Redwall - Brian Jacques

 A re-read from when I was a kid. I read a lot of the Redwall books and enjoyed the adventures. Still fun. So to speak.

Dead Aid - Dambisa Moyo

 

A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul

 

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

Re-read, re-post: "He could think of no reason for the transponder sending unit to be in the hotel. He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that."

This time through I was struck by the subtlety of Chigurh's mind and the falling-away of Bell. One of the terrifying things about Chigurh is the clarity of thought, and subsequent action, he seems to demonstrate. Rarely is he tripped-up or caught off-guard. This gives him an apparent single purpose to his actions. Bell, as he admits time and again, feels overmatched by what is coming. Ellis tells him that cannot be stopped, that you cannot get back what was lost. Bell's self-described story is one of failure. As narrator he may hold that the country has changed. Ellis suggests it has not. Its always been hard on people. We are left wondering if Bell, who seemed to model himself after his grandfather, would not have been better off paying closer heed to his father's example - who we hear little about. Perhaps. There are no clear answers.

"I knew he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there is all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."

Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier

 

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

 This time through I was struck that McCarthy actually pulls his punches in terms of the violence perpetrated by the Kid. The judge speaks to this towards the book’s conclusion: how the Kid alone did not give his heart entire to the terrible mission of Glanton and his mercenaries. Yet, in a book infused terrible violent deeds, McCarthy almost entirely skips over the Kid during the more horrific scenes. Why? Are we meant to think he is any more innocent? If this is McCarthy’s intent what do we make of the judge’s verdict? No one inhabiting the battlefield is free from war.

Portfolios of the Poor - Collins et al.

 A masterful scholarly work - though accessible to non-experts - examining how the world's poor live on $2 or less per day. Using in-depth 'financial diaries' the authors reveal the world's poor (focusing on Pakistan, India, and South Africa) to have much more dynamic and fluid financial lives than the uninitiated might think. The book provides important insights into how to combat poverty, emphasizing that the poor suffer from the 'triple-whammy' of low and irregular incomes, and a lack of available financial instruments. Recommendations for microfinance and addressing systemic poverty are included. A must-read for anyone interested in leveling the economic playing field on any scale.