All that we see & seem

I had heard a lot about Ayn Rand before i decided to read the Fountainhead and i was impressed when I finally did. Even if you don't agree with her doctrines and her ideas on morality and society, one cannot question that Rand is a gifted author who deserves our time . Anthem is a short book that rewrites history in order to reach its conviction, that man can only excel as an individual, and not in a collective whole. Rand presents a dystopian world in which everything has been labeled and every action has been pre-established and free thinking is restricted because ideas are imposed as n...

As the title bluntly indicates this is a book about grief, mourning, trauma and recovery. It’s an account of the grieving process of a man and his two sons following the death of the wife and mother. Their coping mechanism is physically manifested in the presence of a personified crow that morphs according to their needs; it can be their substitute mother, their friend, their therapist, their excuse or deus ex machina. While the title is clearly inspired by Emily Dickinson, the book revolves around another literary figure, that of Ted Hughes, as the father is a Ted Hughes scholar, there...

I feel like with classic books, there is not really much to say that can be original or has not already been said about them. In any case, as this is my first encounter with this book, I will give my review nonetheless. I am astonished at how perspicacious and insightful George Orwell. He wrote a book about a dystopian future, creating and imagining a world that is not that different to our world today, more than half a century later. In the book he writes the manifestos of an oligarchy that controls the world he describes and the struggle of an individual to set himself free in such a w...