There’s at least two ways to look at Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy: as a novel, and as a history of philosophy. As a history of philosophy, a Philosophy for Dummies, if you will, I think works. It gives a compact overview of how western philosophy evolved in the… Read more »
Posts Categorized: First Lines
First Lines: The Graveyard Book (re-read)
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The hand belonged to a man named Jack, and the knife just killed a father, a mother and a sister. It did not kill the little boy, who managed to escape to the nearby graveyard, where he was raised by the ghosts of… Read more »
First Lines: Elevation
Stephen King’s Elevation is a novella about a guy who is mysteriously losing weight. It’s a good story, a bit heavy on the current state of politics, but not especially great. It also contains the weirdest concept for a department store e-commerce website I’ve ever seen: you go to a website, and after an old-fashioned… Read more »
First Lines: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (reread)
Upon finishing my reread of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I am pretty sure it is my favorite book of his. And I suspect that is because I have absolutely no clue what to make of it. It is an absolutely fantastic story, in every sense of the word. But… Read more »
First Lines: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was a selection of The Missus’s book-club she didn’t get to. I had previously read Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library, and since that was a nice, quaint, strange, weird, but enjoyable little book, I dove in. Well, these books were little alike. This one took hard work… Read more »