Short Stories: Dostoyevsky

The book I would like to mention is one that's downloadable from Gutenberg.org by clicking on the following link:

Short Stories by Fiodor Dostoievski

I have read only half the stories so far, but they are written in that unique Dostoyevsky style that some will enjoy and others will probably find maddening. If nothing else, they are intriguing and unpredictable. I think he writes beautifully for short stories, but that's hardly surprising. After all, this is Dostoyevsky.

Some are quite long for "short" stories, but they vary considerably in length. "The Heavenly Christmas Tree", the shortest one, is to me the Russian version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl". Which came first? The era is the same. Who cares?

But I don't want to focus on that. The longer the story, the better. What a film scriptwriter he would have made in our day!

It's free, and downloadable in a variety of formats to suit anyone, or could be read online, but I must admit it's more fun to read on a Kindle Reader or in a Kindle or Calibre program for your Mac or PC. 

Instructions on how to do that, if required, are on my Gutenberg blogsite, together with the latest books available for September 2012.

CONTENTS                                         PAGE 

AN HONEST THIEF                                    1 

A NOVEL IN NINE LETTERS                           21 

AN UNPLEASANT PREDICAMENT                         36 

ANOTHER MAN'S WIFE                               101 

THE HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS TREE                      151 

THE PEASANT MAREY                                156 

THE CROCODILE                                    163 

BOBOK                                            205 

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN                    225

Denis Wright

@deniswright on Twitter

A Modest Proposal for Book Club

Live book clubs have several vital advantages over online ones.

• They have a set time and place, which 'makes' people do their homework
• They are very interactive on a group basis
• They are social occasions amongst a special group, usually friends

It is obvious why online ones often fail – the environment is just the opposite from the above. Priorities change. The book doesn’t get finished or if it does, writing a review gets pushed down the list. 

Obviously, it's easier to sit round and discuss it over coffee and forbidden treats.

These failings of online book clubs are recipes for collapse, and that’s what seems to happen. It's understandable. Those who have been dutiful online club members get disappointed. The others get embarrassed about their failure to complete their mission. It all goes silent.

Death of the club is usually swift, even though the corpse remains.

Anne Powles [@Qyntara] offered a possible kiss of life by providing an example of the model for the only online alternative, namely:

Conversion of the approach to a 'random' book review/comment site – short, long, whatever.

There are no pressures, no deadlines, no real 'club' in the sense that you need to join. You don't.

But how to post?

Here's an option.

Submit any reviews to readerbook7@gmail.com

 These will be posted as a blog piece and can be mentioned and retweeted on Twitter.

Presently there is only one person who can do that, but several people can [and should] have the email address and blogger password, can check for any new reviews, and can post on behalf of those who write an email.

If that doesn’t work, then it's been an interesting but failed experiment. So what? No harm in trying....

Any comments?

@deniswright

The Moral Molecule

I have just finished reading an exciting book by Paul Zak called "The Moral Molecule". It is an exciting romp through the hormones which influence our moods, trust, happiness. While the author takes us through many of his interesting experiments it is not presented as an account in scientific terms (though he does provide sample numbers). It is a personal account, very amusing at times, roller coasting through vampires, New Guinea natives, Greek philosophers and religion, how to beat some of the problems of experimenting with humans. He comes over as a fascinating man. I recommend this book. It is available in hard copy or on Kindle. It is a very easy read despite its title. 

Anne Powles
@Qyntara

Mister Pip - comment by @deniswright

Lloyd Jones Mister Pip The Text Publishing Company 2006

I'm coming to the conclusion in my old age that you can never say you’ve read a book if you’ve read it just once. At least, I can't say that about me. When I decided to write down a few thoughts about this book, it had been a couple of months since I'd read it for the first time, so I had to go back to it to remind myself of simple things; names of the characters etc.

  I was immediately absorbed back into the book again, and though I'd enjoyed it (if that's the right word for something that tells you some things you don't want to know) first time around, it wasn't till the second time that I really let the rich earthiness of the tropics flow over me once again as it did in my own childhood in Queensland.

  Maybe that's why I enjoyed the early part of the book more than the last few chapters, though saying this does too little credit to the author. He writes beautifully and consistently throughout.

  The characters are drawn very well, from Matilda, the centre of the tale, giving us a first-person account of the world as it expanded and exploded around her, to the enigmatic people in her life. Her mother, a complex character of love, bitterness and betrayal, represents the best and worst of adopted western faith overlying the veneer of primal religion that really nurtures and gives meaning to the lives of the villagers. Mr Watts, (Pop Eye) - or as he becomes, Mister Pip - opens the eyes of the children to a strange new world – that of Pip in Great Expectations. His gentle way of teaching becomes an endearing quality as he looks after his wife, Grace.

  The stories of the older villagers who are invited to the school to talk to the children in an adult show-and-tell are wonderful. There is nothing you can possibly anticipate in what they are about to say, and they do so in their own special way.

  The odd thing about this book is that it made me realise for the first time ever that I had a lot in common with the Pip of Great Expectations, which I'd read a hundred times as a child. Fortunately in my personal story there were no Miss Havershams, but there were many of the warmer characters in Pip's life who I could identify. Maybe it was Matilda who jolted me into this recognition of myself; it certainly never occurred to me before. But that's my tale and doesn't belong here.

  Over the charm of the story hangs the presence of the copper mine and the terrible things it did to the lives of these people. I guess we rarely if ever think about what our insatiable need for this metal does to the people who stand in the path of the mining companies who see them as a nuisance at best and a lethal threat when the chips are down. The Company can get the Government to call in troops to terrorise and butcher them; the dreaded 'redskins'  – and the villagers are powerless to stop them. Resistance only makes things worse. And we benefit from this need for copper, and therein lies our guilt, for we are either ignorant of it or say it's out of our hands.

