读书笔记

根据上级党组织创先的工作安排，要求每个党员做好“读好一本书”的工作，本人最近利用业余读了一些书籍，有些是娱乐型的书籍，其中也不乏有深刻思想的一本书--《棚屋》。

《棚屋》加拿大作家威廉·扬所著，该书持续三年居全美各大畅销书榜前3名，超越《达·芬奇密码》创造的所有记录。“没有媒体的狂轰滥炸，没有奥普拉的推荐，全凭民间的口口相传，《棚屋》创造了销量超过1000万册的奇迹。”（摘自《纽约时报》）带着这样的宣传，我比较好奇的买下了这本书。

这是一本带有神学色彩的小说。该书主要讲述男主人公麦克在痛失爱女后如何克服心中巨恸，回归生活的心路历程。三年前，麦克带着三个儿女外出度假，结果小女儿梅西在山间的湖边棚屋被凶手杀害。此后麦克一直生活在心中自责、巨恸的阴影当中，一蹶不振，连自己另外两个心爱的孩子以及妻子也忽视了。直到一个邮差无法送行的风雪天，麦克意外的收到一封署名“father”的来信，邀他去湖边的棚屋（梅西遇害的地点）相见。这是凶手的阴谋？还是一场恶作剧？抑或是上帝的邀请??其后小说的内容主要叙述麦克硬着头皮前往棚屋，发现邀请者居然真的是上帝、耶稣以及萨拉玉（基督教中的真神之一），其后三位“father”与麦克共同生活了一段时间，教会了麦克很多做人甚至做神的道理，由此麦克深刻领悟了人生道理，最终对那段不堪的往事释怀，重新振作起来，并重拾起了爱，用爱去拥抱活在身边的爱人。

做为对西方宗教不大了解的中国人看来，可能很难理解为什么一本如此情节简单的书籍会如此叫好又叫座。其实仔细读来，该书的思想主线就是两个字：宽恕。这个思想也是中国文化的一部分，中国文化中有一种气魄，宰相肚里能撑船，可以说是宽恕的一种普适价值解释。黎巴嫩诗人纪伯伦说过：一个伟大的人有两颗心，一颗心流血，另一颗心宽容。这是该书开篇引用的一句话，让我印象非常深刻，甚至对该句话的印象程度超过了全书，时常拿起它来考量自己的思想与行动。

宽恕是德行中的德行，会原谅、宽恕他人的人才是最快乐的人。在这一点上

无须多言，把思想在拓展开来，能够宽恕自己做处的环境、历史的人，才是永远快乐的人。正所谓“不以物喜，不以己悲”，就是中国文化中对宽恕的另外一种深层次的定义。联想起现在一小部分共 产 党员缺乏这种对人对物的宽恕气度，而误入歧途，走上犯罪道路。有的人对自己的物质生活欲求不满，并没有意识到自己的权利是来自于人民，而是与人民为敌，走上贪污受贿的不归之路；有的人热衷于与别人较劲，认为别人不能过的比自己好；更有甚者，对举报者或者提出异见的人士不仅不虚心接受，反而心存恶念，动用手中权力打击、报复。这里面有规章制度的原因，但是归根结底还是人的思想上不够成熟，以一种自私自利的角度看问题，不能对一些个人得失释怀。

正确的看待问题，是共 产 党员必备的素质；以一种宽恕的胸怀待人接物，更是一种高尚的情操。

-----谭可立

 

第二篇：读书笔记4

Wuhan Institute of Technology

读 书 笔 记

书 目 名 称 The Great Gatsby 起 止 页 码 120-194

姓 名 邓林 班 级 2014级英语2班 学 号 1410010406 指 导 教 师 陈珩 所 在 学 院 外语学院

20xx年5月

On Cross-cultural Communication Chapter 7 brings the conflict between Tom and Gatsby into the open, and their confrontation over Daisy brings to the surface troubling aspects of both characters. Throughout the previous chapters, hints have been accumulating about Gatsby’s criminal activity. Research into the matter confirms Tom’s suspicions, and he wields his knowledge of Gatsby’s illegal activities in front of everyone to disgrace him. Likewise, Tom’s sexism and hypocrisy become clearer and more obtrusive during the course of the confrontation. He has no moral qualms about his own extramarital affairs, but when faced with his wife’s infidelity, he assumes the position of outraged victim.

The importance of time and the past manifests itself in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. Gatsby’s obsession with recovering a blissful past compels him to order Daisy to tell Tom that she has never loved him. Gatsby needs to know that she has always loved him, that she has always been emotionally loyal to him. Similarly, pleading with Daisy, Tom invokes their intimate personal history to remind her that she has had feelings for him; by controlling the past, Tom eradicates Gatsby’s vision of the future. That Tom feels secure enough to send Daisy back to East Egg with Gatsby confirms Nick’s observation that Gatsby’s dream is dead.

Gatsby’s decision to take the blame for Daisy demonstrates the deep love he still feels for her and illustrates the basic nobility that defines his character. Disregarding her almost capricious lack of concern for him, Gatsby sacrifices himself for Daisy. The image of a pitiable Gatsby keeping watch outside her house while she and Tom sit comfortably within is an indelible image that both allows the reader to look past Gatsby’s criminality and functions as a moving metaphor for the love Gatsby feels toward Daisy. Nick’s parting from Gatsby at the end of this chapter parallels his first sighting of Gatsby at the end of Chapter 1. In both cases, Gatsby stands alone in the moonlight pining for Daisy. In the earlier instance, he stretches his arms out toward the green light across the water, optimistic about the future. In this instance, he has made it past the green light, onto the lawn of Daisy’s house, but his dream is gone forever.

