Amsterdam

I'm still living in this strange, transitory situation right now, but I've snapped out of my funk a little bit. I, Tiffany Rose Anderson, am reading again! For real! Every day! In the past four-five days alone I have read two books. And it feels amaaaaazing.

So, I'm going to copy what Nikki did with her old reading blog and post my favorite quotes from the book I've most recently finished and any other thoughts I might have, if I'm feeling up to it. So, here is my favorite quote from Amsterdam.

"In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied  daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was--square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of the TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imaginiation, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning."

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

I feel like this, sometimes, but other times, I feel the exact opposite. Being human is a strange thing.

I gotta say I was disappointed by the ending of the book. I saw how McEwan led up to the climax, and perhaps it was fitting for those two characters, Clive and Vernon. Like The Comfort of Strangers, but it's still frustrating. I found myself hating what actually happens in the book, but loving the writing itself. Dang you, McEwan.

Sorry, feeling a little sleepy (been getting up earlier the past two days. Impressed? I know, it's ridiculous), so I'm just going to stop here and maybe continue tomorrow.