The Cure for the Unemployed Blues

I have been married and in Colorado for almost 4 months now. I love love love Denver, but did find myself very jobless and very bored. I know, I should probably lower my expectations, but I feel like I have a bachelors degree and deserve a good paying, and fairly enjoyable entry level job. It isn't happening! After going crazy for 3 months, I found an old love of mine.... READING. I have read 7 books in the last 2 weeks, and suddenly am loving being unemployed. I have lost my motivation to find a job, and instead would rather read a book every 1-2 days. Is this bad? Are you jealous? You should be. Don't get me wrong I am still looking for a job, but I am no longer stressing over it. I have also been leaning more towards more schooling, so maybe that will happen soon. GO SCHOOL! Anyway here is a quick review of the last few books I have read with some of my new/old favorite quotes. I am on an amazing streak where every book I read is well written, and a completely captivating story. I am loving it, and hoping this streak never ends.

• East of Eden (John Steinbeck). There is not one bad thing I can say about this book. I have quoted or talked about it in my blog... here, here, here, here, here, and finally here. Needless to say, I love it. It is my favorite book of all time. You should probably read it and then read it again! 

• "I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible." 
• "I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?"

• Brave New World (Aldous Huxley). This book is based in a futuristic "utopia" that offers "soma" and all other carnal pleasures and no moral repercussions. There are no such things as mother or fathers. Everyone is manufactured and raised to love what they do, and not want anything else no matter where they are in the class system. 

• "A gramme is better than a damn." 
• "All of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." 
• "The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior. Murder kills only the individual-and, after all, what is an individual?" 
• "Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel- and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get." 

• Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurson) . It is a story about a black woman written by a black woman, but that isn't all it is about, and definitely isn't the issue for Janie (the main character). The book is about the relationship between male and female in the 1930s, and about finding love. 

• "Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me.how surprised y'all is goin' tuh be if you ever find out you don't know half as much 'bout us as you think yo do. It's so easy to make yo'self out God Almighty when you ain't got nothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens"
• "It's uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know
  there..Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves"
• "Love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore" 

• 1984 (George Orwell). A book written about a totalitarian future (although 1984 is now in the past, it was originally published in 1949). Big Brother is (always) watching, no sex except for the purpose of reproducing for the party, and it certainly should not be enjoyable,  kids turning their family in to the thought police, newspeak and last of all unexpected love.

• "Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."
• "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
• "If there us hope it lies in the proles."

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams).  Hilarious! It starts with Arthur Dent's house being demolished to make way for a bypass. His friend Ford Perfect (an alien/editor of the book hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy/pretend earthling looking for work as an actor) comes and gets him because the Earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. This book is incredibly eccentric and will have you laughing through the whole thing. You find out the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42, but then you must find the what the ultimate question really is. 

• "Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."
• "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of." 
• "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made PResident should on no account be allowed to do the job." 
• "It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination."

• Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut). Initially starts out with a writer who is working on a book about what certain Americans were doing at the precise moment the atom bomb hit Hiroshima. It begins with him writing and getting in contact with the three children of Felix Hoenikke (Father of the Atomic bomb) to find out what they and their father were doing. We further learn of other things Hoenikke invented, and much more about the life of his children (a midget, a giant, and the new right hand man of the President of a Caribbean island) and what they did with his new dangerous invention. Obviously it is and eccentric satire, and it also introduces you to a new religion and the teachings of it.  It might be my new favorite Kurt Vonnegut book. Either this or Mother Night (I know! It is almost blasphemous of me not to say Slaughterhouse 5). 

• "All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies." 
• "Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns."
• "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."
• "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."
• "No damn cat, and no damn craddle." 
• The Plot Against America (Philip Roth). This book literally gave me nightmares, and I had to keep reminding myself that it didn't happen, and FDR was elected to 4 terms. It was also a propaganda machine for FDR, and I love that.  It is a tale of an alternative history where America has gone fascist and Hitler's allies are in the White House. It is a story about a 9 year old Jewish boy growing up in Newark, New Jersey, and his family. The novel is incredibly plausible, and it will have you freaked out, I promise! 

• "Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear." 
• "Nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others." 

• Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides). This is what I am currently reading. It is about a hermaphrodite, and her/his family genealogy/history. We are tracing the gene through time that leads to Calliope/Cal. It is undeniably interesting and well written. I am only on page 150, so don't have much to quote, but will write one of the early paragraphs that grabbed me, and made me love the voice of this book. 

• And so now, having been born, I;m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flew off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I;m sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick shot of my father as twenty-year old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning...