12:30

In an apple I found a worm, and it made me insanely happy.

Latex, baby!

Epiphany of the Day

It is NOT a good idea to eat while listening about putrefaction.

“A Clockwork Orange”, by Anthony Burgess

After reading 1984 nearly a year ago, I spent good hours sifting through the Google search results for “dystopia novels”. I think that’s how I got to this one, but I couldn’t be sure. Books often spend months at a time on my to-read list, and (un?)luckily I don’t keep track of who recommended what.

With its weird Russian-influenced Nadsat English, A Clockwork Orange became interesting pretty quickly. Here’s a sample paragraph:

“They viddied us just as we viddied them, and there was like a very quit kind of watching each other now. This would be real, this would be proper, this would be the nozh, the oozy, the britva, not just fisties and boots. Billyboy and his droogs stopped what they were doing, which was just getting ready to perform something on a weepy young devotchka they had there, not more than ten, she creeching away but with her platties still on.”

As you can see, even my not-enough-to-speak knowledge of Russian helped make this a lot of fun. It took me nearly half the audio book to figure out that “horrorshow” meant “хорошо” and not “horror show”. (That pun is actually used in the book, too.)

In the end, it turned out to be more of a coming-of-age story than an earnest dystopia. (Perhaps that’s why the ending caught me off-guard.) But if you asked me what other book I could compare it with, I wouldn’t have an answer, and this is enough to make it a great read.

• Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.
• What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
• It’s funny how the colours of the like real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

Quotes from “Charmed Thirds”

by Megan McCafferty.

(sequel to Second Helpings, sequel to Sloppy Firsts)

A note on the style of writing… convoluted, antithetic, yet hilarious. Here’s a typical sentence:

“Thus, the of-the-moment, faux-antifashion fashion statement was to go out looking like you really didn’t care what you looked like when you went out.”