All posts tagged: Book

Continue Reading General Theory of Love

A General Theory of Love

The following passage from the book I’m currently reading is interesting to me. Strange timing after a surf on the web earlier today led me to Maslow’s pyramid of needs. “Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system is moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so. The same is true today. We are free to label ourselves the end product of evolution not because it is so, but because we exist now. Expunge this temperocentrist bias, and the neocortical brain is not the most advanced of the three, but simply the most recent.” A General Theory of Love (Vintage)

Continue Reading The Siege

The Siege by Helen Dunmore

I’m captivated by a book I’m reading called ‘The Seige’ by Helen Dunmore. The subject of this story is the siege of Leningrad during the second world war. Dunmore writes so descriptively that it feels like a firsthand account. She manages to make a very bleak world colourful. I’ll transcribe a short passage from the book which gives some indication of how beautifully and eloquently she writes. Suddenly and sharply, it’s obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It’s crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometres, without a pig or a potato patch between them. It only works in the way that fiction works, by making people collaborate. All its life, the city has had the power to demand. It asks for milk, and before dawn milk arrives. Field after field furs […]