Sunday, November 27, 2016

The Member of the Wedding (Carson McCullers)

Carson McCullers
The Member of the Wedding

Whimsical story of a young girl about to go through puberty with a hard scary edge. Reminiscent of Harper Lee's descriptive style. And has a wild young girl. It's a sort of coming of age story darkly sinister in parts with strands of sexuality and naivity. Our heroine is unconnected to those around including close family but once she decides to go out into the world becomes connected to everyone. Philisophical in parts. The ending seems as if she's found herself and is happy but can we really see that she is or still playing fantasy games.



Future Perfect (Steven Johnson)

Steven Johnson
Future Perfect



An interesting book but ultimately his arguments are flawed by inaccuracies and handpicked examples that only really serve to undermine his thesis. For example was Kickstarter really the first to allow small companies to set themselves up with little capital? What about the indie record model as only one example. And books. There is very little social analysis of arguments and not sure why the web is changing the world for the better. His comparison to political left or right / central control or libertarian is nonsense and arbitrary, giving a level of world view analysis that it doesn't warrant by extrapolating theories from an insubstantial starting point. The journalism chapter has no mention of lies that can be peddled on the internet with very little analysis or critique now. He muddles free markets with democracy as if one and the same and has an extremely naive view that big corporations or those who benefit from them will roll over and allow a networked market share in the benefits of profit. Bullshit and of course the big corps will fight down the newcomers if they possibly can. The main network he models his theory on, the internet was itself  born top down from the USA military and then academia. Other naive points that to be honest he's not the only one to fall into are shown especially in the chapter on democracy: the American Tea party is not for big corporations - surely that's the inevitable outcome of the unregulated market they espouse. Bottom line is that this is a capitalist apologist plucking examples with little context. School teachers motivated by cash?!

Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)

Henry Fielding
Tom Jones

Don Quite vs Cant Tales mashup. Main story with lots of sub plots and indeed separate stories altogether although adding to the gist of the whole  Saucy stories. Odd extra tales. Lewd men and women. Hero unable to restrain desires. Partly oblivious to reality. Sidekick out for their own gain. Verbose prose why use 10 words where 100 will make the story more amusing. Latin chucked in for good measure. Not that I ever learnt it. No my sorta schooling. Later in one of the chapters intro a book  tells us he can steal from the ancients but not contemporaries  as the poor can steal form squires but not each other. Last book intro goes into how he won't be able to conjour up miracles as ancients could with deity interference. Then he does give us an incredulous ending