Listed in their order of “birth”, they are called Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium.

Destruction has abandoned his realm, and Delight turned into Delirium. Other than that, they still fulfill their functions, as they have done from the very beginning.

Although all the seven Endless play major parts, Dream - also called Lord Shaper and Morpheus, amongst many other names – is the main protagonist of the series The Sandman, which was written by Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman is among my favourite authors, and other books I would highly recommend are “Neverwhere“, “Good Omens“, “American Gods“, “The Graveyard Book“, “Smoke and Mirrors” and “Fragile Things” (the last two being collections of short stories).

Style
The Sandman consists of ten graphic novels. In every book, he works with around ten different artists. Thus the visual style changes a lot throughout the books.

I don’t like “comics”. The Sandman is not a comic. It’s one of the most inspiring, most creative, most ingenious, mysterious, thoughtful, it’s one of the most intelligent “graphic novel serious” ever written.

As are Neil Gaiman’s other books.

Rating
1+
Must read if you are somehow interested in fantasy, myths, religion, history, psychology or literature.

(Thanks to D. for hosting me for half a year in Norway, for having the books in the shelf, and for working so much that I actually had the time to read all of them)

Quotes

“When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you awake, you always forget.”
– Dream

“Not knowing everything is all that makes it okay, sometimes.”
– Delirium

“The Endless are merely patterns. The Endless are wave functions. The endless ar repeating motifs. The Endless are echoes of darkness, and nothing more.”
– Destruction

“This is the second brother I have lost, whispered Despair in her shadowy voice. I cared for him, very much. He was so wise; he seemed so certain of the rightness of his actions. And I, who do nothing but doubt, admired that in him. He was a creature of hope. For dreams are hopes, and echoes of hopes.”
– Despair

The Sandman, Part I: Preludes and Nocturnes; Amazon, 12.95 Euros (delivery free of charge)

And it really is the story as presented in “Pride & Prejudice” by Jane Austen. Just with a couple of zombies as extra.

To give you an example, I will present the first line of each books:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

So, it’s rather close really.

Pride, Prejudice & Zombies is written “by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith“, says the book. If you look at the back cover, you’ll find details about the authors:

Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature. Seth Grahame-Smith once took a class in English literature. He lives in Los Angeles.

Style
Hilarious. Grahame-Smith mimicks Austen’s style perfectly. An example:

Elizabeth: one of our heroines. An athletic zombie slayer par excellence. Beautiful, wild. Looking for a husband. Well, her parents are looking for a husband for her. She’s quite happy without.
Charlotte: Elizabeth’s best friend, who was bitten by a zombie a couple of weeks ago, and is slowly transforming. Elizabeth can’t bring herself to kill her, so she tries to cover up Charlotte’s symptoms.

The following scene takes place at a dinner in a very luxurious castle:

Elizabeth watched Charlotte bow slightly, and then limp to the furniture to the furthest corner of the room, where she lifted the bottom of her gown and bent her knees into a squat. Elizabeth immediately excused herself, rose, and (taking care not to draw attention) grabbed Charlotte by the arm and escorted her to the toilette, where she watched her stricken friend suffer through a quarter-hour of a sickness so severe that decorum prevents its description in these pages.

Rating
2

You can buy the book on Amazon for currently 8.74 Euros, no shipping costs:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

(this posting is dedicated to Sara who didn’t help me out with the word “back cover”)
(thanks to Marit for the book!)

Es gab welche, für die der Glanz des Lebens nur ein Trugfeuer war. Höhnisch mit unseligen Händen, Parias, die eine hündische Angst durch die Straßen hetzte, Mörder und Gezeichnete. [...]
Er hatte es schon immer gefühlt, schon damals, wie er als Knabe in dem wilden Buche las und nach Abenteuern hungerte. In den blassen Flammen seiner wurmstichigen Jugend war immer ein rötlicher Hauch gewesen, der aus den schlimmsten Verstecken seines Herzen kam. Das Glück der andern war ihm ein kindisches Bilderrätsel. Planlos hatte er mit dem Schicksal gespielt und war an seinen armseligen Mausefallen vorbeigestolpert, ohne sich zu verletzen.

