The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. As I thought, finished it pretty quickly. Interesting way of writing the book...been a while since I finished the book, don't remember my exact after thoughts, but I do remember her acute descriptions, the stuff that she captured so sharply which actually sets up the time and place in front of your eyes. Regarding the emotions...somehow, post the book am left more with wonder rather than sympathy for the characters.
What else? Started reading the Catcher in the Rye and Chariots of God, and Fever and Cloud Atlas. Yes, I am not decided yet and haven't been reading. For the first 1/5 of an average book, its an active effort - you have to pick up the book and put in some reading work. For the rest of it, the book captures you and difficult to leave it till its over. So am nowhere near the first 1/5 mark.
Chariots of God - this is non fiction, book about the kind of things and thoughts which are my favorite time pass and a continuous source of wonder. Pondering about life, God, stars, UFOs, aliens, our place in the universe, here and beyond, beyond of beyond, what are we, were God aliens? This book (on kindle) ties up some of these thoughts beautifully with some actual evidence and tries to weave them together to lay out a beautiful mish mash of imaginations, new thoughts - some new, some corresponding with my own conjectures. The other day I was looking at the Hubble Photographs at the Big Picture...and it left me thinking - but there is just no way of knowing who we are, or how we came to be or why is this universe so huge - and still whatever we seem to comprehend of the universe may be a dot in another such universe. Or maybe as soon as we are able to comprehend something, we realise we have just started to imagine, and its like looking in a mirror which looks into another...to infinity. Imagining infinity. Difficult. Another way to look at it, think of the known world, known human powers, known capabilities...the ability to think is the best of all abilities maybe...still it is just the first step in an infinite ladder...the next ones may be telepathy, teleporting, or may be all this is just a drop, a ripple and we are existing in something locked in time and space...looking up at stars spread across the sky, each one at an expanse of a few million light years...it is like looking at time itself. May be some day, it would be easier to comprehend that time is just another axis, and that there are more such things. It is like there is some water trickling down a huge wall, whatever we think and know is that trickle of water. Somehow we do not realise that the trickle is from a huge ocean behind that wall...we hear it all the time, but since we hear it all the time, we do not think about it. Anyway, does thinking about it helps? Our daily problems are very very different...and maybe a way of keeping ourselves busy so that we do not think about the ocean beyond. But sometimes, just sometimes it surfaces, gives a hint, a glimpse, and there is a flash - you can see through and through and then you realise - all this is a mirage.
Depressing, K says, when I talk like this. But think about it, this is more like possibilities..a promise beyond this pale blue dot of ours, a promise that all what we go through is insignificant and there is a world, where all that matters to us is intact, or all that matters to us cease to matter to the universe. But yes, this can be depressing to think that the human species, the earth - with our sense of self importance, of our love of treating ourselves so seriously, the war, peace, money, economy, gold, oil, coal, love, hate- are just an accident in a massive scheme of things and the universe would have been no different even without us. Huge blow. But we need our own anchors, and our seriousness is our anchor.
To life. And to its inexplicability. It sure would have been boring if we knew everything. More fun like this. Rest - keep guessing.