Othello by Shakespeare

10/10

William Shakespeare that is. Othello is, unofficially, my favorite Shakespeare play (of the relatively few that I've read). I don't know if that's because I am one of those who can't have my favorite be the most famous or popular? Hopefully I'm not that guy, I hate that guy. I actually think the main reason is that it was one of the first Shakespeare plays that I was introduced to and sorta where my Shakespeare appreciation began. So, it's a sentimental thing. Now that we've gotten to the bottom of that...

Othello is very underrated. It is not put on the same level, it seems, with some of the other awesome Shakespeare tragedies, i.e. Hamlet, Macbeth, etc. But it sure does hold its own. Othello is where we meet, arguably, Shakespeare's most villainous creation, Iago. Iago is, in my opinion, not only Shakespeare's darkest creation, but anybody's. I have yet to find a character who is more evil, sinister, and terrifying as Iago. And for some reason I really enjoy exploring the depths of a character like that.

The tale is about a ruler, Othello, and his fascination/love Desdemona and the jealous Iago who resorts to all means of deception and scheming in order to destroy the both of them. And boy does he ever. He's got everyone fooled and pulled the wool over just about everyone's eyes. It's a cool read, folks.

Shakespeare's always good for a quote or two:

"To mourn a mischief that is past and gone Is the next way to draw new mischief on."

"You have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser."

"O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, Let us call thee devil!"

"I think you think I love you."

"When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do at first suggest with heavenly shows."

"How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"

"They are not ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they're jealous. It is a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself."

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

7/10

This is the sequel to Ender's Game. It's pretty good. It's much more science fictiony (and philosophical) than Ender's Game and not nearly as many cool things happen in it. Also, Ender plays a less prominent role, which, to me, is a downfall. But alas, it is still worth a read. Just don't expect it to match Ender's Game. You have been duly warned. On a side note, Card says that this book was the original book he wanted to write and the reason he even wrote Ender's Game at all. Therefore, it can stand alone without Ender's Game. I just wouldn't recommend it.

It's cool in the sense that we find out what happens to Ender after the grand finale of Ender's Game. A few cool things: Ender and hive-queen action, a computer that speaks to Ender through a chip in his ear, it's been many a long year since Ender should even be thought to be alive and his identity is hidden in those regards, and I guess other things. It's been a while since I read it, but rest assured, Ender is still a dominator.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

9/10

I'm usually not a big fan of newer books, books written recently, for whatever reason. I am forever unable to get with the times. I think it's because newer books seem to always be pretty risque and push the envelope in lame ways to shock the reader or something. I loved this book, however. And I guess it was risque in it's own right, but there was something to it that made it not so lame. I think McEwan's writing style is what won me over. He is very descriptive and doesn't write like a 21st century author. In fact, he has a very Jane Austen feel to him, and yes, that is a compliment.

The book is about a young, imaginative girl who accuses her sister's new boyfriend of a crime he may or may not have committed. She convinces herself that she clearly saw what she saw, and it is her testimony that eventually leads to some serious life-changing events in the young man's life, as well as her sister's. The way the story unfolds is all very interesting and makes one wonder how clearly some past events actually unfolded.

The book is tremendously fascinating, almost perfectly written, and contains one of the most surprising and cool plot twists I've seen. Sorry to give away that there is a plot twist, now you, dear reader, will be looking for it. But I confound you to see it coming.

This book was also adapted into a very well-done movie.

Some quotes:

"Self-pity needed her full attention."

"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."

"He was happy and therefore bound to succeed."

"Truth was strange and deceptive, it had to be struggled for, against the flow of the everyday."

The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

9/10

A book about deduction and astute observation? Where do I sign up? Count me in. I just finished reading this book last night. This was fun reading. That Sherlock continued to amaze and solve some real puzzlers. This book is a Barnes & Noble book that has gathered all of the Sherlock Holmes stories into two volumes. Volume 1 included:

1. A 100 page short novel called "A Study in Scarlet" and was really good. There's a lot of anti-Mormon stuff in this story that is more comical than anything where Mormons are painted as these crazed religious zealots that murder anyone who does not obey. The story, however, was still very good.

