention my impatience with traditional piety, and my disdain for reverence where the object is anything supernatural. But I make no secret of them. It is not because I wish to limit or circumscribe reverence; not because I want to reduce or downgrade the true reverence with which we are moved to celebrate the universe, once we understand it properly. 'On the contrary' would be an understatement. My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer."
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14-Dec-2023: 15. Madly, deeply: The Alan Rickman diaries by Alan Rickman
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Vegan FAQ! :)
The Web Site the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See.
Please watch Earthlings.
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You can reach me at yoze83 [AT] yahoo.com
