Review on Luiyología

My Year 2020 in Books

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Any Goodreads user has access to a yearly report with some statistics and basically the covers of all the books read in one year. In order to have it the user only has to set the books as read and the read date to any time in that year. Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2020 in Books from Goodreads, as I did for my read books in 2018 and 2019.

Data

	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015
Book read	42	56	54	54	57	63
Pages read	6,353	8,037	7,511	9,388	12,136	7,855
Average length (in pages)	151	143	139	173	213	125
Average rating (1-5)	3.6	3.6	3.7	3.9	4.2	3.3

Evolution of my reading stats over the last years

The featured image goes to James Rhodes, as I liked a lot his autobiography. You can read my review in Goodreads but I will summarize it here with the first sentence: Instrumental is a terrible book and at the same time a wonderful one. Knowing the James Rhodes from nowadays, and knowing already a bit about his past, it is even more emotional.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

My TOP 10 read books in 2020

Instrumental by James Rhodes (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Factfulness by Hans Rosling (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Rey Blanco by Juan Gómez Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
El Tío Curro: La Conexión Española de J.R.R. Tolkien by José Manuel Ferrández Bru (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (you can read my review in English in Goodreads)
Cicatriz by Juan Gómez Jurado
The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russel
Si escuece, cura by Esther Samper (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)

My Year 2019 in Books

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Any Goodreads user has access to a yearly report with some statistics and basically the covers of all the books read in one year. In order to have it the user only has to set the books as read and the read date to any time in that year. Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2019 in Books from Goodreads, as I did one year ago for my read books in 2018.

My 2019 in numbers

I read 7,878 pages across 57 books, a 114% of my 50 books read in 2019 goal
That’s 20 novels (not taking into account comics or short stories)
The average length was 138 pages
My average rating was 3.6 (up to 5)
The longest book I read was my nth reading of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The featured image goes to Nnedi Okorafor, as my main discovery of the year after reading her Binti trilogy. She has won a Hugo, a Nebula, a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

My TOP 10 read books in 2019

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
El paciente by Juan Gómez Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Los girasoles ciegos by Alberto Méndez
Loba Negra by Juan Gómez Jurado
The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor
Sumalee: Historias de Trakaul by Javier Salazar Calle (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

My Year 2018 in Books

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Taking advantage of this nice feature I will summarize My 2018 in Books from Goodreads:

I read 7,224 pages across 56 books, a 112% of my 50 books read in 2018 goal
The average length was 129 pages
My average rating was 3.7 (up to 5)
The longest book I read was Patria, by Fernando Aramburu

The amount of works is not very important (because some of the 56 are comics or short stories) but still 56 books means almost 5 books per month, that translates to one book per week approximately. Not bad, taking into account the other million things that I do (or intend to do) every week.

I’m not copying here the full list, friend me on Goodreads if you are curious, but at least I want to highlight some of them.

I have included in the ranking three books by Juan Gómez Jurado, including the Top 1, so he deserves to be in the featured image of the post obtained from La Opinión de Málaga.

I’m currently reading El Emblema del Traidor also by Juan but when I finish it I will begin my 2019 reading again books by or about J.R.R. Tolkien. I miss it.

My TOP 10 read books in 2018

Reina Roja by Juan Gomez-Jurado (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (you can read my review here in the blog)
Patria by Fernando Aramburu (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (you can read my review in English in Goodreads)
El rayo que no cesa by Miguel Hernández (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Poeta en Nueva York by Federico García Lorca (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Espía de Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado
Ndura: Hijo de la selva by Javier Salazar Calle (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)
Contrato con Dios by Juan Gomez-Jurado
Intemperie by Jesús Carrasco (you can read my review in Spanish in Goodreads)

Travels With Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Travels with Charley: In Search of America is mainly what they call a travelogue o travel literature. It’s not the first time that I read one and I’m starting to enjoy the genre. I added this one to my want to read in Goodreads a long time ago after reading some hilarious paragraphs during a couple of English lessons, and the rest of the book had not disappointed me at all.

