Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift: Chapter 10

No man could more verify the truth of these two maxims, “That nature is very easily satisfied;” and, “That necessity is the mother of invention.”  I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy.  I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing-masters. [His list of detestable people]

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift: Chapter 12

...a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon.  Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.  Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people! [on colonisation]

East of Eden by John Steinbeck - Chapter 24

This is one of those quotes I keep thinking of but I forget the phrasing, so it's worth putting it down on this blog to remind myself:

Lee said, "Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair."

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift: Chapter 6

"They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again; in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet.  The learned among them confess the absurdity of this doctrine; but the practice still continues, in compliance to the vulgar." [makes little sense, as they have nothing to put there feet on, but that's how traditions are]

"Their notions relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely from ours.  For, since the conjunction of male and female is founded upon the great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the Lilliputians will needs have it, that men and women are joined together, like other animals, by the motives of concupiscence; and that their tenderness towards their young proceeds from the like natural principle: for which reason they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world; which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts, in their love encounters, were otherwise employed.  Upon these, and the like reasonings, their opinion is, that parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children;" [Something to ponder on]

"Having a head mechanically turned, and being likewise forced by necessity, I had made for myself a table and chair convenient enough, out of the largest trees in the royal park." ['A head xally turned' - such an good expression!]

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift: Chapter 4

"During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran).  This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’" [Al-Qur'an?]

Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi: Discovering Justice

"In the Iranian justice system, a judge is not required to first practice law, and I sent out in my studies intent on judgeship" [p15, IMO a person should never be able to become a judge without having first practised law]

"...it was fashionable to affect intellectual airs, and to skillfully [sic] dissect the shah's flaws in conversation, but to be truthful about it, we were not very bothered about such questions. " [p17, showing her lack of interest in politics or deep knowledge thereof. Just noticed that shah is spelt with a small s throughout the book]

"We socialized, in mixed groups of men and women, along such wholesome lines. True, it was the era of the miniskirt, and around the university - indeed, all around the city - stylish young women bared their legs in homage to Twiggy, the fashion icon of the moment. The students at Tehran University came from middle- or working-class backgrounds and didn't view their social live as a realm for experimentation. We didn't wear veils - in fact, the three veiled women in our university class stood out - but neither did we date, in the Western sense of the word. We always gathered for coffees or weekend trips in mixed groups, and although men and women studied together in the library, in class women still occupied the front rows, and men the back." [p19, liberal society and a lack of Islam - only 3 veiled women!]

"To conservative clerics, the university was a den of corruption, a polluted place where men and women sinned under the pretext of coed learning... the perfect excuse to invoke against the possibility of a [woman getting] a university education." [p20, so why are universities still mixed now in Iran Shirin and with more women than men in higher education? Such a spiteful and accusatory attitude]

"In 1964, the year before I had started law school, the shah had expelled a little-known, scowling cleric, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, to Najaf, Iraq, because of his fiery sermons that cleverly attacked the government. But with the ayatollah in absentia, no ideology or leader had yet emerged for anti-shah sentiment to coalesce around... To be anti-shah, in those days, did not mean you were pro-Ayatollah Khomeini." [p20]

"In March 1970, at the age of twenty-three, I became a judge." [p21]

"Though they squaked at the very notion of the SAVAK [secret police], people still trusted the legal system and sincerely believed that the laws protected their rights." [p22]

"...the shah had spent $300 million on makeshift silk tents with marble bathrooms, and on food and wine for twenty-five thousand people, flown in from Paris." [p23]

"One evening at a friend's party, a young man circled around me half the night, until he persuaded the host to introduce us... it was arranged for us to meet at another party the following week. He declared himself smitten, and said that if I reciprocated his interest, he would immediately ask for my hand in marriage." [p25]

"In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter arrived in Tehran on a New Year's Day visit and called Iran "an island of stability." The evening news broadcast footage of the shah toasting Carter with champage, the first time a largely Muslim nation had observed their leader drinking alcohol on national television. Not long after, a newspaper published an article aggressively attacking Ayatollah Khomeini. The next day, seminarians in the holy city of Qom revolted, amrching on the shrine with chants called for the ayatollah's return. The police shot into the crowd, and a number of men were killed." [p32]

"In early August [1978], a crowded cinema in the southern city of Abadan was burned to the ground. The flames engulfed four hundered people, burning the alive. The shah blamed religious conservatives, and Ayatollah Khomeini angrily accused SAVAK." [p33]

"[After Ayatollah Khomeini had written a letter instructing citizens to rise up and expel bureaucrats, Shirin and others went to the minister of justice's office]... He looked up at us in amazement, and his gaze halted when he saw my face. "You! You of all people, why are you here?" he asked, bewildered and stern. "Don't you know that you're supporting people who will take your job away if they come to power?" "I'd rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney," I retorted boldly, self-righteous to the core. Years later, whenever we ran into each other, he would remind me of that fateful remark." [p34]

"On February 1, 1979, the heavy-lidded, stern face of Ayatollah Khomeini emerged from an Air France jetliner..." [p35, when you're a revolutionary leader you have to look stern and he was a very old man too - what irritating criticisms she makes!]

