Invitation to Sociology

This book is a wonderful, wonderful read especially for those interested in the workings of sociology and what it really is as a subject. Berger is witty, intriguing and certainly has a way with words. It is pretty heavy stuff as he pulls in examples from religion, natural science and related subjects such as history and psychology. If you are one who is interested in debunking social normalities and the mechanisms of society (what is society anyway?) then this book provides an objective view of the world. A dictionary should be kept at hand though.

Available at the Sociology section at Kinokuniya.

My Booklist for 2006/2007

The beauty about new books are that they encapsulate age-old ideas in the context of our modern society, at the same time, themes prevalent in what may be called evergreens or classics, reverberate through the barriers of time and remind us that the human condition, human delusions and the idiosyncrasies of man are hardly peculiar to any generation. Here are just a few books that I hope you may discover and enjoy for the year to come.

1. Small Island by Andrea Levy
Winner of the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award, the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year, the 2005 Commonwealth Writer's Prize-Best Book Award and the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction-Best of the Best

2. Extraodinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
Republished by Wordsworth Editions under its reference series

3. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy by Tim Burton

4. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

5. Mister God, This is Anna by Fynn

6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

7. Pigtopia by Kitty Fitzgerald

8. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

9. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

10. The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas

11. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend

12. The Greenmile by Stephen King

All of these books are books that I myself possess not all of been subject to my enjoyment. However, I do choose my books with a tempered spirit, they do not lay dormant on shelves by virtue of some streak of monotony that they may possess but how, they are, I believe, saved for some season for their own, a book I may understand and appreciate more as I grow. I hope you too can enjoy a few books from this list of 12, most of them are 20th century literature, but others like The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James are magnificient pieces of work in terms of storytelling and their vibrancy does not lose its candour in the light of the distractions we have today.

Metamophosis by Franz Kafka

Synopsis: Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman and a responsible son, wakes up one morning to find himself having metamophosized into a cockroach. The story reveals the responses of his parents and amily, and the situations that take place after.

I've always been wanting to read this short story eversince I'd encountered an excerpt of it in a literature guide I once had in secondary school. Now that I've finally come to read it I am rather intrigued by the whole new, well, genre, it presents. I can't seem to place it anywhere actually, perhaps somewhere between fantasy and a sort of moral rhetoric, which really, encompasses everything. I haven't really given much thought about it, but it is a sad tale. There's a strong intuition of hope that comes along with Gregor Samsa being turned into a cockroach[of all insects, but perhaps, there's a reason] but yet a deep-seated premonition of his situation having gone beyond the 'point-of-no-return'. There is no resolution to the story--Gregor, does not, by some miraculous stroke return to his human form just as he miraculously turned into an exo-skeletal being. Instead, we see his struggles, and how his metamorphosis is progressively wholistic--in that it first tackles his physicalities and then his habits, he gets farther and farther away from being human in form and at the same time, the humanity that surrounds him, his family, gets more and more frustrated and intolerant of his presence and their feelings of hostility--they can no longer believe the roach is Gregor--climax when at the end of the story they are convinced that they must get rid of him. Prophetically enough, Gregor dies the next morning. It is a short story but heaved heavy with melancholy. The reader plows through the pages asking when, when, when Gregor will return and the pages can conclude with a happily ever after. Instead the entire development begs one to consider what humanity consists of. Through the metamorphosis of Gregor, we, as the readers, know that Gregor is innately human by his thoughts. Of course, his family cannot read his mind, let alone communicate with him and only from his appearance do they feel that Gregor is no more Gregor. And so Kafka leads us to really think what humanity is. For Gregor, he was still himself, human as ever despite his looks.

It is a terse, short story and I believe much more is to be gleaned off its pages. For now, let me think.

Huzzah!

For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
-Amy Lowell, Boston Athenaeum

We are on our maiden post. For the love of books this page was created, and for the love of ideas, these words are penned.

Books; stories, poems, nursery rhymes, practical critcism, literary discourse, all these and more are just the few things associated with books. They have always been such a vital force in my life, and one of my first loves. Everyone reads, and it is without a shadow of doubt that I say that, be it the newspapers or a classic novel, the poem or the comic, the magazine or the play, life is reflected through any page that bears words. It is a love for life, not an obsession, but an admiration of its joys and jubilations or an interest in its twists and turns of irony or fatality--that leads us to read. Books read us too, and decide to relate to us on a level that we can function. Reading a fairytale when one is 5 says alot about good and evil and their ends, reading a fairytale at 25 could make you see the reality of the human condition reflected in these simplistic [or maybe not] works. Books grow with us, but more specifically the ideas they contain, which is why ideas will remain a vital element here. This collection of book reviews and ideas will take time to build up, and I believe that I too will grow and change in my opinions on certain elements of the things I read and the ideas I attain, but nonetheless, I know my love for books will remain. I close with a quote of Francis Bacon, that runs along the lines of how it is that porridge should be eaten hot, and ice cream eaten cold:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed on and digested.