What we've read

The Secret Agent

Fascinating book by Conrad, his use of languague is tricky, intricate, vague, wordy, redundant..

I found this book to be a treatsy on what must have been interesting characteristics of people at the time. However, I do not think that Conrad does a great job at bringing his characters to life. They all come accross as, more than just not redeemable, rather somewhat vapid descriptions of the internal workings of several normal if not somewhat radical individuals

"Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in business for himself. He might have been anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way. But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent medicines. But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the depths. For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic. I shouldn't be surprised. What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc's expression was by no means diabolic."

The Maltese Falcon

Mattson's second choice placed us squarely into a 1920's detective-thug-mystery novel, and the signature book of the "hard-boiled" detective genre. In this book we follow Sam Spade through a sequence of interactions, where he incessently smokes cigarettes, dealing with intolerable criminals, swoony women, mounds of booze, and incompetent cops, from this he slyly calculates his share, while pocketing any money he can get and making sure he is playing the players. Spade is both super-humanly cool, yet vulnerable and believable. I thought the character development by Hammett was excellent, considering my view that this was mostly just another "pulp" fiction book, rather than a true work of literature.

An Example of Hammett's character development:

The main character, Sam Spade, appears only in this novel and in three lesser known short stories, yet is widely cited as the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective genre

The Sound and the Fury

What is going on here? This book begins with a cacophony of events and speaches and snapshots and left me with the impression that I was coming off another ether binge. The book ratched up the coherence and the depths of the inner turmoil in the following chapters as it delved into the family disfunctionality and the characters flaws creating intrigue and interest in the details. The big picture slowly comes into focus and tightens its scope and descritpion as the story of a once pround Southern family from a multitude of directions.

Perhaps this an example of a master author at the peek of his powers telling a masterpiece of a story. Or maybe just intellectual masterbation. I liked it.

Stumbling on Happiness

Our first non-fiction book was met with a variety of reviews and opinions. The premise of this book is that people are not accurate at predicting how a particular life decision or change will impact their lives. The book argues that people systematically make several psychological mistakes when evaluating events in their lives. The result of these errors is a consistent struggle to make good decisions regarding what will make one happy in many situations.

A primary criticism of this thesis is that only one way of ascertaining happiness is considered to be valid. The author considers how people evaluate their own happiness. A person can look backwards in their life, look forward and imaging their futures, and can consider their happiness in the moment when experiencing an event. Though it is conseded that any measure of happiness is difficult and flawed, it is assumed that the best and only valid measurement of happiness is the one made while experienceing an event. The majority of the book rests precariuosly on this weakly argued assumption. In spite of being a house of cards, the book is presented in an entertaining way, and presents many novel pscyhological experiments to establish the flow of ideas, and was considered wonderful and light read by some members. Cough.