"Ayatollah Khomeini did not speak that day of an Islamic state, nor did he say what would come next. But he called on God to cut off the hands of Iran's enemies" [p36, what an interesting way to word things... to a nationalist Iranian/eastern audience this is good but to a western audience this is shocking - from the general tone of the sentence you can tell it's meant negatively]

Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi: A Tehran Girlhood

"[Shirin's grandmother witnessed] the banning of the hejab, as part of the modernization campaign launched by Reza Shah, who crowned himself king of Iran in 1926... and he set about emancipating [women] by banning the veil, the symbol of tradition's yoke." [p8... She claims to be a supporter of women's rights but she speaks positively of the Shah's banning the hejab and prohibiting women from the right to choose. She also claims to be a devout Muslim but she calls the mandatory religious dress a "yoke".]

"One day that year I crept up to the attic, to make a quiet appeal to God. Please, please keep my mother alive, I prayed, so I can stay in school. Suddenly , an indescribable feeling overtook me, starting in my stomach and spreading to my fingertips. In that stirring, I felt as though God was answering me. My sadness ended evaporated, and a strange euphoria shot through my heart. Since that moment, my faith in God has been unshakable." [p10, just in case you though she was a staunch secularist or pro atheism]

Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi: Prologue

"It is the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic that the state had acknowledged that it had murdered its critics, and the first time a trial would be convened to hold the perpetrators accountable. The government itself had admitted that a rogue squad within the Ministry of Intelligence was responsible for the killings..." [Prologue, pXIV]

"The material was dark with descriptions of brutal murders, passages where a killer, with seeming relish, told of crying out "Ya Zahra," in dark homage to the Prophet Muhammed's daughter, with each stab." [Ibid.]

"I blinked once but it stared back at me from the page: "The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi." Me... We read together, read of my would-be assassin going to the minister of intelligence, requesting permission to execute my killing. Not during the fasting month of Ramadan, the minister replied, but any-time thereafter. But they don't fast anyway, the mercenary had argued; these people have divorced God." [Prologue, pXV]

I should point out she doesn't mention the dates and times of the above, nor the people involved - which minister - quite a high position, no? and what happened to him or the assassin? And she doesn't mention any of this in the rest of her book. The prologue really drags you in to make you read the rest of the book.

Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi

This is the autobiography of Shirin Ebadi the Nobel peace prize winner of 2003. Upon reading her words and thoughts I grew to dislike her as a person. I do not agree with her values or beliefs and I personally find her to be stuck up snob with virtually no understanding of religion or politics. However, I respect the steps she took to bring people their rights and that is all that is commendable about her. At one point I nearly stopped reading the book because she annoyed me so much. The book is written in a very spiteful and pretentious tone, but whoever translated it did an amazing job as they manage to mask much of the venom. I continued to read on just to find out what other failures of the Iranian government had allowed to let pass.

I will be choosing select quotes from her book, some of which show her good side and others her bad side, and posting them to this blog.

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

When Michael Crichton passed away last year they found in his study a complete manuscript which came to be his first post-humous and penultimate publication: Pirate Latitudes. There's another one that is set to be published in 2012 I'm informed (wikipedia... if you trust it). I bought this book a few weeks after he died and only got round to reading it lately.

The book starts out in Port Royale where a privateering expedition, headed by a captain Charles Hunter, is requested to punish the infamous Spanish pirate captain Cazalla and make a profit from the booty. The captain hatches a plan to raid the pirate stronghold on the Island of Matenceros and he picks the best men (and a gender-confused woman) for the job. Thus begins a great adventure.

Perhaps it was the theme of pirates that didn't really appeal to me and caused me to not like this book as much as his other works, but Crichton does a great job of keeping the reader interested and even though it doesn't match to the best of his other novels, it is still quite good. Sometimes the way he words things, descriptions and specific terms seem a little queer and don't fit in with his regular style - I put that down to not having lived long enough to perfect this novel. And the story isn't as thrilling as I'd like, but this is a really good book - I read it to the end and enjoyed it, and in some sections I physically laughed out loud.

Some of Crichtons previous have stories sent me to sleep and I dropped them mid-sentance and others kept me riveted and I've since re-read them, but this one is in the middle and was good enough to keep me reading it through to the end. Thus I recommend it and give it a 3.5/5 rating.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The most famous book by the famous John Steinbeck is The Grapes of Wrath, but that's the only book of his most people bother to read because he writes particularly large books. I decided to be different and bought another one of his dustbowl classics - East of Eden - to be my first taste of Steinbeck.

While he does a good job of keeping me reading on, sometimes the story line wore thin and I found myself skipping pages. Sometimes it just goes on and on and there is quite a bit of empty dialogue that was begging to be skipped.

I didn't appreciate the story line revolving around the story of Abel and Cain. He does this twice in the book - two generations worth. My main caveat with such a story line is that it has been done to death - so many authors build a story around that of Abel and Cain and it's getting boring and Steinbeck does it twice in the same book.

The most interesting theme of the book is to do with the character of Catherine aka Kate. This was the "Evil Woman" character in the story - a scheming demon of a woman. It was reading about her that made this book. My main criticism of the character was not so much the character (although she dies young for some unexplained reason) but the way Steinbeck lacks the ability to fully explain her psychology - it's lacking in reality to a certain degree and he also has a chapter in the middle of the book where he monologues about Cathy, asking the question: is she really bad or just mad etc... I didn't like the way he attempted to shirk the responsibility of defining a realistic character by abandoning the attempt to justify and explain her behaviour.

Nonetheless, this was a good story and quite useful if you want some choice quotes about the evils of women... though I'm not going to list any quotes here - can't be bothered. I give this book 7/10. It's worth reading if you want to try some Steinbeck.