“Severins Gang in die Finsternis” erschien im Jahre 1914 als zweiter Roman von Paul Leppin, der selbst in Prag aufgewachsen ist. Eine sehr lesenswerte Biographie, v.a. wenn man sich noch nicht so sehr mit der Frühlings-Generation auseinandergesetzt hat (nicht zu verwechseln mit dem Prager Frühling).

Stil
Man muss mit Superlativen vorsichtig sein … aber ich denke, ich kenne keinen Autor, der derart bildlich zu beschreiben vermag.

Und ein wunderbares und überlebensgroßes Glück rann ihm wie siedendes Metall ins Blut und brannte in sein armes, von der Liebe bewältigtes Herz eine süße, korallenrote Narbe.

Paul Leppin ist ein Großmeister der synästhetischen Beschreibungen, ich habe mir beim Lesen häufig “genau so ist es!” gedacht, und doch habe ich zuvor die geschilerten Dinge niemals in dieser Form beschrieben gefunden. Er gibt Gerüchen Farbe und Gedanken einen Geschmack.
Kurt Pinthus rezensierte das Buch kurz nach dem Erscheinen im Jahre 1914:

“Dies ist ein Gespensterroman, in dem kein Gespenst unheimlich Grausen verbreitend auftritt. Sondern eins der stillsten, unaufdringlichsten und dennoch ernstesten, künstlerischsten Bücher, die in den letzten Monaten emportauchten. Zugleich ein Buch, das beunruhigt, das niederdrückt, das ein wirreres Grauen in uns weckt als unheimliche Geschichten und spukhafte Abenteuer. Denn das Grauen rührt uns an, welches das Leben, das Geschehen an sich birgt, jenes scheinbar hintaumelnde, sinnlose Geschehen, das unbiegsam, unverwirrbar trotz aller Wirrnis zu seinem Ziele zwingt.”

Bewertung
1

Und hier gibt es das Buch bei Amazon (zur Zeit 12.90€).

(Danke an Solveig – ohne Dich wäre mein Bücherregal nur halb so voll, und ich ein reicher Mann.)

The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian’s beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil’s garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil’s, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry’s world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian’s wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

Style
I can’t remember reading a book so slowly, so carefully. Every sentence feels like a precious truth made of glass. I tend to highlight sentences or paragraphs I like with a red pencil – the book is a red mess. Especially the very philosophical, contradictory and hedonistic character Lord Henry Wotton is a source of ingenious inspiration.
Wow. The downside of reading this book is the depression following afterwards, because you will soon realize that “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. Oh cruel world!

Rating
1

(You get the book for ridiculous 2.40€ on Amazon - no shipping costs.)

Quotes

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

One charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet – we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together – we tell each other the monst absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it – much better than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she finds me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me?

I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no princples better than anything else in the world.

I think you are wrong, but I won’t argue. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

The post on her left was occupied by Mr Erskine of Treadley, and old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everyhing that he had to say before he was thirty.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the truimph of mind over morals.

You will always be in love with love.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid the others might pick them up.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and always ends by deceiving others.

Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect – to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord – there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! [...] He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Unselfish people are colourless.

Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. [...] To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life – that is the important thing.

If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

All sins, as theologicans weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets of life. I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

To get back youth I would do anything, except take exercise, get up early or be respectable.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

Content
Small Gods is one of the many Discworld Novels he wrote. I won’t go into very much detail here, it’s mainly about religion and religious people living on a flat world (disc), which is carried by 4 elephants standing on shell of a giant turtle, which is swimming through the universe. There are many gods on the discworld, but they can only live as long as people believe in them. The more followers they have, the more powerful they are.
The god Om has a whole state praying to him. Omnianism is state religion in Omnia. There’s lots of inquisition and burning people going on. But soon the God finds out that out of those hundreds of thousands of followers, actually only one person believes in him – and he has to get his powers back, because he’s trapped in the body of a little turtoise, powerless, and things get difficult …

Style
Pratchett is such an awesome writer. He manages to talk about real people, to criticize society, to ask very difficult questions and point out very tough things by writing a hilarious, extremely inventive, ingenious story about a funny dude running around with a god trapped in the body of a small tortoise. The book is never serious. The book never feels heavy, I actually laughed a lot reading in the metro, and still, between the lines, there’s a lot of truth going on. Serious truth. It’s an incredible skill cheering people up whilst adressing such issues.
And apart from this “meta” writing skills, his writing skills are amazing and outstanding. I decided to allow myself one discworld novel a month from now on, until I run out of money or books eventually.

