Grotesque

By Natsuo Kirino

This murder mystery begins in with a cut throat look at a highly competitive junior high and high school in Japan as a small group of people try to navigate the complicated hierarchy of this microcosm. As they move out of this environment and into adulthood the story explores what it means to be women in Japan, how sexuality plays into social expectations and ultimately about how we construct our sense of self and the role of self delusion in that process. With a changing narrator through some interesting means, the reader is forced to evaluate the story they are hearing through multiple voices and struggle with credibility and whose story to trust. 

As this mystery unfolds the story surfaces issues around beauty, growing older (in particular for women), jealousy, long term self deception and freedom.

"With my monstrous beauty and my monstrous desire, I suppose I'll now become a full-fledged beast. My ghastliness has increased along with my age. I've written it any number of times already, but I do not feel lonely. This is the true figure of the woman who was once a beautiful girl. I daresay my sister must take great delight in my decline. That's why she calls me all the time." Pg 126

"No, what I believe is that there is something implicit in everyone, which forms that person's character and is responsible for everything else. There was something inside Kazue herself that was accountable for the change in her appearance. I am sure of that." Page 181

"And Kazue would never accept the fact that a woman with equal ability would always be more successful if she was beautiful. . . . In contrast to Mitsuru and me - who knew to polish our natural gifts in order to survive - Kazue was overly ignorant of her own self. A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people's evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction." Page 211

"Is this not the intensification of individuation - this heightened sense of awareness of self - a result of the suffocating burden of being trapped within the same social community? It is from the pain this produces that we find changes occurring in our makeup and structure. Without a doubt the experiences that unfold are cruel and bitter. Perhaps it is not possible for us to teach about these bitter experiences. More likely it is impossible for us to articulate the findings we extract from our painful experiments in life." Page 310

"You and I are the same. And Kazue too. We all had our hearts wrested away by an illusion. I wonder if we looked like victims of mind control." Page 343

"Kazue's journals were different. Zhang's deposition may have been predictable, but not Kazue's. The dissolute loneliness she depicted was awful. When I finished reading her words, I felt a change come over me - something I'd never felt before. Before I was even aware of it, I started to weep in sympathy. Me! I couldn't hold back the tears as I thought about how completely alone Kazue had been: her outward appearance so grotesque she was like the Incredible Hulk. The reverberations that echoed through Kazue's empty heart made my own heart tremble, paralyzing me so I couldn't speak." Pg 461

Book 8

Japanese Book Recommendations

I don't usually post anything but book reviews but I wanted this link to refer to for future reading:

http://www.blizzardboy.net/japanese-authors

The Gospel Singer

By Harry Crews

This is Crews first book, a well told story of a man who can sing well, really well. Well enough that people are moved to convert to Jesus by his voice alone. The difficulty is that the singer himself is less than godly and must reconcile this with himself and ultimately with his community who want to make him more than he really is. As Crews says at the beginning of the book, "Men to whom God is dead worship one another."

"Enigma, Georgia, was a dead end. The courthouse had been built square in the middle of highway 229 where it stopped abruptly on the edge of Big Harrikin Swamp like a cut ribbon. From the window of the cell on the north side of the courthouse, Willalee Bookatee Hull could see the whole town. He swayed gently, shifting his weight form one foot the other other. Behind him on a wooden table a plate of peas was congealing in a gauze of pork fat. Two biscuits lay at the side of the plate. There was a slop bucket in one corner of the cell and above it at eye level a sheet of tablet paper on which someone had written in pencil the regulation s of the Lebeau County jail.

Willalee Bookatee, in the breathless heat of the cell, swung before the brilliant square of windowlight like the pendulum of a clock. There was no sound except the steady drone of flies, stuck and sticking on the gummy edge of the plate behind him.' Page 9

"When Willalee Bookatee turned on that Muntz television and the Gospel Singer's voice slipped out into his cabin, it was balm poured into a wound. Nothing mattered. The world dropped down a great big hole. Everything - whether it was a razor cut, or a tar-scalded eye, or a burning case of clap off a Tifton high-yellow whore - everything quit but that voice and it went in his head and down his flesh to where his soul slept. And it could stand whatever it was for another week." Page 11

"'To get back to the point, though, 'Foot said. 'Because our gifts are obvious does not mean that Gerd does not have one, or at least that he doesn't fancy he does. Every Catholic knows that he could have been Pope, had circumstances just worked out right; and every criminal, even the prettiest, knows in his heart that he is really Pretty Boy Floyd or John Dillinger. Every man knows that his gift will set him free if he is just lucky enough. Or unlucky enough, depending on your point of view. '" Page 209

Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

By Matt Gallagher

Spitting some truth about Iraq, Gallagher recounts the stories of him and his men. The day to day mundane, the ironic, sardonic and ugly reality of war. But darn, this guy can write!

