Books, glorious books

With each passing set of 24 hours, 2012 is teetering to a halt, and the doors to 2013
are gradually creaking open. I created a goodreads account this year, and
participated in the 2012 reading challenge - I've read 40 books this year and have
decided to evaluate my favourites, as a commemoration to the power of literature.
So, here are the top 6 new books I've read this year...

1) The Crossing
Hello McCarthy! Truthfully, the entire Border Trilogy was wonderful, but The Crossing was my favourite because it was the longest (haha) and therefore contained the largest number of beautiful and inspirational passages. Click here to read the quotes I loved from it.

2) On the Road
I debated about this one, but it seems unfair to leave out Kerouac's masterpiece when it was the one book that I zipped through almost non-stop and thoroughly enjoyed this year. All the characters are mad, but madly in love with life, and the pulse of this book was so rigorously steady in its own crazy way that I finished it with fond memories. Plus, the movie seems fantastic. Click this to see my review of the book. 

3) Emma
My favourite Austen novel to date! At times, Emma reminded me of myself, and at other times, someone I'd love to sit down and seriously discuss life priorities and estimation issues with. I remember why I read Emma - I was sick of the depressing endings of books I was reading beforehand and made sure that Emma ended WELL, and also frankly missed Austen's eloquent (and romantic) writing style and female-themed novels. Boom, reviews here.

4) To Kill a Mockingbird
I remember reading the first few pages of this book 2 years back and finding it whoppingly difficult, but studied it this year for English class and seriously ended up LOVING it. The tone is so friendly, the parallels drawn genius, and theme deadly serious that this is a book that will impact any human that touches it. Here's my review.

5) Villette
My favourite Brontë novel, and more proof that Charlotte is the best Brontë (I have to stop saying this). The intricacy of her writing is sublime, and although the book was about a depressed (BUT INDEPENDENCE-STRIVING) woman, I enjoyed it immensely. The plot of the book was ingeniously planned, as well as the character development. The language was just stunning (allow me to reiterate). The book was a present from one of my best friends, and I love her for it (as well as other things)! Review here.

6) The Road
Last but definitely not least, THE ROAD was the book that opened the doors to the McCarthy-craze I've been going through for months now. I wept at the end of The Road (a book that makes you cry is a good book). The language, as I've rambled about enough, was so lovely. McCarthy's fluid style, the pulse of the words, the sound and rhythm of each syllable... Reading this book was hands-down one of the best decisions I made all year. Reviews here.

2012 was a fantastic and rewarding reading book for me. Hopefully 2013 will be even better!!

What difference does it make after all?--anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.

 Second batch.
 

I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can't go on all the time-- all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.

Originally says 'girl' instead of 'guy'.

Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

I agree with this quote! Used to think about it to myself a lot (although I hate to admit it).

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

This quote is amazing, probably my second or third favourite. Love, love, love it. Perfect way to kick off a chapter.

I could hear and indescribable seething roar which wasn't which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realised that I had died and reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly eas, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realised it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein, like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.

This was when Paradise was high. Anyway, I still love this. Talks about the mind and life and death. Love the bit about falling asleep and waking up, I think about it that way too.

We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

Isn't this lovely? How could I leave it. So short but memorable and moving.

Just finished reading Everything is Illuminated - expect quotes up for that soon, too!!
On the Road is one of the best books I've read this year. Period. Here's to all the crazy people who "never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing

Quotes from On the Road (part 1).

So... let me just start off by saying all the characters in this book are very different from me - they drive at whirlwind maniacal speeds, hit a jam-packed club at every feasible opportunity, and are always looking for more weed to smoke.
Nevertheless, this is a beautiful book, with an incredible character - Dean Moriarty (aka Neal Cassady) at its core. The boys' drive to get high is definitely a huge theme at the brink of the book's plot (and one of the most defining features that allowed this book to be dubbed the piece that 'defined the 50s'), but I read it from a different perspective. These characters are madly in love with life and this is why I connected with this book so deeply.
The Speaker is Sal Paradise (aka Jack Kerouac). Now would be a good time, after all the 'akas' to explain that On the Road was originally written within the span of three weeks- or should I say typed -  on a 120 foot manuscript that is now called the  'original scroll.' Some rich football team owner bought it for 2.43 million American dollars. Anyway, the version I read was not the original scroll but the version edited for publication (although you can certainly get your hands on the published original scroll) and all the names are switched around, hence the aka's.
One of the characters in the book - Carlo Marx - is ACTUALLY Allen Ginsberg and the more you think about it as you read the more brilliant everything gets. And Old Bull Lee is really William S. Burroughs. So I suppose all the writers who defined the Beat Generation pretty much hung about together. Sort of.
Anyway, Dean completes this story and Paradise does a swell job of telling it in the first place. Cannot wait to watch the movie. Garret Hedlund makes a perfect Dean.
Without further ado, here are the first batch of quotes:

Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say anything, just look, and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there. Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico and the sleeping gringo and all that crap) - and crap about greasers and so on - and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don’t put down any bull. I’m so amazed by this. Schooled in the raw road night, Dean was come into the world to see it. He bent over the wheel and looked both ways and rolled along slowly. [...] The sun rose pure on pure and ancient activities of human life."

A new world.

You had a vision, boy, a vision. Only damn fools pay no attention to visions. How do you know your father, who was an old horseplayer, just didn’t momentarily
communicate to you that Big Pop was going to win the race? The name brought the feeling up in you, he took advantage of the name to communicate. That’s what I was thinking about when you mentioned it. [...] In the car as we drove back to his old house he said, "Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world.

Love this quote... Old Bull Lee says it. Interesting about the mutation in the brain. If you read the book Old Bull Lee is the wise owl.

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

This quote is one of my favourites. Hasn't anyone ever felt like this? When you sit still and stare and all of a sudden you're sure your life and the world is surely all in your mind and you feel all animal-like and strange and sit just existing.

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

And, this is is just some really good writing I could not let slip. Beautiful descriptions ('pressed grapes,' 'color of love')

On the Road

So far, On the Road exceeds expectations. Favourite quote from it is shown below.