Rating
1

(Thanks to Thomas for the awesome book!)

Quotes

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

The existance of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.

Brutha`s foot kicked against something yellow-white, which bounced away among the rocks making a noice like a sackful of coconuts. In the stifling empty silence of the desert, it echoed loudly.
“What was that?”
“Definitely not a skull”, lied Om. “Don’t worry …”
“There’s bones everywhere”
“Well? What did you expect? This is a desert! People die here! It’s a very popular occupation in this vicinity!”

Cusp had formed an opinion that Vorbis was somehhere on the other side of madness. Ordinary madness he could deal with. But Vorbis had passed right through that red barrier and had built some kind of logical structure on the other side.

The unwritten motto of the Inquisition: Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.

“The way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.”

There were 1183 religious books in the library, each one – according to itself – the only book any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. As Didactylos used to say, you had to laugh.

Positiv ist hervorzuheben, dass er wunderschön schreibt, dass er viele Dinge beim Namen nennt, die meiner Meinung nach absolut korrekt sind, und dass er nicht nur Fakten, sondern auch Gedankengänge und Schlüsse präsentiert, die (zumindest für mich) neu waren; auch hat er sehr ordentlich recherchiert, und listet fast durchgehend Quellen auf.

Negativ (aber unterhaltsam) ist eindeutig die polemische Art, die er teilweise an den Tag legt – darüberhinaus hat er auch hin und wieder schlicht Unrecht (so behauptet er z.B., Einstein hätte lediglich einen metaphorischen Glauben besessen, was faktisch falsch ist, wenn man die Veröffentlichungen Einsteins als Grundlage nimmt; auch behauptet er mehrfach, Religionen wären “widerlegt”, was natürlich Unsinn ist – an anderer Stelle sagt er nämlich selbst, dass man die Nicht-Existenz eines Gottes natürlich niemals verifizieren kann).

Ich habe mir die Mühe gemacht, einige Gedanken abzutippen, weil ich sie für spannend/diskussionswürdig halte. Ich hoffe, lieber Herr Schmidt-Salmon, dass sie das nicht als Copyrightverletzung sehen – schließlich soll das ganze der Verbreitung des Buches dienen.

Wenn ein Mensch etwas glaubt, so heißt dies möglicherweise nur, dass er etwas vermutet, dass er sich seines Wissens nicht ganz sicher ist. Diese rationale Form des Glaubens ist [...] unproblematisch, schließlich sollte jedem, der sich auch nur halbwegs mit Erkenntnis- oder Wissenschaftstheorie beschäftigt hat, klar sein, dass alles Wissen “durchwebt ist von Vermutung”, wie Xenophanes schon vor Jahrtausenden formuliert hat.
Schwierigkeiten bereit hingegen die zweite Bedeutung von Glaube, die exakt das Gegenteil meint: Wenn jemand von sich sagt, er glaube, so kann das auch heißen, dass er etwas für unbedingt wahr hält, dass er sich des Geglaubten über alle Maßen sicher ist. Diese irrationale Form des Glaubens widerspricht nicht nur unserem Wissen um die notwendige Begrenztheit unseres Wissens, sie ist zudem aus zwei weiteren Gründen [...] inakzeptabel:

• Durch die Unbedingtheit des Glaubens werden historisch bedingte Irrtürmer sowie unzulängliche Moralorstellungen für die Zukunft festgeschrieben, also künftige Erkenntnis- und Humanitätsfortschritte zugunsten dogmatischer Borniertheit verhindert.
• Unbedingter religiöser Glaube beschwört fast unweigerlich religiöse Konflikte herauf. [...]

