Books I've Read...and Liked Reading

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own. Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Notable Reviews:
"A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.” —Time

“A Gothic tour de force. . . . A tight, deftly controlled story . . . . Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.” —The New York Times

"Elegaic, deceptively lovely. . . . As always, Ishiguro pulls you under." —Newsweek

“Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled . . . . The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.” —Entertainment Weekly

"It's like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of the disaster you've left yourself open to."

"When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. more scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go."

"All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that comes along, there's a part of you that's been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: 'One day, maybe not so long from now you'll get to know how it feels.' So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you-of how you were brought into this world and why-and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange."

The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell

Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones reprises the familiar atrocities, in graphic detail and at massive length, from the viewpoint of an SS officer intimately involved in their execution. The book, which has already won the Prix Goncourt (Littell grew up in Paris and wrote it in French), is certainly skilful. It's certainly objectionable too, deliberately so: the resentment and repugnance it arouses are evidently a part of its underlying calculus. One's abiding sense of something pornographic about the whole enterprise is orchestrated - cleverly, horribly - into the comprehensive disgust at one's own species that it seems intent on arousing. Despite the title (the Kindly Ones are the Eumenides, agents of catharsis in Greek drama), this is not one of those works that set out to leave you with a feeling of teary uplift about the Holocaust (a strong point in its favour). -guardian.co.uk

Notable Reviews:
"A staggering triumph...A tale covering the whole of the Second World War-a scope that has become disappointingly rare in the contemporary novel” —Le Monde

“A new War and Peace...Never in the recent history of French literature has an early work been so ambitious, so masterfully written, so meticulous in its historical detail or so serenely horrifying.” —Le Nouvel Observateur

"A monument of contemporary literature...The author is incredibly deft, avoiding the usual traps of his subject matter: it is impossible to read this novel constrained by historical judgement or moral consideration." —Newsweek

“This is a book which leaves you haggard and breathless. One of those rare novels destined to become a classic.” —Lire

"There have been hundreds of thousands of us whom you still judge as criminals: among them, as among all human beings, there were ordinary men, of course, but also extraordinary men, artists, men of culture, neurotics, homosexuals, men in love with their mothers, who knows what else, and why not? None of them was more typical of anything than any other man in any other profession...To state that I was not typical means nothing. I lived, I had a past, a difficult and burdensome past, but that happens, and I managed it in my own way. And then came the war, I served, and I found myself at the heart of terrible things, atrocities. I hadn't changed, I was still the same man, my problems had not been resolved, even though the war created new problems for me, even though those horrors transformed me. There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers."

"There are psychopaths everywhere, all the time. Our quiet suburbs are crawling with pedophiles and maniacs, our homeless shelters are packed with raving megalomaniacs; and some of them do indeed become a problem, they kill two, three, ten, even fifty people-and then the very same State that would without batting an eye send them to war crushes them like a blood-swollen mosquito. These sick men are nothing. But the ordinary men that make up the State-espicially in unstable times-now there's the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you."

"Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No one asks you for your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit. YOu might object that killing another soldier in combat is not the same thing as killing an unarmed civilian; the laws of war allow the one but not the other; as does common morality."

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people's intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it's the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing "a rogue military commander" in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell's dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor's decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor's hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth. -Publisher's Weekly

Notable Reviews:
"Royally entertaining.” —Time

“Mr. Gladwell is a gifted storyteller, able to find memorable characters and delightful anecdotes wherever he goes.” —Wall Street Journal

"I knew from the first few pages of Blink exactly what I thought: I'm gonna be up all night reading this." —Entertainment Weekly

“If you want to trust my snap judgement, buy this book: you'll be delighted.” —New York Times Book Review

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."

"This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works - and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment - it is our responsibility to act."

"As I've talk to people about Blink over the past few years, I've been amazed at how often this point has come up. In fact, I would venture to say that no argument in the book has resonated more with readers than this one. We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we're well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confused information with understanding."