7. The World as I see it

Name : The World as I see it
Writer : Albert Einstein
Publishing year : 1949
Language : English
Type : Non-fiction
How come ? : I've been intending to read this book since a long time, just because, well, it's Einstein and it's how he sees the world. Sounds interesting.
Estimated time : Theoratically about 7 hours, but Gosh I spent way too much time not reading it after starting it. More about that in the review.
Main themes : Random stuff (collected articles and letters written by Einstein at different matters).
Recommended for : Anyone who wants to read random articles written by Einstein that are NOT related to science or relativity by any means.
The book in a few words : Already said it, random stuff.

The synonpsis : The book is a collection of articles and letters written by Einstein regarding many issues.


The Rating : Not bad 6/10

The Review :

Well, this book had me going through a lot of thinking, but NOT about its content .. but about my choice of books. I won't be reading any articles/letter collection any time soon.
The book as a read wasn't bad (hence the 6) but the structure of the book make it not only a tiresome book, but also an annoying one. It's because of the book's lack of cohesion that I stalled reading it (I'd read a couple pages then I go do something else .. it's like reading the 4 page of a journal) and therefore I lagged all my plan of reading this summer. Wrong, wrong choice of books.

The book is, as mentioned a couple times above, the book is not actually a flow of the genius insights about life and meaning and such as I actually expected. I was even tricked by the first pages of the book to believe that the book would be an awesome journey inside a mastermind's mind, only to be driven to boredom by the miscellaneous correspondences Einstein had in his time. It was a nice trick, though.
Okay, the book wasn't that bad (it was boring, though). Einstein, who was a scientific authority back in the day, was unexpectedly considered an authority in everything else! Journalists of the time wouldn't miss a chance to ask him about anything that was trending, and him being a man of large general knowledge (he's no more the science geek I expected him to be) didn't help him at all of losing this notoriety. He, however, conveniently denied his reputation in exemplary modesty. That didn't stop him from making influential comments on every subject he supported such as Zionism (in its social form) or Socialism.

Another "discovery" about this man is how big of a peace-lover he is. Like a third of a book is all about how atrocious War is and how it must be stopped at any price if there is any hope for humanity to flourish. Kind of ironical since he was the one to inspire the Manhattan Project that leaded to pretty much to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and USA becoming a major nuclear threat worldwide. Nice job, Einstein.

The book also lives in the spirit of its time, that being the post WWI world, so many references have been made to the context of letters and attitudes. It is written for the post WWI reader who's ready to be influenced by the opinions of the Great Man of the era. This somehow made it distant from the casual-reader me. I didn't want to read about that bot because I hate history, but because I really hate it.

When the book says "Life", it somehow means it. When I picked up the book as my second non-fiction read, I expected it to be about the philosophical meaning of Life. Contemplation ,remarks and insights from one of Humanity greatest minds. But then what you get is not what you expect, and there you have arguments for socialism, for Zionism and even the reason why Einstein resigned from the German Academy of Science. I seriously couldn't care less about his reasons.

Einstein is a man with a big mind and this mind of him, coupled with his reputation back then and now, made even his plainest ideas worth be written on a book. It's not mind-blowing nor revolutionary book, it's what a man, a "simple" man, thinks of things around him, and no matter how "important", this man is, it's still a one man's take, nothing more. It wasn't even that impressive, especially with the complete lack of order the articles/notes were inserted in.
This books was a mind disappointment.

Joining the idea I started this review with, and after the fiasco reading this book was (I mean I literally couldn't read more than five pages a day because of how disordered it was ... and that set me way behind my plans of reading), I intend to change the change the "format" of reading cycles. Since I started this blog, I made the Novel > Classic > Non-fiction > Recommendation cycle. I turned out fine except the Non-fiction part. I have to read both books by necessity, not by passion, not by will. And so I won't make any conditions of the reads I'll pick up from now on, but I'll try as best as I can to have a mixed bag and not all novels (as I highly suspect I'll end up doing).


Favorite passages : 
All quotes were from the first third of the book. The rest is pretty .. 20-century-ish.

"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."

"I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow-men. "

"Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'."

"The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling."

"That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.", Einstein being a troll.

"War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. ".
Yes, sure Einstein, sure. That's why you've written that letter to Roosevelt.

"He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; "

"There we confided our experiences, ambitions, emotions to each other. We both felt that this friendship was not only a blessing because each understood the other, was enriched by him, and found ins him that responsive echo so essential to anybody who is truly alive."
Einstein on his friend Katzenstein. I "awww"-ed at this.