2. Another 100 page short novel called "The Sign of Four" that turned out to be one of my favorites of all the stories.

3. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" which is 16 short stories that are about 20 pages each. These short stories have far less character development, but get right to the good stuff: Holmes dominating and solving cases. Some of my favorite stories of the 16 were "The Red-Headed League" (yes, it IS as awesome as it sounds), "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (intense and interesting), and "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" (this one had a very Poe-like feeling).

4. "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" which is 11 short stories that are about 15 pages each. My favorites were "The Silver Blaze" (my very favorite of all the short stories in Volume 1), "The Reigate Puzzle" (some cool deductions in this one), "The Greek Interpreter" (mostly because we meet Sherlock's lesser known brother who also has an awesome name, Mycroft. He is exactly like Sherlock except better, according to Sherlock. The two of them together were quite the dominators.), and "The Naval Treaty" (just real good). "The Final Problem" is also notable because it features Sherlock's greatest nemesis, Moriarty. I'll leave it at that due to spoiler issues.

5. A 120-page short novel called "The Hound of the Baskervilles" which was amazingly awesome and my very favorite of all the stories in this volume. It is easily the most well written and most suspenseful. Sherlock is at his best here. Watson too.

Now for the quotes:

"It is not easy to express the inexpressible."

"The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness."

"I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely."

"A change of work is the best rest." I guess he is here quoting William Gladstone, the current Prime Minister at the time.

"Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him."

"There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman." Holmes says this is an old Persian saying.

"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent."

"It's every man's business to see justice done."

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

10/10

Good old Clive Staples Lewis, a former atheist who converted to the Church of England, is THE best author on Christianity without a doubt. He is quoted more often than almost anyone, and for good reason. I have read more C.S. Lewis books than I think any other author. I do enjoy his stuff. And this, Mere Christianity, is, in my opinion, his very best work. There's more insight here than any book, outside of scripture, that I have ever read. The way he explains the Christian doctrine is simple, true, and inspiring. He has a section on pride that is just epic. He has a brief section on the Trinity, however, that is not as good as the rest. I'm going to cut my comments short, because I think that I'm going to set the quote record with this one.

Quotes that made the cut (Yes, I had to pass on some very good ones due to the excessive amount of amazing quotes.):

"The question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this?'"

"Selfishness has never been admired."

"I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people."

"As in arithmetic - there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some wrong answers are much nearer being right than others."

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should have never found out that it has no meaning."

"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on."

"There are a good many things that would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years....If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual."

"If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things that we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them."

"God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them."

"The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection."

"A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

"Love is the great conqueror of lust."

"I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the first world war, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it." Ha ha, one of my favorites.

"There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit."

"It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind."

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest."

"The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.'"

"If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."

"Those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy."

"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means - the only complete realist."

"Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary."

"If what you call your 'faith' in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all - not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him."

"What God the Father begets is God, something of the same kind as Himself."

"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is."

"God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one."

"Laziness means more work in the long run."

"He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, 'Be perfect,' He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment."

"You must realise from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal."

"The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words."

Sorry, dear reader, for the abundence of quotations. This guy knew his stuff and how to say it, that is for sure.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

8/10

This was the first Dickens book I ever read. I am now a full-fledged Dickens fan. His writing style is unreal. He turns ordinary things into fantastic, many times comical, descriptions. I always catch myself chuckling at how awesome he just finished describing something. How his brain conjures up the combination of words that it does is beyond me, but I do likey likey. Plus, he has some hilariously classic titles to his chapters. Check this one out for Chapter 36: "Is a very short one, and may appear of no great importance in its place, but it should be read notwithstanding, as a sequel to the last, and a key to one that will follow when its time arrives". Oh man, you can't beat that. There's others as well worth mentioning, but I hope you'll just take my word for it.

