oofym's reviews
124 reviews

I read this book over such a long period that during the first couple of chapters I was in essence a "Christian", but by its end I was more of a Neo-Platonist/stoic-deist? Funnily enough Augustine spends a fair chunk of the book criticizing and attacking such beliefs, I don't think I've ever been convinced of an idea by a criticism of it, but there's a first time for everything,

Augustine has some fantastic insights, especially during the first half of the book, and interesting theological questions mixed with reflective life stories turn out to be quite a nice mix. Like many other readers have echoed, the uncanny thing about reading The Confessions is how much it can make you relate or sympathise with a man who's been dead for almost 1700 years.

That's really what I'm after these days, not so much complicated questions of life or existential rabbit holes, but rather a fascinating glimpse into the brain of a human from a time and culture thats long since passed and gone.

There's nothing I can say that someone far smarter than me hasn't already said hundreds of years ago regarding The Bible.

A brief but entertaining historical overview of the Knights Templar. Enjoyed it.

A very lonely and melancholic sci-fi read. Despite its inherent sadness, this book was a breeze to get through. It's nice to have a break from dense literature and just coast along in some well-regarded but simple tales of aliens and atomic destruction and etc. I enjoyed it, it's an analogy for loneliness, it comments on how we destroy the environment, not much else to say.

Virginia Woolf's writing is utterly beautiful, transcendent in nature but mellow in tone.
What struck me most about The Waves is how throughout its length (and especially towards the end) it seems to be pondering the supposed meaningless of life; yet I find that Woolf's intricate prose and subtle descriptive talents (whether it be on a human or an inanimate object), serve as a strong argument against Woolf's nihilism.

To our proto narrator Bernhard; the repetitions, strangeness and small goings-on that occur daily in our lives cause him to develop a strong sense of disgust and despair at the passage of time. Perhaps it's because I'm not as old or as intelligent as Woolf, but I find all the things that Bernhard laments to instead be praiseworthy.

The Waves made me realise two things: One; that prose writing is its own high-art, and with enough talent it can reside in the same sphere as Michelangelo's paintings, or Rachmaninoff's symphonies.
And two; that perhaps I'm more of an optimist than I thought. 

I can see why "The Prince" continues to be held up as an important piece of political literature, but also holds the rather controversial reputation of being a guidebook for psychopathic leaders. I think it's more nuanced than that. 

With books like these we have to realise the Machiavelli was writing for a very specific type of person, during a very specific time period, under very specific circumstances. I'm not a fan of people who take a political book on how to run a principality under monarchal feudalism and then try to apply it to being a manager at Costo. I think what's important to understand is at the time of writing Machiavelli was under the impression that desperate times call for desperate measures, he wanted Italy to have some sense of unification and peace and to attain this he had to look at great leaders of the past and see what they were all doing. Like anyone who looks at history for long enough, Machiavelli quickly realised that kindness doesn't get you far in the realm of Kings and wars, and that most great leaders of old were typically ruthless; although i don't think ruthless is even the best word for it, what Machiavelli truly places importance on is decisiveness. "The prince" Isn't all just "Kill everyone who gets in your way, be a meanie" like some people seem to think it is, instead Machiavelli is trying to figure out a sort of mathematical formula for keeping power and ruling well. One of the big aspects of this that Machiavelli goes over is that your citizens need to love you, you can be a tyrant to your enemies but never to your people, and the easiest way to get your citizens to love you is to simply present yourself well and treat them better than other leaders do. That tidbit alone adds some moral nuance to "The Prince" that a lot of people never seem talk about.

However, what I enjoyed most about this book was the historical elements of it. Niccolo seems to be just as much of a history nerd as he is a political fox. The sections on how leaders have ruled in the past, the failures and achievements they make, and what eventually happens to them i found all very interesting and entertainingly well written. My copy of "The Prince" has a little extra story at the back which Machiavelli wrote to his friends about this Italian duke called Castruccio, and my word is it an eye-opening account. Eye-opening in the way that it makes you realise why Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" in such a controversial manner; in which he mostly disregards morals. He wrote like that because everyone was behaving like that. Genuinely, the amount of crazy political shenanigans going down at the time in Italy is ridiculous.

Overall "The Prince" is a very enlightening window into a time and place that is far behind us, while it also discusses human tendencies and power dynamics that still occasionally plague us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is certainly applauded for a good reason, sometimes going into a widely regarded classic can be a bit of a letdown, perhaps the writing isn't as masterful as you expected, or the themes feel outdated; that's not the case with the Great Gatsby. I was honestly gobsmacked at how intricate and flowery the prose is throughout the novel, I expected Fitzgerald to be in the same realm as Hemmingway (who I find to be a very dull writer) but instead Fitzgerald is about as poetic as you can get without actually just writing poetry.

The themes of the novel are still relevant almost a century later. Some readers might interpret the book as being a critique on a particular time and place in America, a hammering against the supposed "American dream", but I find it to be much more universal than that, the novel plays on human tendencies that exist in any age and transpire in any place. Gatsby is your quintessential dreamer, as well as the time-frozen romantic. He longs for the mirage of a bygone love that has eluded him since his youth, through years of hopeless longing he has constructed the artificial image of a woman who has aged and changed while he's stayed the same. Eventually the characters and the reader come to the conclusion of a simple truth: that reality will never quite compare with what we can dream up in our heads. That's really the thing that stuck out to me here, the idolization all these characters have. Gatsby idolizes Daisy, Daisy Idolizes wealth, Tom idolizes prestige and ethnicity, Nick idolizes Gatsby. While the people who float around them seem to idolize the sheer intrigue and secrecy of what we suppose upper-class life to be.