"In order that they may derive consolation from it and--not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think of them.".
Einstein cursing, relatively cool :D (baad pun).

"What I have to say is nothing new and does not pretend to be anything more than the opinion of an independent and honest man who, unburdened by class or national prejudices, desires nothing but the good of humanity and the most harmonious possible scheme of human existence."
That's the book in a nutshell.

5. Divergent

Name : Divergent
Writer : Veronica Roth
Publishing year :  2012
Language : English
Type :  Novel, Bestseller
How come ? : I marked it as "to read" back in the Hunger Games era when the comparison between the books was too common on forums and websites. It resurfaced however when the actress cast to play the heroine Beatrice (Shailene Woodley) was cast to play Hazel Grace from TFioS. Since I'm going to watch both movies anyway (after the Hunger Games movie success, I highly suspect that Divergent is set to be a big blockbuster, and Shailene is set to be the next Jennifer Lawrence maybe ? Maybe). So I might as well read the book before the movie is released, that is in 2014, just to give myself enough time to forget it so as not to repeat the Hunger Games movie tragedy.
Must. Not. Read. Books. Days. Before. The. Movie's. Release Date.
Estimated time : Around 12 hours.
Main themes : Post-apocalyptic World, Romance, War, Family, Sense of belonging.
Recommended for : Sci-fi fans (although the book isn't exactly sci-fi), people who loved Hunger Games/hated Hunger Games/Didn't read Hunger Games, someone with 12 hours to spare on reading another post-apocalyptic novel.
The book in a few words : The adventure of a girl who got entangled in issues bigger than her as she tried to balance out her inherent anomaly, her romantic feelings and her sense of belonging.
The synopsis : In a post-apocalyptic world, the city of Chicago is divided into Factions : Tribes or guilds that lace people with one of the five common tendencies : Selflessness, Curiosity, Courage, Honesty or Sociability. Beatrice is 16 years-old girl who was born and raised in Abnegation, the faction of the Selfless. She, however, never felt as selfless as she is expected to be. She struggled to fit in but it was clearly impossible for her to dissimulate in the community of grey and self-denial. The Faction Choosing Ceremony approaches, and the choice she'll make will decide her life.


The Rating : Not Bad 6.5/10

The Review :

