📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• I must try to make my behavior intelligible. This confession - shall I call it? - is written to keep myself from brooding, to get down what happened in the order in which it happened. I am not content with myself. With this pencil and exercise book I hope to find some clarity. I create a second self, a man of the past by whom the man of the present may be measured.

  an excerpt from Rogue Male, written by Geoffrey Household in 1939

• My arrival was noticed only by a boy and girl, the inevitable boy and girl to be found in every dark corner of a great city. Better provision should be made for them - a Park of Temporary Affection, for example, from which lecherous clergymen and aged civil servants should be rigorously excluded.

  an excerpt from Rogue Male, written by Geoffrey Household in 1939

• Could all the humiliations and suffering he has been subjected to, all the violence that has come out of it, be mastered? For a short while now, Boualem has been convinced that he is capable of violence. Secretly, he is even preparing for it, for he knows that one day he will be forced to use it. In his mind, killing has almost become a symbolic and conciliatory act, a simple rite of exorcism whereby violence and blood come close to being purely abstract.
  
  He also knows that there are thousands like him. But mistrust is everywhere. How can those who want to fight meet when mistrust has been raised to the level of neurosis? You are afraid to reveal yourself to your neighbor, but also to your friend, your brother, and your offspring. Everyone is barricaded behind a bulwark of hypocrisy and artificial piety.

  an excerpt from The Last Summer of Reason, written by Tahar Djaout in 2001

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• Turns out even Hilary Mantel can just baaaarely get me to read a book about French history, even fictionalized. I'm audiobooking this, currently halfway thru a 33+hour reading. It's... clearly good. But also interesting to compare with Mantel's Cromwell books, which she wrote... 15 years later? They're so much better - she grew so much as a writer. There's a lot that's stilted here, and some tonal unevenness compared to what I expect.

  an note about A Place of Greater Safety, written by Hilary Mantel in 2006

• Asmodeus! This cat is a side character but has an INCREDIBLE story arc.

  an note about Rogue Male, written by Geoffrey Household in 1939

• What a delight. Page turner, action packed, funny. Really reads like a spy movie. It's a tale of a British gentleman on the run, using his Sportsman Outdoorsiness while being hunted by Foreign Agents. A lot that rhymes with Riddle of the Sands, but this is much more exciting, and funny too. A+.
  
  This has been on my list for a while, but it came up repeatedly in Ministry of Time, which nudged it up the list.

  an note about Rogue Male, written by Geoffrey Household in 1939

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