Lectures i divagacions

The Great Gatsby Francis Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 Wildside Press, ebook The Great Gatsby is one of the main classics in American Literature. Located in the Egg, a place close to New York, in the years of the dry law, it develops a live story. Years before the time of the novel, Jay Gatsby and Daisy had fallen on love, but because of the poorness of Gatsby and the WWI they got separated. Years later, we find Gatsby living in the West Egg, in front of the house where Daisy, now married to Tom Buchanan, is living, just across the bay. With the help of Nick Carrafield, that in fact is the narrator of the history, Gatsby manages to get in touch with her again,but the inevitable fate wont give Gatsby the chance of reaching what he has been pursuing during years; in the end he wont be able to be happy with the love of her life. The Great Gatsby is a novel written in 1925, in the times of the prohibition (Dry Laws). However, even though that he writes about a gangster -i...

The Catcher In The Rye J. D. Salinger, 1951 Little, Brown and Company, 224 pàgines It may seem quite pointless to talk about The Catcher In The Rye , as it is one of the greatest classics of XX century's literature. However, after having read the book, I have to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about the nature of the book. Before reading it, I have always thought that it was a very grave novel, with a very significant spiritual content. Now I know I was extremely wrong. The Catcher In The Rye is a novel about a rebellious boy, Holden Cauldfield, that is incapable to find his place on earth. He has been expelled from several schools, because he doesn't feel like studying some kinds of subjects. He has a quite complex personality for his age, and he has the sensation of being above all the boys of his age, and this makes him a conflictive boy. In the novel, we follow him a few days, after having been expelled from Pencey. In this few days, alone in the city, Holden b...

The Road Cormac McCarthy, 2006 Vintage, ebook The Road is the chronicle of the journey of a father and his son, but forget the typical road novel. We are in an undetermined future in a post-apocalyptic world; all signs of civilization had been burnt down to the basis by an undefined catastrophe. In this world, the man and his son travel south, without any final destination; they just hope that things will be better in the south. They have to spend most of their time looking for stores to avoid them from starving to death. If that wasn't bad enough, they also have to keep themselves save, because as world has been reduced to a gray amount of debris and ashes, humanity has gone back to the ages when men ate each other. The Road is a fascinating novel. It is deeply hopeless, because we face a world on which life has almost disappeared and just a few men and woman have survived and are engaged in a permanent struggle for surviving. The man and the boy just keep walking south...

El Laberinto de las aceitunas Eduardo Mendoza, 1982 Booket, 320 pàgines Un intern d'un psiquiàtric barcelonès és segrestat per la policia amb la intenció d'acomplir amb un alt deure per l'estat. Aquesta operació, en principi simple i sense gaire risc aparent, fracassarà de manera estrepitosa, i el nostre protagonista es veurà embolicat en una obscura conxorxa entre gent de la faràndula, policies incompetents i empresaris peculiars que es resoldrà de forma inesperada. Sense dubte, Eduardo Mendoza és el gran mestre de la novel·la d'humor espanyola, fet que demostren obres com la que ens ocupa i altres com l'esplèndida Sin noticias de Gurb . És un gènere que l'autor ha conreat més recentment en novel·les com El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato . Personalment, crec que és molt millor en aquesta vessant que en altres tipus de novel·les, com pugui ser La ciudad de los prodigios , que sense que sigui una novel·la de segon ordre no em va semblar tant bona en ...

If The Dead Rise Not Philip Kerr, 2009 Quercus, ebook kindle Berlin, 1934. Bernie Gunther is working as a house detective at the Adlon hotel. Hedda Adlon, the wife of the hotel owner, asks him a special favor: help Noreen Charalambides, an American journalist friend of her, to investigate the real situation of Jew population in Germany. During this investigation, aimed to promote an American boycott to the Berlin 1934 Olympics, Bernie Gunther will discover a construction racket related to the Olympic sites that will put him on a very complicated situation, in which he will have to choose between love and life... Later on, in 1954 in the city of La Habana, he will have the opportunity to resume the life he was about to have twenty years before, but twenty years might be too much time. If The Dead Rise Not is a story that starts in the era of the Totalitarianism and ends in the era of Cold War. However, it has not a great involvement with the political situations, at least in ...

Resistance to Civil Government (més conegut com a Civil Disobedience ) Henry David Thoreau, 1849 Traducció de Mercè Capdevila Pujol Proteus, 40 pàgines El juliol de 1846, Henry David Thoreau va passar una nit al calabós del seu poble (Concord, Massachusetts) per haver-se negat a pagar els imposts que devia dels sis anys anteriors. D'aquesta experiència, que en cap cas va ser considerada com a negativa per qui la patí, en va néixer un dels textos més influents del segle XIX, el popularment conegut com a La desobediència civil . En aquest assaig breu, que aparegué originalment a la publicació Aesthetic Papers (1849), Thoreau planteja la seva visió de la relació entre l'individu i l'estat, en base a la qual defensa el dret de la persona de viure deslligada de l'estat i fora de les seves imposicions. Una de les idees principals que es desprèn de l'obra és que hom té el dret a la seva individualitat, i que el total sotmetiment a l'estat en cert sentit ...

The Wilt Alternative Tom Sharpe, 1979 Cornerstone digital -ebook- Henry Wilt has a quite comfortable life. He is married to a very energetic and enthusiast of all sorts of "natural" things woman; he is father of quadruplets and is the head of the department of Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology . Furthermore, he lives in a big and wonderful and big house in a high class neighborhood. However, he feels that his life is nothing but miserable. At home he feels like a dummy in the hands of his wife and all his social and environmental thoughts and actions. In addition to that, he neither can't cope with the quadruplets, four outspoken girls that loose no opportunity to importunate him. Things aren't better at work, where he has to bear with the responsibility for the the acts of all his teammates and subordinates and the department, a bunch of bourgeois marxists that just can't help infuriating the school direction with clearly inadequat...