All in all, the Great Gatsby deserves its place in amongst the other highly regarded novels of western literature. 

About as perfect as you can make a metaphysical (sci-fi?) novella. It's got the mystery, it's got the philosophical quandaries, but most importantly it has the VIBES.

Yeah I really enjoyed this, it's a very tightly executed book, I felt like it had the perfect amount of everything. Sometimes it feels like It wants the reader to put on their Agatha Christie detective hat, at others it wants you to go read metaphysics by Descartes.

I think a part of a review on the back of the book sums it up much better than I ever could:
"The theme is not cosmic, but metaphysical: the body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom."

There's alot of interesting propositions contained in such a short novella, questions of the human soul or consciousness, allegories to the garden of Eden, how do we quantify time and space, science fiction on the credibility/importance of our senses and perceptions, and best of all: time loops.

Highly recommend, rarely are such short books so worth the purchase as this one was.

(Won't be reviewing White Nights here as I've already read it and reviewed it in the past.)

I love me some Dostoevsky man, he always hits the spot. This short story collection contains: White Nights, A gentle creature, and The dream of a ridiculous man.
My really short review of the three would be this.
If you're feeling hopelessly romantic; read White Nights.
If you're feeling Nihilistically depressed; read A gentle creature.
If you're feeling spiritual and hopeful; read The dream of a ridiculous man.

A Gentle Creature.
This was my least favourite of the bunch, it's still a good story, but Dostoevsky sets himself such a high bar with his other works that when one of his stories is only a 7/10 you can't help but feel disappointed. Purely personal opinion of course but i found the themes and writing in this one a little mundane in comparison to the other two short stories.
You have this main character who is essentially an egotist, everything revolves around him, his opinion is of utmost importance, and everyone around him must adapt to his ideas. He marries a very young girl (Because he believes he's "Saving her") and then gets annoyed when she occasionally acts like a young girl. He's also blinded by his own self-importance; when the girl kills herself he refuses to truly pin the blame on his own actions. He stupidly thought everything was fine in their relationship when the whole time he was caging this young girl up and emotionally manipulating her. A trend I see between this story and The dream of a ridiculous man, is that both involve a man corrupting and ruining something innocent, but A Gentle creature is a much more sinister example: A man corrupts a girl out of sheer egotism and then refuses to take the full blame.
Moving onto the next story.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
This one honestly made me a little emotional. The story is about this unnamed protagonist who is suicidal, he's decided to shoot himself with a revolver tonight. However, as he's pondering over whether or not he can actually do it, he dozes off in his armchair. The dream that subsequently follows is the main plot of the story. He dreams that he shoots himself in the heart, that he dies and has a funeral. Then as he's lying in his grave some strange creature lifts him up and carries him off into space. Eventually he lands on a strange planet far away that is identical to earth in all ways... except one, that the people are different. Without going into too much detail, the protagonist realises that he is literally in the Garden of Eden and is witnessing humankind before the fall, or before the first sin. It's a utopia. Then you get the saddest part of the story, The protagonist accidently corrupts them all and drives them to sin. He discovers that he's playing the role of the snake in the garden. He witnesses all the turmoil and vice befall them that has befallen modern humankind, and he's devasted. When he awakes from his dream it's simultaneously heartbreaking but also hopeful. He realises that the requirements to produce an environment like the Garden of Eden are incredibly hard, but also possible. If everyone tomorrow were to follow the golden rule, to be as meek and innocent as little babes, then humanity could really become paradisal in its structure. 
I get why some view this story as stupid, even Dostoevsky calls the character "A ridiculous man." But I love it too, because this story is Dostoevsky at his most hopeful and idealistic, the "Holy fool" is a common character archetype in his novels, and the protagonist of this story might be the most extreme version of it. To truly think that we can attain a world without sin or vice, without deceit or corruption; it seems ridiculous, but as the protagonist points out, it isn't impossible.
Of course, if you're an Atheist or not of the Abrahamic religions, then this story becomes nothing to you. But to me it was really beautiful.

Wow. You know a book was good when you breezed through 520 pages in two days.

This really took me back to the days of watching shows like Game of Thrones or Breaking bad, as weird as that sounds. You've got all these different character perspectives intertwining, you've got gore and tension, sex and crime and everything is rushing towards this ending which makes it feel like the walls are falling down around the characters. I loved that this had the tension and anticipation of a crime novel, which it essentially is.

The moral ambiguity of this story is utterly fascinating, and judging by other's reviews; specifically, their thoughts on the ending. I can tell the author has done a great job at blurring the lines of what crimes are deemed as justifiable and which ones aren't.

Let's get things straight, Masako is a bad person, and the fact that other readers are shocked that at the end she bonds with an equally awful person is surprising to me. I hate to sound pretentious and like a know-it-all, but I genuinely believe people are mad at the ending because they're blinded by their conceived notion that Masako is somehow a morally good character who just happens to be struggling. She's monstrous, and when she finally, in her own words meets someone who is just as empty and devoid of goodness as her, she wants him to stay, despite the awful things he's done. That makes total sense to me, birds of a feather flock together.

I honestly struggle to write in-depth reviews about books I loved, I feel like it's often better preserved in my memory if I don't try to articulate every aspect of it. What I will say is that it brought me out of a reading slump and has encouraged me to tackle other long novels with grisly plots. 

If there's one particular thing this story has made me think about, it's this: that there are varying degrees of bad, but all bad actions are reprehensible, nobody can justify hurting someone else under any circumstance, it will ruin your conscience if you're even remotely a good person. We often describe hell as being bottomless, and the story of "Out" is an example, you can always sink lower, depravity has no limits.