Mimsy Were the Borogoves...and the Momewraths!

I quoth Machiavelli:

...the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

The idealist is doomed, says Niccolo, and yet I pine for ideals. For instance, what is the ideal, the foremost, the summum bonum of literary works for which my time can be dovoted in this noble effort we call the book club. The ideal book, as our resident poet extraordinaire has explained, must lift us to great heights, both mentally and emotionally - not to create in man a dichotomy, of course. The ideal book for the book club must be a classic, it must be short (we are scholars of other disciplines with limited time), and it must be like delightful candy - sweet, and creating in the reader a sense of joy, mirth, and wanton pleasure. When we are done, we will all rejoice and make merry having been stuffed to the rafters which such goodness.

Perhaps, Graham Greene's The Quiet American


One reviewer summarized: "Fowler (the main character) is a perfect Graham Greene protagonist--the man who has no particular moral, religious or political beliefs who finds himself perched on a moral precipice--with moral redemption on one side and the moral abyss on the other."

What book says you?