"Democratic birth and the quest for financial independence seem to be intrinsically linked - freedom's dirty little not-so-secret. I'm sure Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty would agree. And while the idealist in me - back then, I guess I still thought of myself as one of those - looked upon greed as the ultimate of vices and viewed people who talked about their finances publicly as boors and covetous tools, I couldn't help but sympathize with the locals' fixation. Theirs was a penury only dreams could escape. And for a while, that dream ran through the lean, tall men in body armor from across the sea who arrived in ghost tanks and smiled too much.

They didn't all feel that way though - about us or our money. There were just enough of them out there who wanted us gone or dead, or dead and gone, the battles and skirmishes continued; thus, so did the war.

Reality endured." Pg 19

"It was the day after the great red dust storms ended, a little more than a week after our squadron lost its first soldier to a deep buried IED in the farmlands west of Saba al-Bor. I lay in my bed, staring at the wall from the top bunk, basking in the rarest of days - one in which I could sleep in. I thought about nothing and how awesome it was to think about nothing and how if life went well, nothing wouldn't be so rare anymore. The gears of my mind were just beginning to grind toward muscle movement, mainly a product of memory rather than a conscious decision, when SF Big Country barreled through the door. 

'The IA got Mohammed Shaba!' he said, staying just long enough to drop off his now empty mug of coffee. Just like that, he was gone, I was back in Iraq, and my nothingness had burst like a star cluster, illuminating all kinds of gut wrenching, hidden somethings back into plain sight." Page 47

"With nothing to lose, it was easy for them to be honest with us. The eyes told all.

The stare: history's chronic shame. To the victor goes this eternal barb, the unblinking eye of the masses." Page 59

"The sun was a hammer.

High noon. Mid-July. A patrol that required dismounting. A new contender with an old face ascended to challenge the concept of war for peace. It reigned in flares of tyranny, punishing the masses and the elite alike. What it lacked in staying power, it made up for in promises of daily rebirth, rising from the ashes of night as a big ball of phoenix. 

. . . . The personal tragedy faded away on days like this. With the heat so unrepentant, so unapologetic, no alternative existed. It was, and always had been, and would continue to be, so. Iraq was all we did, all we knew, all we remembered. Patrol, damn it. Patrol." Page 166

"It shot out of the Babylonian dust, shattering the calm harnessed by a sandstone skyline. Surrounded by a haphazard maze of tiny homes and shops lacquered in grime, a sea-green minaret sat on top of the building like a crown. It has overseen easy wars and fragile peaces that leapfrogged for untold life spans, bearing witness to humanity's tragic flaw of eternally repeating itself. The mosque stood as proudly today as on the day it first became a place of worship, many dawns ago. This was just one of those dawns.

The infantry platoon trudged on ahead of and behind me, heads scanning, rifles aching. We were hungry. We were exhausted. We could smell the stench from our own bodies. What we wanted had made that dangerous evolution into what we needed. Despite all of this, the dreamer in me - ignored for many hours and desperate for attention - seized my mind with ironclad resolve, forcing me to stare off to the easy, into the sun and toward the mosque. The soldiers contiued to walk. So did I, although not consciously but simply out of habit and because I didn't know how not to.

Clouds of red puff danced brilliantly with the violet horizon, casing the Shia mosque as aptly as winter could allow. it was so easy to get caught up in the horrors of the moment, I thought, that the most vivid beauties of existence faded into eternal loops of grey. Time to take a deep breath and capture a mental snapshot. It's what a responsible individual does in times like these. 

The now of nowness kicked. It fucking sucked carrying half of my body weight in armor plating, dripping with sweat and anger and impatience, rifle dangling at the low and ready like a forgotten ornament on the backside of a Christmas tree. Why did this country always smell literally like shit? I didn't know. How did I help the counterinsurgency today? God only knew. Those were bitches of the now. They were trivial, fleeting, and banal. And no one cared. Fuck the transient. What really mattered was how this moment survived into something beyond time and beyond me and beyond them and beyond this. Hence the clouds. hence the puff. Hence the horizon.

Hence the holy.

. . . Sometimes I felt like humanity was the stillborn carcass of what we were supposed to be. Other times I wasn't even sure we had made it into the womb.