John Steinbeck and Charley

In 1960, a 58 years old John Steinbeck bought a small camper to drive around the United States with his dog (Charley). He called the camper Rocinante (here you have a picture of it), the perfect name for a saddle in which to go on adventures. He said before the book was published:

I was advised that the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script would cause curiosity and inquiry in some places. I do not know how many people recognized the name, but surely no one ever asked about it.

The book was published in 1962 and Steinbeck died just six years later. Reading this book you can somehow perceive his age, obviously regarding his health condition but also because he didn’t care about others reading what he wrote or did. When he started the arrangements for the trip, everyone tried to persuade him to abandon the idea because it’s age and chronic disease, but he felt he needed the trip and that it was now or never.

During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

The purpose of the trip was to get to know again his country and, in my opinion, as a way to say goodbye to several places, essential locations for him in the past. This quote summarizes his motivations:

For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago, or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.

Steinbeck beautifully describes his feelings about the places or about the people he encountered, and that is what makes this book remarkable. He takes advantage of the trip circumstances to give his opinion on the social and political issues of 1960: decisive election year between Nixon and Kennedy, the embarrassing (even on those days for him) racial issues in the southern states and the cold war against the Soviet Union, just to give some examples.

As one can imagine reading the book, and it was confirmed some years after the publication, some of the dialogues during his encounters are purely fictional as a mean for the author to describe a situation or a way of thinking of the folks he encountered. Part of the magic resides in guessing which ones are more or less distant from his real experiences. He even describes the approach as a disclaimer:

I've always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.

The book contains dozens of brilliant quotes, some of them with a beautiful and intense description that mentally transfers the reader to a certain American landscape:

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.

You cannot use this book to prepare a similar trip, or to discover any of the places that he visited. He also wrote about it in the last part of the book, as a retrospective of what he finally ended writing, in one of my favorite quotes of the book:

If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their stored pictures would be not only different from mine but equally different from one another. If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness. From start to finish I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this my country. If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

I really liked this book, and for sure I’ll try to read more from Steinbeck.

A Feast for Crows de George R.R. Martin

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: Apenas dispongo de tiempo para preparar (en condiciones) reseñas, pero no quiero dejar la costumbre de poner pequeños pasajes con la esperanza de conseguir atrapar nuevos lectores.

Espero que disfruten tanto como yo del siguiente fragmento de A Feast for Crows de George R.R. Martin. No contiene spoilers, pero sí da una buena idea del ambiente que se respira en la novela, el tono de este tomo me ha parecido especialmente pesimista y desolador (que ya es decir para Canción de Hielo y Fuego).

Crow-Black (and white) by Hamish Irvine,
from Flickr — CC BY-NC

Back on the road, the septon said, “We would do well to keep a watch tonight, my friends. The villagers say they’ve seen three broken men skulking round the dunes, west of the old watchtower.”

“Only three?” Ser Hyle smiled. “Three is honey to our swordswench. They’re not like to trouble armed men.”

“Unless they’re starving,” the septon said. “There is food in these marshes, but only for those with the eyes to find it, and these men are strangers here, survivors from some battle. If they should accost us, ser, I beg you, leave them to me.”

“What will you do with them?”

“Feed them. Ask them to confess their sins, so that I might forgive them. Invite them to come with us to the Quiet Isle.”

“That’s as good as inviting them to slit our throats as we sleep,” Hyle Hunt replied. “Lord Randyll has better ways to deal with broken men—steel and hempen rope.”

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”

“More or less,” Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world...

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them. but he should pity them as well.”

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is going to be my first review in English. Don't Panic! As I recently only read and watch both TV series and films in English (usually without subs) seems to me the perfect way to express ideas and concepts from the books, as well as a way to improve my skills. Please help me notice any inconvenience or mistake.