Evolutionäre Humanisten [...] lassen lieber falsche Ideen sterben, bevor Menschen für falsche Ideen steben müssen. [...] Sie gehen davon aus, dass die wissenschaftlichen Verfahren Logik (Überprüfung von Aussagen auf ihre Widerspruchsfreiheit) und Empirie (systematische Konfrontation von Tatsachenbehauptungen mit der Erfahrungswirklichkeit) die besten Instrumente sind, die die Menschheit bislang entwickelt hat, um gültige Erkenntnisse über die Welt zu gewinnen und die menschlichen Lebensverhältnisse humaner zu gestalten. [...]
Während Wissenschaftler wissen, dass sie nur etwas glauben (= für wahr halten), was heute angemessen erscheint, morgen aber möglicherweise schon überholt ist, glauben Gläubige, etwas zu wissen, was auch morgen noch gültig sein soll, obwohl es in der Regel schon heute widerlegt ist.

Klar ist: wer auch nur halbwegs redlich mit diesen “heiligen Texten” umgeht, der weiß, dass sie mit Humanität, mit der Gewährung von Menschenrechten, Demokratie, Meinungsfreiheit etc. herzlich wenig zu tun haben. Würden sie [...] sich nicht ständig selbst belügen, müssten sie zugeben, dass sämtliche religiösen Quellentexte weit unter dem ethischen Mindeststandard jeder halbwegs zivilisierten Gesellschaft stehen.
Dies gilt nicht nur für die in den Texten enthaltenen göttlichen Gebote (beispielsweise die Forderung nach der Todesstrafe für homosexuelle Handlungen oder Glaubensabfall in den Quellentexten des Judentums, Christentums und des Islam), sondern auch für das dort angeblich dokumentierte Verhalten der vermeintlich obersten, moralischen Autorität (Gott).
Als ethisches Vorbild für unsere Zeit taugt der Gott der Juden, Christen und Muslime gewiss nicht. [...] Kein noch so verkommenes Subjekt unserer Spezies hat jemals derartig weitreichende Verbrechen begangen.

Halten wir fest: Es ist eine historisch unumstößliche Tatsache, dass die fundamentalen Rechte (insbesondere die Menschenrechte), die die Grundlage für eine moderne, offene Geselslchaft bilden, keineswegs den Religionen entstammten, sondern vielmehr in einem Jahrhunderte währenden säkularen Eanzipationskampf gegen die Machtansprüche dieser Religionen durchgesetzt werden mussten.

Für jeden halbwegs aufgeklärt denkenden Protestanten dürfte es kaum eine peinlichere Erfahrung geben als die Lektüre der Texte Martin Luthers. [...] Im blinden Vertrauen auf die ewige Wahrheit der Bibel forderte Luther u.a. die Ermordung sog. “Hexen”, die vollständige Vertreibung der Juden (kein Haus dieser vermeintlichen Gottesmörder sollte nach Luthers Überzeugung stehen bleiben – siehe Luthers Schrift “Von Juden und ihren Lügen”) sowie die gnadenlose Eliminierung der aufständischen Bauern (denen er ebenfalls vorwarf, vom Teufel besessen zu sein, weil sich diese im scharfen Widerspruch zu den Geboten der “Heiligen Schrift” gegen die angeblich von Gott eingesetzten weltlichen Herrscher aufgelehnt hatten).

Die größte aktuelle Bedrohung für Homo sapiens besteht nicht in Erdbeben und Tsunamis, nicht in Vulkanausbrüchen und Meteoriteneinschägen, nicht in korrupten Regierungen oder Konjunktureinbrüchen, sondern in einer strukturell bedingten Dummheit. [...] in Wahrheit steckt hinter der ganzen Misere aber nur eine einzigartige, gigantische, weltumspannende Riesenblödheit.

Die größte intellektuelle und emotionale Herausforderung für jeden, der sich ernsthaft mit dem Menschen und seiner Geschichte beschäftigt, besteht darin, der Versuchung nicht zu erliegen, Zyniker zu werden.