It's impossible to start without mentioning the HIGH similarity between this work and the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Not only because of the general feeling of reminiscence the novel invokes while reading it, but also because once the comparison is stricken, you can obviously see who gets all the superlatives.
So, Beatrice (or later, Tris) is a 16 years old young girl born in a post-apocalyptic USA where she gets through trouble because she is not like other girls from her faction and will get involved in political issues that are far bigger than her little worries. She must fight the evil that is the Erudite faction, hand in hand with Four, her love interest. I can use the same sentence to describe (Spoiler Alert) The Hunger Games just by replacing faction with district and Erudite with Capitol. The novel makes little effort to distinguish itself in the genre, and when it does, I didn't like it. Let me explain.
One of the main delights of reading Sci-fi is getting to imagine a world far beyond our mundane reality, where was we know and what what's possible is no limit to trance an extraordinary storyline. Divergent, however, takes so little from this bless, and implements too little Sci-fi elements that makes it lingers somewhere between the present as we know it and the future as we expect it to be, which leaves a lot to be desired. There is much room for possible improvement but Divergent doesn't seem to bother exploiting it.
What's more, the pace of the story which some find exciting and absorbing, is quite unstable : dull at times, very charged at others. I know it's supposed to be that way (it's neither pure action nor pure narration), but the novel seeks comfort in less fevered scenes that sometimes don't quite fit in the narrative logic, and I even daresay some parts were kind of unnecessary. They only made the work longer, and thus boring at times.
My other complaint is the female narrator. Before I get shot by a thousand (?) feminists, my complaint isn't about the use of a female voice narrator, actually Hazel Grace, the other girl that Shailene will play, is a perfect example of what a narrator girl should be like (The author is, however, a man). My complaint is the blatant oxymoron of what the author imagined the heroine to be like and how it ended being. She was supposed to be a "tough" girl with a rather flat girly side (illustrated by this quote from the book "Can you be a girl for a few seconds ?" ) which we perfectly understand as Tris isn't your typical silly girl, but as soon as the romantic side explored, we see a stereotypical girl act girly whenever Four is around. Although the author tries to redeem the previous image of Tris later on, she just doesn't seem real to me anymore. But I'm wondering : Is that just her fate ? The same things weirdly arrived to (spoiler alert) Katniss once the third book picked up pace, Katniss being the kind of girl I wanted it to be in the first two books. Maybe Mrs. Roth just accelerated the process and destroyed my little fantasy of Tris being actually a Badass Girl. She even seemed inconsistent at times as a character : She instantly recognized Al's feelings for her (Al being another contradictory character), but she took WAY too much time (around halfway through the book) to figure out that Four feels the same for her, although any reader would have concluded by that time that they are both falling in a sloppy love story that the author will unwisely focus on the second half of the book. I just kept reading with a sadness growing me while I watch all my expectations hammered by the merciless ordinarily and the lack of subtlety of the narration. It felt unadorned and plain, sloppy. And of course the final blow was when the effect of the serum was annulled by .. the power of love ? OH COM"OOOOOON. That's .. that's .. that's Twilight.
One more thing : Some expressions are irritatingly repeated throughout the book, leaving the bare style even more exposed. Tris "bites her lips" in every chapter at least two times, and when she looks at someone's eyes, they always "look like dark pits". Also, when she cries, "her eyes burn", and that was uncomfortably repeated in every scene involving crying, almost crying, and feeling like crying. The prize of the the least impressing style this year goes to .... Veronica Roth.
Those were the bad points that Divergent scores, but since I gave it 6.5 it means it has some shiny bits scattered along the 150 pages. One is definitely the -at times- witty dialogue, I even chuckled at some parts. So there go some deserved credit to Mrs Veronica.
The premise of the book and the first part is actually good (although SO reminiscent of The Hunger Games) and the faction thing is very nicely thought of, I ended up asking myself what faction will I choose, only to end up to the conclusion Four makes : why not all of them ? Foreshadowing, foreshadowing everywhere.
Speaking of foreshadowing, the book is not so smart about keeping its secret hidden, as you can probably guess the next thing to happen (which surprises me since I read everywhere that the book is full of surprises).  I mean, whenever Danger sets around the Dauntless, it pops to my mind that it's her that's talking (meaning she'll stay alive) and there is a second and a third book, means he'll stay alive :p The rest of the characters were cold-bloodedly killed by Veronica because she didn't like them or didn't know what to do with them.
My last thought is that the book could have been better in many ways, at least at quilting the holes in the narratio, characters and pace, I mean just by the ideas that were in, and more effort by the author to actually add description to her novel, maybe it would have felt better. I still have my hopes at the move, though, the book is perfectly set for such medium, and I hope the set designers would put more effort to illustrate the world and animate the characters that Veronica Roth neglectfully briught to life to the boo that's trying too hard to be the next Hunger Games. (Both books share a 4.4/5 rating on Goodreads, what the world had come to ..).


Favorite character : 
All the characters weren't developed well (except Tris which unnaturally transformed as the book went on) so it's hard to have any special appreciation for one of them really. But I'll go with Christina just because she got most of the good lines in the book. She was made selfish by the author (she didn't have to make her take the flag, I thought).
More on the quotes part :p


Favorite passages : 
The book isn't sharply written. The language isn't especially beautiful and the only thing that deserves a shout-out is the rare use of sarcasm in the book. Some sentences were good, but most of the work seemed like someone who tells you what happened to him last week.


"Leaving us with Eric is like hiring a babysitter who spend his time sharpening knives"

"He smiles at me. I wonder if throwing up at him will do me any good"

"Awkwardness aside, it is nice to be liked."

""You weren't allowed to have pets ?" Christina demands, smacking the table with her palm. "Why not ?"
"Because they're illogical," Will says matter-of-factly. "What's the point of providing food and shelter for an animal that just soils your furniture, makes your home smell bad, and ultimately dies ?""

"They don't want you to act in a certain way. They want you to think in a certain way. So you're easy to understand. So you won't pose a  threat to them"

""Hey now," says Christina, brushing Will's shoulder with her finger. "This is supposed to be a lighthearted session of symbolic document destruction, not a political debate""

"I never used to understand why people bothered to hold hands as they walked, but then he runs one of his fingertips down my palm, and I shiver and understand it completely."

""Like you don't want to know what his fears are. he acts so tough that he's probably afraid of marshmallow and really bright sunshines or something. Overcompensating""

"She sets her hands on my shoulders. "Can you be a girl for a few seconds ?"
"I'm always a girl." I frown.
"You know what I mean. Like a silly, annoying girl."
I twirl my hair around my finger. "Kay."" : This one actually got me.