#32 for 2011:

Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert. The quality, the caliber, keeps going strong.  Sure, it’s weird as hell, but revealing, and compelling, and it stays with you.

“An army,” she said, “is composed of disposable, completely replaceable parts.  That is the lesson of the Levenbrech.”
“Replaceable parts,” he said.  “including the supreme command?”
“Without the supreme command there is seldom a reason for an army…”  (p. 47)

“The universe as we see it is never quite the exact physical universe,” she said.  (p. 75)

“A large populace held in check by a small but powerful force is quite a common situation in our universe.  And we know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers-
“One:  When they find a leader.  This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders.
“Two:  When the populace recognizes its chains.  Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
“Three:  When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage.  They must never even believe that escape is possible!”  (p. 108)

This is the age of the shrug.  He knows I’ve heard all the stories about him and he doesn’t care.  Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.  (p. 149)

“All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof!  All things are known because we want to believe in them.”  (p. 150)

The universe neither threatens nor promises…  [T]he realities of the universe… must be faced regardless of how you feel about them.  You cannot fend off such realities with words.  They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by “life and death”.  (p. 179)

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words.  From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same.  A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe.  In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding- symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity.  (p. 201)

He gave the impression of being self-contained, an organized and firmly integrated whole.  (p. 217)

I think this just spelled out my greatest wish…

The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.  It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look.  There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual.  You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself, “Now what is this thing doing?”  (p. 221)

“If you would possess your humanity, let go of the universe!”  (p. 223)

“Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk?  Is your religion real when you fatten upon it?  Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name?  When comes your downward degeneration from the original revelation?”  (p. 225)

“Abandon certainty!  That’s life’s deepest command.  That’s what life’s all about.”  (p. 226)

“To exist is to stand out, away from the background,” The Preacher said, “You aren’t thinking or really existing unless you’re willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.”  (p. 227)

Daly would say, away from the Foreground; and I bet that The Preacher would reply, yes, away from the foreground and the background both- to be in your own space, in a life of your own creation, your own world, never again to be repeated in all of eternity and only existing now if you make it so!

“The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.  Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.  We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.”  (p. 305)

The patterns could guide and they could trap.  One had to remember that patterns change.  (p. 307)

[T]here exist no intransigent opposites except in the beliefs of men….  You know then that the universe is a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it.  (p. 377)

“It is my strength as a human  that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.”  (p. 384)

#31 for 2011:

Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert.

Profound and strange enough to allow one to see reality reflected in it.  Not so strange that one can’t recognize the reality, either.

One could wish Herbert hadn’t chosen “Jihad”, but one recognizes it as merely a vehicle which fit the setting and purpose, not a commentary on that specific religion.

This sequel is as good as Dune.

“I was enjoying the silence,” Scytale said.  “Our hostilities are better left unvoiced.”  (p. 14)

“It requires only the slightest shift in emphasis, a glissade of the emotions, to transform envy into enmity,” Scytale said.  (p. 27)

He felt that some element of himself lay immersed in frosty hoar-darkness without end.  His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind.  He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad.  He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that this universe still eluded him.  (p. 81, emphasis mine)

And so it is with all human power.

Here lies a toppled god-
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.  (p. 141)

“You can’t stop a mental epidemic.  It leaps from person to person across parsecs.  It’s overwhelmingly contagious.  It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues.  Who can stop such a thing?  Muad’dib hasn’t the antidote.  The thing has roots in chaos.  Can orders reach there?”  (p. 187)

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.  (p. 209)

#30 for 2011:

Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler

In short, the main character is a modern black woman (California, 1976) who has just moved into a new apartment with her new husband Kevin when she is inexplicably transported to the antebellum South (Maryland, 1815).  There she rescues a drowning boy and finds a strange connection with him, returning to her own time just in time to save her life.  For Kevin, only seconds have passed, but she reappears wet and muddy and on the other side of the room.  In the course of what is a month in California, she is called repeatedly back to the past to safeguard the boy who is growing by leaps and bounds into the shoes of his plantation-owning, slave-holding father.  Forced to live for longer stretches in the complex and brutal realities of that former time, it becomes less certain that she will eventually escape back at all, or that either she or her husband can live with how they both have changed.

“It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now.”—Sam Frank, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

Yes, quite.  Only they forgot gender relations as well.  Honestly, in the introduction, this book is compared to Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  What more need be said?  It needs to be read.

