Author: John Fante
Rating: 6/10
Last Read: April 2014

Quick Summary: Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer in LA during the depression.  He’s convinced of his own greatness, but can’t seem to get the words onto the page correctly!  This follows his adventures (and madness) through the city, into love, and on a mad chase after his love into the desert.

I heard this book described as “The Great Gatsby of the West Coast.”  I’m not totally sure about that one – I like Gatsby much more.  I didn’t love the book, but it was still a decent read.  Perhaps I should give it a second chance one day.

I picked it up because one of my favorite poets – Charles Bukowski – loved this book.  One bonus for me was the fact that Bukowski wrote the foreword! What a surprise. 

My Takeaways

No matter how convinced you are of your own talent, if you cannot do the work and produce output, you are nothing.  Ego is your enemy.

My Highlights

But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm.

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book!

“My advice to all young writers is quite simple. I would caution them never to evade a new experience. I would urge them to live life in the raw, to grapple with it bravely, to attack it with naked fists.”

every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.

You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.

God was such a dirty crook, such a contemptible skunk, that’s what he was for doing that thing to that woman. Come down out of the skies, you God, come on down and I’ll hammer your face all over the city of Los Angeles, you miserable unpardonable prankster. If it wasn’t for you, this woman would not be so maimed, and neither would the world

a Bandini with dynamite in his body and volcanic fire in his eyes, who goes to this Camilla Lopez and says: see here, young woman, I have been very patient with you, but now I have had enough of your impudence, and you will kindly oblige me by removing your clothes.

the world seemed a myth, a transparent plane, and all things upon it were here for only a little while; all of us, Bandini, and Hackmuth and Camilla and Vera, all of us were here for a little while, and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all; we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die.

The world was dust, and dust it would become.

What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?

“What’s the matter with him?”
“T. B.” she said.
“Tough.”
“He won’t live long.”
I didn’t give a damn. “We all have to die someday.”

He was going to die in a year, she said. He had left Los Angeles and gone to the edge of the Santa Ana desert. There he lived in a shack, writing feverishly. All his life he had wanted to write. Now, with such little time remaining, his chance had come.

There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.

I looked southward in the direction of the big stars, and I knew that in that direction lay the Santa Ana desert, that under the big stars in a shack lay a man like myself, who would probably be swallowed by the desert sooner than I, and in my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence toward which he was being hurled. Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn’t matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task. And Sammy was soon to die.

To hell with that Hitler, this is more important than Hitler, this is about my book. It won’t shake the world, it won’t kill a soul, it won’t fire a gun, ah, but you’ll remember it to the day you die, you’ll lie there breathing your last, and you’ll smile as you remember the book.

This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigaret, and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky.

Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: July 2016

Quick Summary: A journalist and his “lawyer” go on a five day drug binge and attempt to cover stories in Las Vegas.  Lots of “what the fuck” moments abound – you can’t take your eyes from the page. 

Quick read.  

The book is 70% descriptions of drug usage and effects of drugs.  If drugs aren’t your cup of tea… you should probably just skip over this one.

My Takeaways

Vegas is a very bad place to take hallucinogens.

Don’t mix your drugs.

My Highlights

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

After a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

Author: Markus Zusak
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: January 2015

Quick Summary: The story of a small girl living in Germany during WWII.  Particularly interesting because the narrator is Death. She is taught to read by her foster father and steals books from the Nazi regime. Her family takes in a Jewish man.  Horror and sadness ensue all around.

 

I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

My Highlights

He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world. She was the book thief without the words. Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.

It’s very rare, don’t you think, for a statue to appear before its subject has become famous.

“After all,” he said, “you should know it yourself—a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.”

“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole ….” Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that.

You might well ask just what the hell he was thinking. The answer is, probably nothing at all. He’d probably say that he was exercising his God-given right to stupidity.

When the elderly Jew climbed to his feet for the last time and continued on, he looked briefly back. He took a last sad glance at the man who was kneeling now himself, whose back was burning with four lines of fire, whose knees were aching on the road. If nothing else, the old man would die like a human. Or at least with the thought that he was a human.

Now more than ever, 33 Himmel Street was a place of silence, and it did not go unnoticed that the Duden Dictionary was completely and utterly mistaken, especially with its related words. Silence was not quiet or calm, and it was not peace.

The accordion remained strapped to her chest. When she bowed her head, it sank to her lap. Liesel watched. She knew that for the next few days, Mama would be walking around with the imprint of an accordion on her body. There was also an acknowledgment that there was great beauty in what she was currently witnessing, and she chose not to disturb it.

THE BEST word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.

I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

Author: Italo Calvino
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: May 2016

Quick Summary: A collection of short “stories” told by  Marco Polo about cities he has visited.  These are poetic, fantastical descriptions of unreal places, usually highlighting an individual aspect of life in a city.

The book is interesting, though it took me quite a while to get into it – there’s no easing you into the strangeness that you will encounter.

This is definitely a book you can revisit and appreciate further, I think.

My Highlights

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. –loc 67

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. –loc 107

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. –loc 122

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: –loc 125

But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her. –loc 150

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts. –loc 163

The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. –loc 168

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms. –loc 203

the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; –loc 222

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?” –loc 225

traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. –loc 230

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” –loc 240

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. –loc 253

It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. –loc 285

“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” –loc 368

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. –loc 392

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” –loc 639

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” –loc 695

The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying bis conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood. –loc 964

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. –loc 987

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.” –loc 1012

Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.” –loc 1134

“The places have mingled,” the goatherd said. “Cecilia is everywhere. Here, once upon a time, there must have been the Meadow of the Low Sage. My goats recognize the grass on the traffic island.” –loc 1145

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” –loc 1243