Dickens is very apt at conveying the terrors of the human condition. He makes it tremendously easy to sympathize with many characters, and I found myself more than once feeling almost pained at the harsh hand dealt to Oliver Twist. He makes it so easy, also, to get behind and root for his characters to overcome their poorly dealt hand. He's also a suspenseful writer and builds up the tension quite nicely.

Another Dickens attribute: coming up with the coolest names ever for his characters. I mean, Oliver Twist? How do you come up with that? Mr. Bumble? Mr. Fang? The Artful Dodger? Does not get better than that.

Some quotes regarding the difficulty in overcoming old habits:

"He was now instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue forever."

"I am chained to my old life. I loathe and hate it now, but I cannot leave it. I must have gone too far to turn back."

But then...

"It is never too late for penitence and atonement."

"It is never too late to repent."

P.S. My internet kicked me off just as I was about to post this. So, terror-stricken, I thought I lost my precious, precious post. But nay, it somehow saved itself as a draft. Hooray!

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

10/10

Simply put, one of the best books ever. I read this in less than a week with rabid obsession. I love baseball about as much as anything, so this book was right up my alley. However, a quote by Nick Hornby of The Believer in the opening page makes a case for the appeal of this book even for those who aren't big into baseball: "I understood about one in four words of Moneyball, and it's still the best and most engrossing sports book I've read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode." It is also a business book, and a good one at that. Mark Gerson of The Weekly Standard is quoted on the back cover thusly, "Moneyball is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written."

The book contains some of the coolest, most interesting and unique statistical analysis I've seen. Stuff, even as a baseball fan, that I'd never really thought about. The book focuses on the Oakland Athletics and how they continue to outperform teams who have way more money to spend than the A's do. The A's run their team like a business and look at certain numbers that they have learned are accurate gaugers for players. They worship on-base percentage, walks, not stealing bases, not squandering outs through sacrifice bunts, and don't care about strike outs compared to other outs. Awesome. The upper management runs the show and decides on the strategies the team will implement, not the coaches. They ask, "In what other business do you leave the fate of an organization to a middle manager?"

The book is about the A's obsession with learning "the minute events within the event." And that's why I worshipped it. How much does a batter's batting average drop after a first-pitch strike? What percentage of pitches out of the strike zone do players swing at? How much money per win do teams pay? There's this awesome part where the A's want a certain relief pitcher and want to get rid of one of their own. He finds out which teams want the relief pitcher he wants, so he offers those teams his pitcher for a pretty sweet and alluring deal. They bite and are taken out of the running for his guy who he ends up getting. Not bad. This book is unbelievably entertaining and I could go on about it for some time.

Too many good quotes, here's a few:

Bill James, a sweet baseball stat guru: "Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it. Certainly the average fan, seeing perhaps a tenth of the team's games, could never gauge two performances that accurately - in fact if you see both 15 games a year, there is a 40% chance that the .275 hitter will have more hits than the .300 hitter in the games that you see. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible - it is a matter of record."

"Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor baseball team."

"The market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash."

"It was more efficient to create a closer than to buy one...You could take a slightly above average pitcher and drop him into the closer's role, let him accumulate some gaudy number of saves, and then sell him off. You could, in essence, buy a stock, pump it up with false publicity, and sell it off for much more than you'd paid for it....Jason Isringhausen's departure wasn't a loss to the Oakland A's but a happy consequence of a money machine known as 'Selling the Closer'".

Billy Beane: "Relievers are like volatile stocks. They're the one asset you need to watch closely, and trade for quick profits."

"The difference between 1-2 and 2-1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous. It's the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch...People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it's really the first two out of three." This is a quote from an Ivy League dude named Paul who is the main stat guy and a huge part of the A's organization.

Scott Hatteberg: "When you go to the plate, it's about the only thing you do alone in baseball. Here they have turned it into a team thing."

P.S. A movie is coming out with Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. Ha ha, good stuff.