. . . I pried my eyes away from the east and focused on the street in front of me. My thoughts, though, refused to transition back to the patrol and instead lingered on the dawn and the mosque. With the minaret crown. With the dancing clouds and the grave chants of the Salah. This was all temporary, I reminded myself, even though it felt oh so normal and everlong and permanent. Whether Stryker wheels rolled over the sands of Hussaniyah for months or years or decades more, that hallowed house would watch over many more easy wars and many more fragile peaces, standing proudly throughout. And some other rambling junior officer with dark bags under his eyes, from my country or another, would peer out at the Iraqi sunrise and wonder. 

Like I said. Eternal loops of grey.

My inner reins broke, and I kept walking mentally, joining my physical location a half mile from the mosque. One thought lingered with me, though, all the way through the patrol and back to the JSS: Fuck the transient." Pages 241 - 243

Book 6 

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

By Charles Yu

This unique, beautifully written and imaginative book explores time travel, the human story operating within time, self and self construction through time and memory. 

 

Then it blows the concept of time to bits. 

 

More accurately the story of a man coming to terms with his father. 

 

I closed this book with hope that there is no moment like the present to let go of regret, pain, old festering memories and liberate oneself from the barricade of time and into healing.

  

"I fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me - I'm not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space-time. For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in the same little packet, the most uneventful piece of time I could find. Same exact thing every night, night after night. I know for a fact that nothing bad can happen to me in here." Location 225, Kindle

"The smell of Ed is pretty powerful in here, but I'm okay with that. He's a good dog, sleeps a lot, sometimes licks his paw to comfort himself. Doesn't need food or water. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know that he doesn't exist. Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. Superflous. Gratuitous. He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva. And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a non-existent dog." Location 91, Kindle

"I tell TAMMY it will be alright. She says what will be alright? I say whatever you are crying about. She says that is exactly what she is crying about. That everything is all right. That the world isn't ending. That we'll never tell each other how we really feel because everything is okay. Okay enough to jsut sit around, being okay. Okay enough that we forget that we don't have logn, that it's late, late in this universe, and at some point in the future, it's not going to be okay.

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft." Location 160, Kindle

"This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.

The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.

The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodigetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves. Navigating possibility space is tricky. Like any skill, practice helps, but only to a point. Moving a vehicle through this medium is, when you get down to it, something that none of us is ever going to master. There are too many factors, too many variables. Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, too inconsequential, despite all our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we're up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there's a little bit of splashing on the surface, but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.
I try to tell people all this, but no one listens." Location 225, Kindle

"All that got encoded in my box, too. You like like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn't been working out so great for me. Now never has.

Chronological living is a kind of lie. That's why I don't do it anymore. Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. Especially after you've seen what I've seen.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward." Location 320, Kindle

"from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (manual within the book)

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for

Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.

Manifects itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know." Location 624, Kindle

"Can you liver your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort? You can in this device. My father designed it that way. Don't ask me why. If I knew the answer to that, I would know a whole lot of other things, too. Things like why he left, where  he is, what he's doing, when he's coming back, if he's coming back.

Where has he been all these years? I'm guessing that's where he is now.

I don't miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine; it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to revers it, you will never again have that original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. it will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter." Location 721, Kindle

"I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar." Location 1072

"Even the sexbots here are lonely." Location 1103

"As I'm falling asleep, I can see, out the window, the fracture line of the disintegrated city, where this minor universe was left undone, not quite finished. Maybe it's just something I imagine in the last moment before sleep, but I swear what I see, behind a peeled-back corner of the sky, is another layer underneath us, a second, hidden layer, one that is present at every point, and always has been." Location 1118

"I can blame this stupid defective universe where everyone is always so sad there aren't even any bad guys anymore, but what if there never were any bad guys? Just guys like me. I'm the bad guy. No heroes, either. I'm the hero. A guy who just shot his own future in the stomach." Location 1226

"'This book,' TAMMY says to me, 'is a copy of a copy of a copy, and so on, forever, like that, I could keep going if you'd like.' It is a copy of something that doesn't exist yet. It is a book copied from itself.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years." Location 1350

"I am editing this book even as I write it, writing it as I read it, now I am repeating myself, even as I create it, I know it is flawed and possibly even inconsistent, and yet all I can do is to go forward and see where it takes me, all I can do is read it to see what happens to my father, what happened to him, to us, to see if it is true, to learn what I am apparently thinking right now, to learn what I will think, to see if I can make any sense out of his life. Which is what sons do for their time-traveling biographers, as literary executors, taking the inheritance of the contents of their father's lives, given to them in an unprocessed jumble, out of order and nonsensical. Sons do this for their fathers, they use their time machines and all of the technology inside, and they see if it is possible to put those contents into a story, into a life, into a life story. There is sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don't know where this is going. I don't know how it ends." Location 1356 

"Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire." Location 1452

"My mother spent a lifetime grieving and yet she still loved my father with all her heart: all of it. It was a structure and a vector and a power source that could be directed toward nearly any target even remotely worthy. All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical trasmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of science fiction itslef. " Location 1466

"That's my future self, that's my future self. Listen to you. You sound like an idiot. Who do you think you are? Imagine there's a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. ALl truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don't always have your best interests at heart. That's true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can't trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know wht you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that's me. And I'm telling you: you are the only you. Does that make sense." Location 1644

"Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It's just that most people's machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us." Location 1954

"I am my own most dangerous enemy." Location 2632

"Step out of this box. Popo open the hatch. The forces within the chronohydraulic air lock will equalize. Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last page yet, keep stalling see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodte as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it." Loction 2733 

 Book 5

A Rope and A Prayer: A Kidnapping From Two Sides

By David Rhode and Kristen Mulvihill

While working on a book about Afghanistan, this New York Times reporter was kidnapped by the Taliban. This book details the seven months he is in captivity in tandem with his wife's experience trying to find and free him. 


The story not only chronicles these two individual's experiences, but takes the reader through the broader terrain of Afghanistan and Pakistan's modern history of nearly continuous war. It also navigates one through the perils of having a loved one kidnapped and the strange rules you suddenly have to operate under in order to get that person back.


A compelling read about human survival, fear, loss and in the end the extraordinary story of getting out of captivity and back home.


"Attiqullah gets back in the car and I feel relief for no rational reason. He has kidnapped us, but more and more I desperately view Atiqullah as my protector, the man who will continue to treat us well as other militants call for our heads." Page 91


"One morning, two of our guards leave for bomb-making class and Mansoor leaves for the market. As one guard naps in Sharif's bedroom, Hamid announces he is going to pick up bread for our lunch from a nearby madrassa. He departs and I realize we have a chance to escape." Page 217


"One afternoon, a student who appears to be roughly ten years old arrives from one of the local hard-line religious schools. When I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he says he wants to be a suicide bomber. When I ask him his second choice, he says he wants to be a mujahideen or "freedom fighter." When I asked him his third choice, he says he wants to be a Muslim." Page 275

Book 4

Tweak

By Nic Sheff

An honest, brutal addiction memoir taking the reader through sobriety and relapse as the author seeks freedom from his addiction. He painfully takes you through the turmoil these ups and downs wreak on his family and on himself. Better than many of these memoirs, he is able to really take the reader through the inexplicable joy of sobriety and then the inexplicable joy/devestation of relapse.

Book 3

Broken: My Story of Adiction and Redemption

By William Cope Moyers

An inspirational story of addiction and recovery.

"Crack and alcohol weren't a crutch - they were my feet. For more than a decade they had carried me thorugh my life and now, after seven weeks of separation, i felt like an amputee. How was I going to hobble around in the real world? This damn disease was never going to go away, and I was doomed to fight a lonely battle against it. Lonely. That was my destiny." Pg 185 - 186

"In early recovery there is no greater truth than this: This too shall pass.  .  . I learned that when I was feeling good, difficult days were sure to follow, and when I was feeling bad, something was sure to happen to make me feel better. " Pg. 199

"When my doctor told me I had cancer, he didn't raise his eyebrows or wag his fingers at me. I felt no shame or humiliation. When I told my family and friends that I had cancer, no one ever suggested that I gave myself the illness or that it was in any way my fault, though I suppose people could have pointed a finger at my parents for allowing their blue eyed, blond haired, fair skinned child to swim every summer without sunscreen, go to the beach without wearing a hat and play outside in the hottest and brightest part of the day. . . . I just happened to get it, and when I did, everyone stepped in to help.

During the diagnosis, treatment and recovery stages of my cancer, I was overwhelmed by offers of sympathy and support from family, friends and even strangers. "Get Well" cards and "How ya' doing?" phone calls affirmed that I was surrounded by people who cared about me and were pulling for me to get well.  . . .

With cancer, I never doubted that the medical advice and continuing care I received were the best possible treatments available. From the moment my dermatologists examined the growth in his office to the checkups I continue to get all these years later at the Mayo Clinic, not once did anyone or anything get in the way of my treatment. My health insurance was my ally. . . .

