Mary Roach - "Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers"

[practising surgery on dead bodies] "For me, hands are hard. [...] Because you're holding this disconnected hand, and it's holding you back."

"To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows."

[after being shot] "Whether or not you collapse depends on your state of mind. Animals don't know what it means to be shot, and, accordingly, rarely exhibit the instant stop-and-drop. MacPherson points ou that deer shot through the heart often run off for forty or fifty yards before collapsing. 'The deer doesn't know anything about what's going on, so he just does his deer thing for ten seconds or so and then he can't do it anymore. An animal with a meaner disposition will use that ten seconds to come at you.'"

"A male heart, [...] is in fact slightly different from a female heart. A heart surgeon can tell one from the other by looking at the ECG, because the intervals are slightly different. When you put a femlae heart into a man, it will continue to beat like a female heart. And vice versa."

(China) Tai Bao capsules: made from abortus (fetuses) and placenta, and it is very good for the skin

mellified man: ... In Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to save others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes and partakes of honey. After a month he only excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey) and death follows. His fellow men place him in a stone coffin full of honey in which he macerates. The date is put upon the coffin giving the year and month. After a hundred years the seals are removed. A confection is formed which is used for the treatment of broken and wounded limbs. A small amount taken internally will immediatly cure the complaint.

[China] "Children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixer. The practise began in earnest during the Sung Dynasty (960-1126) and continued through the Ming Dynasty, and up to the early 1900s

Sylvia Plath - Various Poetry

I browsed through her poetry a couple of times. Sometimes I read a sentence which ignited a small spark, but in general, I could not really be bothered.

Perhaps I must first look up some of her most famous poems, and see whether they ring true for me.

I like her poems, and some of her lines ring true ("I patronized her a little and she lapped it up / you could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality"), but in general I haven't encountered poems yet which grabbed me, as soon as I read one line, one stanza...

It is not like her voice doesn't carry a sense of gravity, her words do not really find a common demeanor. She describes intense situations, but seldom they catch me.

The Stones

This is the city where men are mended...

Daphne Du Maurier - "Rebecca" (UNFINISHED)

• Loved the first chapter. Sad, melancholy, hints of haunting.

The rest of the book, as far as I read it (more than one-third) did little to keep my interest. "Poor maiden marries handsome widow, only to fret about her new role, uncertainty, all that uncertainty oozing out of her, and what, oh dear, what happened to his former wife?!?"

Long-winded, boring. Too much repetition.

Ending of the first chapter though:

I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt. All this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of the moon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed. In reality I lay many hundred miles away in an alien land, and would wake, before many seconds had passed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack of atmosphere. I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and turn, and opening my eyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so different from the soft moonlight of my dream. The day would lie before us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquility we had not known before. We would not talk of Manderley. I would not tell my dream. For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more.

I wonder if the name itself, Manderley, rang true to my mind, for I hold the memories of Mandalay dear, and could not completely seperate the two

Raymond E. Feist - "Magician

2nd book of the Riftwar saga.

Bought because of the long trip home from San Diego.

Not bad. Not particularly good. Better than the first, I'd say, but still superficial, and the "Game" that sounded so promising, has hardly been touched and might not be that interesting at all.

[actually, I haven't finished it, and small chance I will anytime soon. Tag as finished to get rid of it.]

Jeroen Brouwers - "De Verzonkene"

Ik denk dat dit het eerste boek is dat ik van hem gelezen heb. Een cadeau van zijn uitgeverij voor relaties, is het een grote polemiek tegen vage, post-vanalles denkers.

Het was in het begin moeilijk door te komen. Er zit dan ook weinig verhaal in, maar toch boeide het wel. Hij schrijft mooi, maar ik moet meer van hem lezen om te kijken wat ik er van vind.

Paul Auster - "The book of illusions"

A wonderful book, but I will not be able to say many useful things about it.

I have been reading it on and off, and almost only when I wanted to relax.

In any case, I am not very good at dissecting the story, characters, motives, structures, &etc.

It is about loss. Chance and loss. About finding a new goal, a new purpose again, about more chance, another love, and more loss.

About films that nobody has seen and books no-one can ever read.

A good book to reread in a couple of years.

Robert A. Heinlein - "Time enough for love"

After 153 pages, out of a 600+, I decided to stop reading this.

True enough, reading this has have been far from continuous. The Harry Potter series intervened, and there were some other books that begged for attention.

But it is not merely being "out" of the story and its characters that made me take this, quite uncommon, step. It simply doesn't really appeal to me.

It's a kind of Sheherezade story, in which The Senior, a very very old man, is just in time prevented from performing suicide after living for more than a 1000 years. He agrees to telling his story without murdering himself, for as long as he'll stay interested in the descendants that have revivded him.

The story becomes a framework for story-chapters in which he relates his travels and experiences. That's it, and it didn't keep me glued to the pages, it didn't even keep me mildly interested.

The writing style does not really appeal either. The characters tend to have very sharp tongues, but it becomes tiresome after a while. There is only so much smart remarks on one page one can take.

And the funny trap that almost every writer seems to fall for: particularly in a story like this which spans multiple centuries, the number of allusions and references to our time and place is much much higher than any other reference-count. It becomes too obvious it is written for our time, in our time by someone from our time.

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hollows

Book will be split in two films, I have been told.

Of course, I was curious to finish it. And it is easy of course, but I do not see a reason to bash it. I must admit though, that the urge to read on, was mostly because I have been reading so much Harry Potter lately. One of the best results of reading these 6 books in a row has been that I was completely immersed in the story.

I particularly enjoyed a few paragraphs of the railway-station in Harry's head when he supposedly died, or is halfway between life and death or --insert-magical-thingy--

Pretending to be dead took a bit too long though. And other details hinted at deus ex machina.

All in all, enjoyable.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Have been slacking, it has been a while. It was ok, though was getting a bit tired of th never-ending Potter vs The World.

This book will be in cinemas within a month, and I am curious to see it. The trailer looked promising.

One thing though, if they make the phoenix sing, there are only two women suitable to bring her voice to life: Emiliana Torrini or Lisa Gerrard.

Leonard Cohen - "Beautiful Losers"

The book I only allowed myself to read when drinking alone in a pub. Stained beerpads as bookmarks, I copied many quotations to various notebooks. There usually wasn't much light, the little candles helped.

They thought I was funny. The best nights I was interrupted and chatted for long hours with unknown girls who drank, laughed and smiled.

Check the preface he wrote for the Chinese translation.