I've been constantly thinking about this post since I finished the book almost two months ago. In this time lapse Mr. Hitchens died, with the subsequent hard time for us his followers. Embarrassingly I didn't have the time and/or strength to write about it, I found it difficult to write something different than what many others wrote. Although it was not a surprise for anyone, his death truly made me very sad and angry.

Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great

God is not Great is a 2007 book from Christopher Hitchens. In this book he made a fierce and sincere apology against religion, or at least against organized religion. Focusing on the Abrahamic religions, the book contains a perfectly documented collection of facts, personal anecdotes and well chosen arguments. In each of the nineteen chapters the author explains (for example) how religion kills, how do we know some metaphysical claims of religion are false, the lies behind intelligent design, and how some religions have ended in the past.

In Chapter Two, Religion Kills, he described common irrationally violent situations in many cities (Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem or Baghdad) easily attributed to religion. He also wrote about the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie and the crazy actions driven by the US after the September 11 attacks, as examples where religious leaders pursued, allowed and justified big massacres.

In Chapter Four, A Note On Health, he reminds us of some big confrontations between medicine and religion: some vaccines, condoms, the Jewish circumcision and the female genital mutilation rituals, and the pursuing and punishment of homosexuality.

Chapter Five, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False, where Mr. Hitchens explains the difference between the knowledge of the world today and when some religions where founded. He claims that the necessary leap of faith needs to be repeated, and it turns harder to take the more it is taken.

In Chapter Nine, The Koran Is Borrowed From Both Jewish and Christian Myths he examines the religion of Islam and its holy book, the Koran, asserting that it was not supernatural and simply was a compendium of other religious texts and sayings.

Chapter Thirteen, Does Religion Make People Behave Better?, explains how non-religious people stand and pursue moral causes with at least as much strength and clearness as religious people. He also notes many issues of misbehavior in religious leaders.

In Chapter Fourteen, There Is No 'Eastern' Solution, he blames Asiatic religions as Buddhism and Hinduism with similar sins and problems: the violence, the unverifiable assumptions, the unhealthy manners and rituals, etc.

Chapter Fifteen, Religion As An Original Sin, where he declares that there are several ways in which religion is not just amoral but positively immoral, being the faults found not in its adherents but in its original precepts. These include:

Presenting a false picture of the world to the credulous
The doctrine of blood sacrifice
The doctrine of atonement
The doctrine of eternal reward or eternal punishment
The imposition of impossible tasks or rules

And Finally Chapter Nineteen, In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment, where he argues that the human race no longer needs religion, to the point that underestimating religion will improve mankind, and will boost the progress of civilization. He ends asking atheists to fight for a religion-free society.

Some of the commonly selected quotes are:

Organized religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.
I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed. History gives us many other such examples, which I am going to discuss later on. But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion.
At least two major and established religions, with millions of adherents in Africa, believe that the cure is much worse than the disease. They also harbor the belief that the AIDS plague is in some sense a verdict from heaven upon sexual deviance--in particular upon homosexuality.
In Ireland alone--once an unquestioning disciple of Holy Mother Church--it is not estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority.
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion and one would like to think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Conceivably, some readers of these pages will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu and Buddhist murderers and sadists. Perhaps they dimly imagine that contemplative easterners, devoted to vegetarian diets and meditative routines, are immune to such temptations?
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers and explanation of anything important.

Mr. Hitchens was an English (also American since 2007) journalist, author and polemicist, in the wider meaning of the expression. He was considered one of the main intellectuals of the world, and was clearly identified as a Pope (in the techie way) in the atheist movement. After a brilliant career with a lot of polemic confrontations with people as Mother Teresa (Hell's Angel documentary) or Bill Clinton (No One Left to Lie To), and demolishing debates against figures like Tony Blair, he faced some serious health issues due to an oesophageal cancer. On 15 December 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, as a complication of this cancer.

I'm not used to write bios in this blog, but if that moment comes surely he is going to be among the firsts to appear.