WHAT WILL THE NEW YEAR BRING? REALISTIC PERSPECTIVE! BOOKS WORTH REREADING!

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road To the Deep North: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("[H]e had beside their bed, as he always did, no matter where he was, a book, having returned to the habit or reading in his middle age. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched . . ." Id. at 22. "Darky Gardiner did not have many beliefs. He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In this own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was note finding so many others. Life wasn't about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right." Id. at 169-170. "In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew note cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a could, bamboo to be bamboo." Id. at 227. Also see Michael Gorra, "Bridge to Nowhere," New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 8/31/2014.).