Médio. Médio prá quase bom, mas médio. As críticas foram ótimas. Meio decepcionante.

Esse livro ganhou o Booker Prize de 2007. Não gosto de todos os livros que ganham o Booker, mas eles normalmente tem excelente gosto. Dessa vez acertaram em cheio, pelo menos prá mim. A Anne Enright escreve de uma maneira muito própria, interessante, curiosa, cheia de frases redondas, perfeitas, cheias de significado. A história é comum, uma família e seus segredos e brigas e preferências, como todas as famílias. Mas a beleza de linguagem e os traços que formam os personagens fazem com que a gente não largue o livro.

What You Shouldn’t Fear

1. Ditching a secure cubicle for lower pay and an uncertain future in the job where your heart truly lies.
2. Changing your hair, your church, or your opinion.
3. Sweating, outside the bedroom.
4. Traveling to a place where your cell phone is useless.
5. Actually having what you say you want.
6. Leaving the lights on and the curtains open.
7. Your gut reactions.
8. Five pounds.
9. Mixing gold with silver, red with orange, and champagne with plastic glasses.
10. Confessing that you’re a Buddhist, a nudist, or even a conservative Republican.
11. Eating the food on the plane — they’ve solved that fear by not serving it anymore
12. Calling first.
13. Being too shy to talk at a party. If you just listen, everyone will think you’re the most brilliant person there!
14. Going into the sex toy shop. If Sue on Letterman can do it, so can you. And if you can’t, shop online!
15. Tough competition.
16. Carbs, fat and dessert.

What You Should

1. Letting somebody videotape you having sex.
2. Drinking at lunch.
3. The sentence: We have to talk.
4. Microsoft, Google, and that creepy little hotdog stand down near the subway tracks.
5. Spending more than you earn.
6. Gum disease.
7. Still not knowing whether you want to have kids when you’re edging up on 40.
8. Bears, ticks, and snakes with red and yellow stripes that touch.
9. Okay, let’s just include all snakes in this category.
10. Any doctor who responds to your questions by telling you that you don’t need to know the answer.
11. Any dentist who tells you that you don’t need anything for the pain.
12. Any dog with his ears pricked up, his body pointing forward, and his teeth all too visible.
13. Costume parties.
14. Not having a choice when you’re unexpectedly pregnant.
15. Hydrogenated fats.
16. Being afraid.

(não me lembro onde peguei…)

Gênio. Meu livro preferido de hoje em diante (não sei até quando…).

Ótimo. Delicioso mesmo. Curtinho. Li numa sentada.

É meio heavy, mas muito interessante.

” But as men farther exalt their idea of their divinity; it is their notion of his power and knowledge only, not of his goodness, which is improved. On the contrary, in proportion to the supposed extent of his science and authority, their terrors naturally augment; while they believe, that no secrecy can conceal them from his scrutiny, and that even the inmost recesses of their breast lie open before him. They must then be careful not to form expressly any sentiment of blame and disapprobation. All must be applause, ravishment, ecstacy. And while their gloomy apprehensions make them ascribe to him measures of conduct, which, in human creatures, would be highly blamed, they must still affect to praise and admire that conduct in the object of their devotional addresses. Thus it may safely be affirmed, that popular religions are really, in the conception of their more vulgar votaries, a species of daemonism; and the higher the deity is exalted in power and knowledge, the lower of course is he depressed in goodness and benevolence; whatever epithets of praise may be bestowed on him by his amazed adorers. Among idolaters, the words may be false, and belie the secret opinion: But among the more exalted religionists, the opinion itself contracts a kind of falsehood, and belies the inward sentiment. The heart secretly detests such measures of cruel and implacable vengeance; but the judgement dares not but pronounce them perfect and adorable. And the additional misery of this inward struggle aggravates all the other terrors, by which these unhappy victims to superstition are for ever haunted.

Lucian observes that a young man, who reads the history of the gods in Homer or Hesiod, and finds their factions, wars, injustice, incest, adultery, and other immoralities so highly celebrated, is much surprised afterwards, when he comes into the world, to observe that punishments are by law inflicted on the same actions, which he had been taught to ascribe to superior beings. The contradiction is still perhaps stronger between the representations given us by some later religions and our natural ideas of generosity, lenity, impartiality, and justice; and in proportion to the multiplied terrors of these religions, the barbarous conceptions of the divinity are multiplied upon us. Nothing can preserve untainted the genuine principles of morals in our judgement of human conduct, but the absolute necessity of these principle to the existence of society. If common conception can indulge princes in a system of ethics, somewhat different from that which should regulate private persons; how much more those superior beings, whose attributes, views, and nature are so totally unknown to us? Sunt superis sua jura. The gods have maxims of justice peculiar to themselves.”