It was a completely different story with my addiction. From the beginning, we all thought the disease was partly if not wholly my fault. . . .

Addiction is a disease so cunning and baffling, they say, that when it tells you that you don't have it, you believe it. Then, when it tells you that you can beat it on your own with no help from the experts, you believe that too. In its ability to take over your mind and destroy your very will to survive, addiction is unlike cancer or any other chronic, progressive disease in the world." Pgs 337 - 342

Book 2

The Historian

By Elizabeth Kostova

This was an extraordinary read. Although it is a thick volume, it went way too fast for me. I just loved this unique take on the Dracula theme. Ms Kostova has the perfect back ground to write a haunting, thrilling engaging tale. I really can't write much more without giving it away but trust me: read this book!

Book 40

The Diamond Age

By Neal Stephenson


Beautiful work of science fiction recommended to me by a colleague at work. I loved the story, it was completely challenging and mind opening. The writing itself was excellent, fun and playful, laugh out loud in many places. Amazing piece of science fiction!


"Hackworth excused himself through a milling group of uncertain Hindus. Their hard shoes were trecherous on the cobblestones, their chins were in the air so that their high white collars would not saw their heads off. " Pg. 47


"On the left were the spirits of generations past who had shown up too early to enjoy the benefits of nanotechnology and (not explicitly shown, but somewhat ghoulishly implied) croaked from obsolete causes such as cancer, scurvy, boiler explosions, derailments, drive-by shootings, pogroms, blitzkriegs, mine shaft collapses, ethnic cleansing, meltdowns, running with scissors, eating Drano, heating a cold house with charcoal briquets, and being gored by oxen." Pg. 48


"The next time Nell saw Harv, he told her that Mark was never coming back, that he was one of the pirates he'd warned her about, and that if anyone else ever tried to do such things to her, she should run away and scream and tell Harv and his friends right away. nell was astonished; she had not understood just how tricky pirates were until this moment." Pg. 69


"From the highest point of the arch, Hackworth could look accross the flat territory of outer Pudong, and into the high-rise district of metropolis. He was struck, as ever, by the sheer clunkiness of old cities, the acreage sacrificed, over the centuries, to various stabs at the problem of Moving Stuff Around. Highways, bridges, railways, and their attendant smoky, glinting yards, power lines, pipelines, port facilities ranging from sampan-and-junk to stevedore-and-cargo-net to containership, airports.  . . . The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds. Hackworth was heading for one of those neighborhoods right now, as fast as he could walk." Pg. 71


"Dr. X's assistant swung the door open and nodded insolently. Hackworth swung his top hat into place and stepped out of the Flea Circus, blinking at the reek of China: smoky souchong, mingled with the sweet earthy smell of pork fat and the brimstony tank of plucked chickens and hot garlic." Pg. 78


"'Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain - there is an ineffable quality to some technology described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sqweet, or a nice hack - signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.'" Pg.114

"Judge Fang stood up to find himself surrounded by a hundred little girls, all facing toward the little jade book, standing on tiptoes, mouths open.


Finally he had been able to do something unambiguously good with his position." Pg 244


Quoted in full from pg 245 from the Great Learning:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the

world, first ordered well their own States.

Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families.

Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons.

Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.

Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.

Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost of their knowledge.

Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.

heir knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.

Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.

Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated.

Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.

Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed.

Their States being rightly governed, the entire world was at peace.

From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must

consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides. (...)

"His left eyes free to wander through the sights of Vancouver, which had not been advisable when he'd come this way on the velocipde. He had not noticed, before, the sheer maddening profusion of the place, each person seemingly an ethnic group of one, each with his or her own costume, dialect, sect and pedigree." Pg. 246


"'It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together, 'Miss Matheson went on. "That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar - do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well-defined borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken.'" Pg 323


"''I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell me, years ago, about being intelligent.' She [Nell] said.


The Constable brightened all at once. 'Pleased to hear it.'


'The Vicky's have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raised their children to believe in that coe - but their children believe it for entirely different reasons.'


'They believe it,' the Constable said, 'because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.'


'Yes. Some of them never challenge it - they grow up to be small minded people, who can tell you what they believe but now why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel - as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw.'


'Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Consable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?'


'Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradition and ambiguity.'


'Ah! Excellent!' the Constable exclaimed. As puncutation, he slapped the ground with his free hand, sending up a shower of sparks and transmitting a popwerful shock through the ground to Nell's feet."  Pg. 356

Good luck to each of you in 2011 navigating "contradiction and ambiguity!"
Book 1