The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck published his novel the The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, shortly after the great depression. It’s set in the time of the dust bowl, where much of the top soil of the great plains, from Texas all the way up to Canada, was blown away after years [...]
I’m currently reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. When talking about how Proust helps to expand the world around us by pointing out the things we tend to miss, he writes the following:
An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that [...]
Over the past few months I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library, so I thought I’d write a post about the nature of ‘the library’ and what it means to me. My somewhat rose tinted view of libraries looks a bit like this, constructed through the libraries I have read about in Discworld books [...]
I’m growing into the idea that a good death is not so much a death where I have chosen the time and place, but where I have some level of control over the event. I used to believe the best way to die was in the setting of my making, my choosing; not necessarily suicide, [...]
I'm feeling a real sensitivity to the aesthetic at the moment, a real harmony with my own thoughts and senses. Sometimes I have these periods, often only moments, when my mind really wakes up and comes into focus. It's as if everything around me takes on a subtly different form for an instant, and then [...]
I've been reading some of Plato's works recently, specifically his allegory of the cave. For those who don't already know what it is about, this is the description from wikipedia, or you can read the original text at the link above.
Allegory of the cave
Imagine prisoners, who have been chained since birth deep inside a cave: not [...]
I recently read Jean-Paul Sartre's book Nausea. It was the greatest book I have read in a long long time, he writes so well and really gets to the heart of the humanity in the story, bringing out the underlying feelings of his character like no-one I have read before. His writing style (in this [...]