True Grit (Charles Portis)

A classic. Amazingly well written, short and to the point. This is a book that takes many readings. I have not seen either of the movies.

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Quotes:

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats

You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.

“They tell me you are a man with true grit.”

I say nothing against the Cumberlands. They broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education. That is all right but they are not sound on Election. They do not fully accept it. I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6: 13 and II Timothy 1: 9, 10. Also I Peter 1: 2, 19, 20 and Romans 11: 7. There you have it. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for you too.

I said my prayers but did not mention my discomfort. This trip was my own doing.

“Ned does not go around killing people if he has no good reason. If he has a good reason he kills them.”

The Hangman's Daughter (Oliver Pötzsch)

Exciting mystery with unconventional characters, well written, bogus ending. The usual. It treats the subject of torture seriously without being repugnant. Worth a read.

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Quotes:

Jakob grabbed a few ropes from the chest way back in the stable and stuffed them into a sack together with the chains, the rusty pincers, and the linen rags used for mopping up the blood.

“It’s the wrong people that suffer, not the poor. The wrong ones!”

Martha Stechlin’s screams rose from the torture cellar through the narrow windows of the keep into the town. Anyone in the vicinity briefly interrupted their work and crossed themselves or prayed a Hail Mary. Then they continued whatever they had been doing.

His arm, from the elbow to the fingertips, was composed of pieces of bone held together by copper wires passed through holes drilled in the bone.

You Have To Stop This (Pseudonymous Bosch)

The "secret" series comes to an end with an unexpectedly strong conclusion, IMHO every bit as good as the first one ("The Name Of This Book Is Secret"). Questions of the meaning of life, friendship, growing up, intermingle in a very interesting book which i found very difficult to put down. Is the ultimate secret the final answer or just another question? Is the end just another beginning? Well done, PB!

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

I've wanted to ready this one for a long time, but didn't want to commit the time. Now it's done. I like it, but i think i like Anathem better. The author has had time to develop... The 2 books have much in common, and both start real slow and eventually build to a frenzy.

The computer stuff in Cryptonomicon is interesting and almost right, but i know too much about computers and encryption to find this stuff cool. The really cool thing about this book (as it is about Anathem) is how Stephenson is able to build a crazy alternative world that is completely insane and also completely real, so much that you start to question the reality of the so-called real world. Did it really happen this way? Well, didn't it?

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Quotes:

As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.

Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single-edged razor blade across the throat of a tubby politician.

As soon as he got through the formalities at the airport, he perceived that the Philippines are, like Mexico, one of those countries where Shoes Matter.

Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew [about war], which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there.

Waterhouse has been trying to invent a new cryptosystem based upon alternative systems of pronouncing words and hasn’t said anything in quite a while.

we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse.

He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.

“Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily,” Avi says. “Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting.”

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.

THE UNITED STATES Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.

“It seems that, while I have been sneaking around the Atlantic, doing my duty—the Führer has come up with a little incentive program.” (Bishop)

Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant.

“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.” (Enoch Root)

“Gold is the corpse of value,” says Goto Dengo.