My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give- and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them.  (p. 109)

I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time.  Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality.  The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse… Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands.  That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.  (p. 191)

#29 for 2011:

The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. 

Exactly what I thought it would be- a light day’s read.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.  (p. 9)

That’s because “girl” is a sociocultural role, a construction, as much as anything else.

“Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”  (p. 167)

&

“[W]hen you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life.  Not just to love- but to persist in love.”  (p. 289)

#28 for 2011:

Rats, Lice, and History by Hans Zinsser.  My edition was actually printed 1967 by Bantam Science and Mathematics.

This was surprisingly entertaining and insightful.  Probably deserves more like 4.5 stars if I had the patience for some of the more intricate explanations, or 5 stars if I had actually sat down with a mind for the biography of typhus and not just a good read. 

quotes later

#27 for 2011:

Let Your Body Win -Stress Management Plain & Simple, by Jacquelyn Ferguson.

If you are not already familiar with the things in this book, you have probably been living in a cave (probably a cave without a saber tooth tiger in it).  Basically an exposition on the fabled Fight/Flight Response role in chronic stress today and an admonition to take better care of yourself.

As if I don’t do that shit already people

Nothing new here at all

#26 for 2011:

I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced; by Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui. 

Nujood was the first child bride in Yemen to win a divorce- and that was in 2008!  The tradition of marrying small children to grown men (who proceed to abuse them physically and sexually) is not a geographically or culturally isolated phenomenon, and it is not changing without a fight.

May there be enough fight inside us all.

No, I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t understand.  Not only was he hurting me, but my family, my own family, was defending him.  All that for a question of- what was it?  Honor.  But this word everyone kept using, exactly what did it mean?  I was dumbfounded.  (p. 97)

Honor?  How can there be talk of honor here?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.  /Inigo Montoya

The defiant child bride is not the one who has broken the code of honor.  The rapists and pedophiles, the abusers and abandoners- they themselves have brought the dishonor upon their families.  The child only brings this dishonor to light.

Always the victims are blamed.

[A] girl of nine married to a Saudi man died three days after her wedding.  Instead of demanding an investigation of this scandalous situation, her parents hastened to apologize to the husband, as if trying to make amends for defective merchandise, and even offered him, in exchange, the dead child’s seven-year-old sister.  

This is the world we live in…  Dune really isn’t so far-fetched at all…

#25 for 2011:

Dune, by Frank Herbert

“I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.” (p. 8)

Presently, she said, “I’ll pay for my own mistake.”
“And your son will pay with you.”
“I’ll shield him as well as I’m able.”
“Shield!”  the old woman snapped.  “You well know the weakness there!  Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he’ll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.” 

The old woman’s voice softened.  “Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings.  But each of us must make her own path.”

In a low voice, she said, “I’ve been so lonely.”
“It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said.  “Humans are almost always lonely.”

(How many truths can you cover on one page?  This is all from page 24.)

“I think she got mad.  She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience.  So I quoted the first law of Mentat at her:  ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it.  Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’  That seemed to satisfy her.”  (pp 31-32)

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.  Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain.  From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”  (Bene Gesserit proverb, p. 69)

Seeing all the chattering faces, Paul was suddenly repelled by them.  They were cheap masks locked on festering thoughts- voices gabbling to drown out the loud silence in every breast.  (p. 129)

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen”-  which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.  (p. 288)

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.  (p. 321, and taken with the admonition the Reverend Mother gave to Jessica about shielding on page 24, it is especially true.)

She was the mote, yet not the mote.  (p. 354)

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense.  But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.  (p. 373)

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion.  This power struggle permeates the training, educating, and disciplining of the orthodox community.  Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably face that ultimate internal question:  to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.  (p. 401)

“Hadn’t we best be getting to a place of safety?”
“There is no such place,” Paul said.  (p. 449)

“Use the first moments in study.  You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success.  Take your time and be sure.”  (p. 484)

The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.  (p. 493)

“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’  It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”  (p. 506)

Oh, and this is interesting:  an online Azhar book.

#24b for 2011:

It Came From Ohio:  My Life  As A Writer, by R. L. Stine/ as told to Joe Arthur.

#24 for 2011:

The Murder of Tutankhamen, by Bob Brier

The above is the cover on my edition.  The newer cover is pretty awesome in comparison!