Marcus

I'd been meaning to read the Satanic Bible for a long time now, and now that I've finally gotten around to it... I kid. This book isn't the Satanic anything, but it is strange. At times while reading it I'd try to imagine how Rushdie came up with it. I can't. His life, his thought process are so foreign to me as to be almost other-worldly. I've never read anything like it. It's magical realism, but it really has little in common with the Latin American variety of the genre. The plot is fairly straightforward, but it is intertwined with so many strange dreams, transformations, sub-plots, backgrounds and most oddly, detailed religious and pseudo-religious events, rites, superstitions and metaphors that it is hard to imagine it all coming from the mind of one man. Every time I looked, i could see, or imagine I saw, symbolism, metaphor, literary allusions and philosophy. It felt like a book that I could read over and over without ever finishing it. In a way, it's strange. I can't tell if it is a work of genius that isn't as acclaimed as it deserves, or if it's the ramblings of a man who is at least a little deranged. It eludes easy categorization.

Woven into a very real and contemporary story of two men's experiences with emigration to England is their parallel experience of possible conversion in to an arch-angel, complete with halo, and a devil, complete with horns and cloven hooves. Sometimes their supernatural transformations are almost absent from the story. There are the expected clash of cultures, family drama, relationships begun and ended and at times, the story feels normal. Then there are long dream chapters of villagers led by a teenaged girl clothed in butterflies on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The arch-angel blazing down pedestrians with fiery breath of righteous indignation. The giant goat-devil who becomes physically and culturally larger than life, both outgrowing his attic home and sparking a popular movement. The juxtaposition is both jarring and enchanting. It makes it easy to get pulled into the story, despite being unfamiliar with almost everything in it and its non-negligable length.

A couple examples of the writing:

...now whenever a trunk was opened, a batch of wings would fly out of it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as they rose; there were butterflies under the closed lids of the thunderboxes in the toilets of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe, and between the pages of books. When you awoke you found the butterflies sleeping on your cheeks.

He stands motionless while small groups of residents rush past in different directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All of the groups contain white youngsters as well as black. He raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to play.

Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a silver rose. And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.

Usually in a book you find a character that you identify with–someone whose motives you understand. I didn't find that character in The Idiot. The unifying trait of all of them is the way their lives are directed by passion. None of them are rational–whether blinded by love, money or vice; whether good or evil, they each act to slowly bring about their own ruin. It's tragic and disconcerting to watch them slowly come unravelled.

Though Prince Myshkin is the “idiot” the book is named for, he is definitely not, at least at the time the story takes place, an idiot. He's innocent and good, but is consistently (and disconcertingly) brazenly honest. It is shocking. When he bares his soul to people who care nothing for him, it's almost too much. The Idiot is a blood on wool contrast of his goodness and the depravity every other character where the end result is the same for everyone.

This story, like most serialized Russian novels, is episodic and probably unnecessarily long. Among the many tangents are, as are so often found in Russian literature, philosophical and religious ponderings, commentary on the stratification of Russian society and descriptions of contemporary historical events. Through it all there is a beautiful, tragic love story where human flaws are shown raw and unpolished. The ending is insane. It's bizarre. Surreal. It's worth reading the whole book for the ending.

Digital Gold is a rolling history of the weirdos, idealists, criminals, rich and famous, and sometimes even pragmatic people who carried the compulsively misunderstood idea of bitcoin from the mind and hard drive of Satoshi to where it is today, a multi-billion dollar currency (or commodity, depending on who you ask).

The book flows smoothly from Silicon Valley investors to druggies peddling their wares on hidden Tor websites run by would-be murders-by-proxy. It dips into economic history and the complex technology of the blockchain without ever being boring or slow. It's readable, riveting, and relevant.

I keep telling myself I'm not going to read any more children's books unless I'm reading them to my children. I convince myself that I'll find more enjoyment or more utility reading grown-up books. Lately though, I've found that every time end up reading a book with a child protagonist, I prove myself wrong. Huck Finn is another case in point.

The most poignant part of the book for me was when Huck was struggling with whether or not to turn Jim in. Huck knew that it was his duty to allow Jim to be returned to his master, but Huck had grown to love Jim and didn't want to hurt him. His reasoning was that he'd feel bad not turning Jim in, but then again, he'd feel much worse if he did betray him and turn him in. Faced with a no-win situation, Huck went with his heart and was true to his friend. The payoff when Jim once again shows his gratitude to Huck is powerful and moving.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking–thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a- floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a- trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I'll GO to hell”–and tore it up.

“My goodness, and she so well only last week! Is she took bad?”

“It ain't no name for it. They set up with her all night, Miss Mary Jane said, and they don't think she'll last many hours.”

“Only think of that, now! What's the matter with her?”

I couldn't think of anything reasonable, right off that way, so I says:

“Mumps.”

“Mumps your granny! They don't set up with people that's got the mumps.”

“They don't, don't they? You better bet they do with THESE mumps. These mumps is different. It's a new kind, Miss Mary Jane said.”

“How's it a new kind?”

“Because it's mixed up with other things.”

“What other things?”

“Well, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and yaller janders, and brain-fever, and I don't know what all.”

“My land! And they call it the MUMPS?”

“That's what Miss Mary Jane said.”

“Well, what in the nation do they call it the MUMPS for?”

“Why, because it IS the mumps. That's what it starts with.”

“Well, ther' ain't no sense in it. A body might stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and somebody come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull up and say, ‘Why, he stumped his TOE.' Would ther' be any sense in that? NO. And ther' ain't no sense in THIS, nuther. Is it ketching?”

“Is it KETCHING? Why, how you talk. Is a HARROW catching–in the dark? If you don't hitch on to one tooth, you're bound to on another, ain't you? And you can't get away with that tooth without fetching the whole harrow along, can you? Well, these kind of mumps is a kind of a harrow, as you may say–and it ain't no slouch of a harrow, nuther, you come to get it hitched on good.”

“Well, it's awful, I think,” says the hare-lip. “I'll go to Uncle Harvey and–“

“Oh, yes,” I says, “I WOULD. Of COURSE I would. I wouldn't lose no time.”

Very good, but because my knowledge of WWI and what led up to it is lacking, the first 1/3 of the book was difficult for me to follow. This isn't a traditional biography that sticks to the life of one person, instead there are several main characters and a lot of, for me, unfamiliar geography. Once I finally settled in though, it was great.