  That is something that remains with me. Matilda pays our price; others like Mister Pip pay a worse one, even if ultimately she gets from her own labour some of the benefits as well.

  And of course, she unearths the great mystery hidden until the end - the truth about Mister Pip and his wife, Grace.

  Yes, definitely a thumbs up from me.

Denis Wright
@deniswright
deniswright.blogspot.com

Foal's Bread @roseofhurlo

I didn't exactly grow up on a farm, and certainly not with horses (always been a bit scared of them to be honest, even in the compulsory tweeny horsey period), nor in the 1930s and 1940s. But my grandparents were dairy farmers, and we spent plenty of our early years on the farm doing farm stuff, town and city kids of school teacher parents that we were. And my Nana had a stroke while she was hosing out the cow shed after milking, at 72, and never recovered. A life of hard work on the farm. My Grandad stuck on for a few more years, grubbing thistles, milking, bailing and things, until another stroke left him writing notes on a pad to communicate with us. A farming life is and always has been tough. This is part of what came back and resonated with me reading Foal's Bread, a marvellous, inspired and tragic novel about our farming heritage.

The horses and the jumping are everything in the book, beautifully portrayed but I kept thinking about three things. The brutal, relentless life on the land. The tough life for girls growing up in these times, with tragic consequences lasting a lifetime and beyond. And the terrible blows that life can deal people, but leave them, somehow, grand and glorious. I don't want to give too much away but (as per my previous tweet) the opening chapter is stark, stunning and devastating and it's sadness runs all the way through the book, not in a sentimental way, but in a terrible tough way. The relationship between Roley and Noah is glorious and unbearable -such pain. And the sadness of the mother, so tough, so beaten down by the relentless blows of life, so awful but glorious in the way she hits out in response, and so ultimately terribly triumphant stays with me. But also, so do the cats, the wonderful mostly warm aunties and the tough judgmental Nin.

Truly I think Gillian Mears has written a great Australian novel that captures a time and a piece of history that is gone, but a part of our culture that is still there, with all its awful and its wonderful bits. And, as this is my first attempt at #tbkclub, at blogging and at any sort of book group, please forgive the over-use of adjectives.

@roseofhurlo (and @roseofadjectives as it turns out)

Are you a parallel or serial reader?

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For most of my life, I was a 'serial' reader. That is to say, I read a book from start to finish (or ditched it, if it didn't grab me) and began another. This makes a good deal of sense when you read printed books. It's tidier for a start.

   When I acquired a Kindle eBook reader, everything changed. I got one because I was unable to read print books any more except with great difficulty, but that is another story.

   On the Kindle, I became a 'parallel' reader. At the moment, there are over a hundred books on the tiny device, with capacity for three times that many, at least. I've stopped putting more on because the ones on there will probably see me out. But my library of current books, all hundred+ of them, sits on my pillow. Some I haven't opened yet.

   This way of reading changes everything – in my case to something more natural to me. If I wake and want to read for ten minutes, I go down the list, and make my selection. Up it comes on the screen; gloriously, at the exact point where I left off when I stopped on the last occasion. If I have an hour (all too rare!) I might select a weightier tome, figuratively speaking. Again, it is ready for me, at the spot where I stopped before.

   I'm blessed with the capacity to remember immediately everything that's gone before in what I've read, even after days – for a limited time at least. So there's no lack of continuity.

   Some (few) books on my Kindle are bought; one in fact, Mister Pip, was bought as a surprise gift for me with ten bucks and true generosity of spirit by the kindly @ameeee. Most classics or other works I'm curious about are downloaded free from sites like Gutenberg.org

   So, you must understand, I am very far from the cutting edge of what's the newest book to come out – too far in some ways, but there are reasons for that, irrelevant here. I'm practically an antiquarian of the Kindle Reader, which I'm sure will be a total bore to many.

   So what are the books I've either completed recently or am still reading – some for the second or nth time?

Completed

Mister Pip
The Turn of the Screw
Gutenberg the Geek
The Hagakure
The Mysterious Stranger

Read in print form, up to 30 years ago and re-reading

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Reminiscences of Queensland
The Tale of Genji
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
The Art of War [two versions, here's one]
Adam Bede

Reading for the first time

The McCarroll version of the Tao te Ching
Romola
My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
From the Five Rivers
Traditions, Superstitions and Folk-lore by Charles Hardwick

Perennials

The Tao te Ching [Gia-fu Feng/Jane English]

There's one more I'm re-reading and absolutely luxuriating in. This is one I'd recommend as a Book Club book that I'm sure most people would love if they've not read it already. But I'm not saying yet....

Denis Wright

 

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The Architecture of Happiness

Posted on behalf of Anne Powles [@Qyntara]

I recently read de Botton's book Religion for the Atheist and was discussing with my son, @jonpowles, the problem with it as I saw it. That problem was essentially that the author, has, I think, some extremely good ideas, but despite his rather nice style, he carries them far beyond what I view as convincing and this rather detracts from the force of his initial thesis. He also does not recognise that a lot of us non-combatant Atheists already do much of what he advises. (I am, however, considering holding an agape!!) Jon said that The Architecture of Happiness he considered was the best he has written, particularly from this respect. He gifted me an iPad copy.

I think that book review you pointed out reflected much of what I think so far about The Architecture of Happiness.  He comes up with great ideas but over-talks and over-thinks them. I am therefore finding I can enjoy it more in short reads, which is not my normal way of reading.  Meanwhile I have enjoyed an unusual Who-dun-it by James Patterson featuring narcissistic personality disorder.

@mazpow I know you are busy but some of those tomes you are currently reading about early childhood language development might indeed be relevant to adult book club development!!

Anne Powles [@Qyntara]