Don't worry about spoilers – I don't mind them. Just share the title + an excerpt that you think is most likely to make someone want to read whatever book you're recommending. I'd like if it's longer than a sentence (maybe a paragraph or two), but if you really think just one sentence is best, that's okay.
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by OptimisticOctopus8
6 Comments
LTG William “‘Slim’s great victory’, [in Burma] Professor [Raymond] Callahan concludes ‘– and this is the most that can be claimed for it – helped the British, unlike the French, Dutch, or, later, the Americans, to leave Asia with some dignity. That, perhaps, is no small thing.’
“It also enabled the Indian Army to end its long history in an apotheosis of glory. This was the military instrument which inflicted on the Japanese their greatest defeat on the continent of Asia. ‘The Raj’, Enoch Powell has written, ‘(without intending the pun) was a mirage, a dream which British and Indians dreamed together and which individuals will still dream again when they meet, long, long after other dreams and other hallucinations have succeeded it.’ More than a dream, it was a symbiosis, subsisting on distance, love and misunderstanding, and the Indian Army was one of the best forms of that symbiosis. The subsequent trials of the [Indian National Army] INA leaders in the Red Fort in Delhi, the derisory sentences, the political use to which the trials (inevitably) were put, then the divided Army being scissored along with a divided subcontinent, these still lay ahead as the Indian Army fought its way brilliantly and with a blitzkrieg-style panache into the capital of Burma.
“Its loyalty had been sorely tried by racial discrimination in Malaya, and its raw recruits after the fall of Singapore had fallen easy prey to Japanese propaganda, by the tens of thousands. But by and large that army served its British masters splendidly in its last days before Partition put an end to it forever. Because of Partition, there is a sad air of swansong about the valiant narratives of the last days of the united Indian Army. A passionate farewell to it exists in the pages of Anthony Brett-James’s ‘*Report My Signals*’ (pp. 338-43) and then John Master’s description of the movement of the Indian divisions to Rangoon down the Mandalay Road In the pre-monsoon days of 1945, slicing through Burma faster than von Rundstedt through France in 1940.
“‘… past the ruins of the empire the Japanese had tried to build there, it took possession of the empire *we* had built, in its towering rising dust clouds India traced the shape of her own future. Twenty races, a dozen religions, a score of languages passed in those trucks and tanks … The dust thickened under the trees lining the road until the column was motoring into a thunderous yellow tunnel, first the tanks, infantry all over them, then trucks filled with men, then more tanks, going fast, nose to tail, guns, more trucks, more guns … This was the old Indian Army going down to the attack, for the last time in history, exactly 250 years after the Honourable East India Company had enlisted its first ten sepoys on the Coromandel Coast …’” (pp. 633-34, *Burma: The Longest War 1941-45* by Louis Allen).
“The moon blew up without warning or no apparent reason”
Opening line of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
The warlord chronicles by Bernard cornwell.
“These are the tales of the land we call Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, the country that was once ours but which our enemies now call England. These are the tales of Arthur, the Warlord, the King that Never Was, the Enemy of God and, may the living Christ and Bishop Sansum forgive me, the best man I ever knew. How I have wept for Arthur”
“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.”
“I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything”
“Do you know what a camel is belethg? A kind of coal, lord Blacksmiths use it for making Steel. Do they indeed how interesting but coal won’t be bothered by a grasshopper would it? The contingency would scarcely arise so why suggest it..”
And the saxon stories by Bernard cornwell
“I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and this is the tale of a blood feud. It is a tale of how I will take from my enemy what the law says is mine. And it is the tale of a woman and of her father, a king. He was my king and all that I have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live, and the swords of my men, all came from Alfred, my king, who hated me.“
“There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world’s evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction.”
“War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.“
“These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish, and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.“
“Exactly. This time I’m not going to tell you a story. I’ll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.”
“We’ve all felt that.”
“And all of us, one way or another, are insane.”
– veronika decides to die by Paulo Coelho
***The Bluest Eye*** **(Toni Morrison)**
*“My eyes.”*
*“What about your eyes?”*
*“I want them blue.”*
*That’s why I changed the little black girl’s eyes for her, and I didn’t touch her; not a finger did I lay on her. But I gave her those blue eyes she wanted. Not for pleasure, and not for money. I did what You did not, could not, would not do: I looked at that ugly little black girl, and I loved her. I played You. And it was a very good show! I, I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her the blue, blue, two blue eyes. Cobalt blue. A streak of it right out of your own blue heaven. No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever after. I, I have found it meet and right so to do. Now you are jealous. You are jealous of me. You see? I, too, have created.*
*——–*
***The Hogfather*** **(Terry Pratchett)**
*”All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”*
*REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.*
*”Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”*
*YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.*
*”So we can believe the big ones?”*
*YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.*
*”They’re not the same at all!”*
*YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.*
*”Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”*
*MY POINT EXACTLY.”*
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
– the bell jar by Sylvia Plath