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******** awesome book. By Iain Banks, by the way. Finished it tonight, and I was about to eat my own toes. I'm dead serious. I cannot convey the amount of energy I had after reading the last 50 pages of that book. Which is really ironic, considering the ending. But he should have killed his father. Damnit, he came so close, but he didn't. Damn you, Frank! But yeah, I'm going to put in here a little excerpt that really dosen't have anything to do with the storyline, but is a good point, nonetheless.
I remember I used to despise sheep for being so profoundly stupid. I'd seen them eat and eat and eat, I'd watch dogs outsmart whole flocks of them and laughed at the way they ran, watched them get themselves into all sorts of stupid, tangled situation, and I'd thought they quite deserved to end up as mutton, and that being used as wool-making machines was too good for them. It was years, and a long slow process, before I eventualy realised just what sheep really represented: not their own stupidity, but our power, our avarice and egotism. After I'd come to understand evolution and know a little about history and farming, I saw that the thick white animals I laughed at for following each other around and getting caught in bushes were the products of generations of farmers as much as generations of sheep; we made them, we moulded them from the wild, smart survivors that were their ancestors so that they would become docile, frightened, stupid, tasty wool producers. We didn't want them to be smart, and to some extent their aggression and their intelligence went together. Of course, the rams are brighter, but even they are demeaned by the idiotic females they have to associate with and inseminate. The same principle applies to chickens and cows and almost anything we've been able to get our greedy, hungry hands on for long enough. It occasionally occurs to me that something the same might have happened to women but, attractive though the theory might be, I suspect I'm wrong.
Home in time for dinner, I wolfed down my eggs, steak, chips, and beans, and spent the rest of the evening watching television and picking bits of dead cow out of my mouth with a match.
While I will probably slaughter you if you don't read this book, there are quite a few people I would adise not to read it: those too immature to read a description of genitalia (not too graphic, mind you, but it's brought up repeatedly), those too immature to read about homicidal adolescents, and most women. Yes, I know, I am female, but I don't really get offended when he spends half of a chapter bitching about women. I actually agree with a lot of what he says. Yeah, so sue me. But read the book first.
DrasBrisingr · Tue Jan 24, 2006 @ 02:11am · 3 Comments |
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