Gatsby’s recounting of his initial courting of Daisy provides Nick an opportunity to analyze Gatsby’s love for her. Nick identifies Daisy’s aura of wealth and privilege—her many clothes, perfect house, lack of fear or worry—as a central component of Gatsby’s attraction to her. The reader has already seen that Gatsby idolizes both wealth and Daisy. Now it becomes clear that the two are intertwined in Gatsby’s mind. Nick implicitly suggests that by making the shallow, fickle Daisy the focus of his life, Gatsby surrenders his extraordinary power of visionary hope to the simple task of amassing wealth. Gatsby’s dream is reduced to a motivation for material gain because the object of his dream is unworthy of his power of dreaming, the quality that makes him “great” in the first place.

In this way, Gatsby continues to function as a symbol of America in the 1920s, which, as Fitzgerald implies throughout the novel’s exploration of wealth, has become vulgar and empty as a result of subjecting its sprawling vitality to the greedy pursuit of money. Just as the American dream—the pursuit of happiness—has degenerated into a quest for mere wealth, Gatsby’s powerful dream of happiness with Daisy has become the motivation for lavish excesses and criminal activities.

Although the reader is able to perceive this degradation, Gatsby is not. For him, losing Daisy is like losing his entire world. He has longed to re-create his past with her and is now forced to talk to Nick about it in a desperate attempt to keep it alive. Even after the confrontation with Tom, Gatsby is unable to accept that his dream is dead. Though Nick implicitly understands that Daisy is not going to leave Tom for Gatsby under any circumstance, Gatsby continues to insist that she will call him.

Throughout this chapter, the narrative implicitly establishes a connection between the weather and the emotional atmosphere of the story. Just as the geographical settings of the book correspond to particular characters and themes, the weather corresponds to the plot. In the previous chapter, Gatsby’s tension-filled confrontation with Tom took place on the hottest day of the summer, beneath a fiery and intense sun. Now that the fire has gone out of Gatsby’s life with Daisy’s decision to remain with Tom, the weather suddenly cools, and autumn creeps into the air—the gardener even wants to drain the pool to keep falling leaves from clogging the drains. In the same way that he clings to the hope of making Daisy love him the way she used to, he insists on swimming in the pool as though it were still summer. Both his downfall in Chapter 7 and his death in Chapter 8 result from his stark refusal to accept what he cannot control: the passage of time.

Gatsby has made Daisy a symbol of everything he values, and made the green light on her dock a symbol of his destiny with her. Thinking about Gatsby’s death, Nick suggests that all symbols are created by the mind—they do not possess any inherent meaning; rather, people invest them with meaning. Nick writes that Gatsby must have realized “what a grotesque thing a rose is.” The rose has been a conventional symbol of beauty throughout centuries of poetry. Nick suggests that roses aren’t inherently beautiful, and that people only view them that way because they choose to do so. Daisy is “grotesque” in the same way: Gatsby has invested her with beauty and meaning by making her the object of his dream. Had Gatsby not imbued her with such value, Daisy would be simply an idle, bored, rich young woman with no particular moral strength or loyalty.

Likewise, though they suggest divine scrutiny both to the reader and to Wilson, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are disturbing in part because they are not the eyes of God. They have no precise, fixed meaning. George Wilson takes Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes for the all-seeing eyes of God and derives his misguided belief that Myrtle’s killer must have been her lover from that inference. George’s assertion that the eyes represent a moral standard, the upholding of which means that he must avenge Myrtle’s death, becomes a gross parallel to Nick’s desire to find a moral center in his life. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg can mean anything a character or

reader wants them to, but they look down on a world devoid of meaning, value, and beauty—a world in which dreams are exposed as illusions, and cruel, unfeeling men such as Tom receive the love of women longed for by dreamers such as Gatsby and Wilson.

Nick thinks of America not just as a nation but as a geographical entity, land with distinct regions embodying contrasting sets of values. The Midwest, he thinks, seems dreary and pedestrian compared to the excitement of the East, but the East is merely a glittering surface—it lacks the moral center of the Midwest. This fundamental moral depravity dooms the characters of The Great Gatsby—all Westerners, as Nick observes—to failure. The “quality of distortion” that lures them to the East disgusts Nick and contributes to his decision to move back to Minnesota. There is another significance to the fact that all of the major characters are Westerners, however. Throughout American history, the West has been seen as a land of promise and possibility—the very emblem of American ideals. Tom and Daisy, like other members of the upper class, have betrayed America’s democratic ideals by perpetuating a rigid class structure that excludes newcomers from its upper reaches, much like the feudal aristocracy that America had left behind. Gatsby, alone among Nick’s acquaintances, has the audacity and nobility of spirit to dream of creating a radically different future for himself, but his dream ends in failure for several reasons: his methods are criminal, he can never gain acceptance into the American aristocracy (which he would have to do to win Daisy), and his new identity is largely an act. It is not at all clear what Gatsby’s failure says about the dreams and aspirations of Americans generally, but Fitzgerald’s novel certainly questions the idea of an America in which all things are possible if one simply tries hard enough.

The problem of American dreams is closely related to the problem of how to deal with the past. America was founded through a dramatic declaration of independence from its own past—its European roots—and it promises its citizens the potential for unlimited advancement, regardless of where they come from or how poor their backgrounds are. Gatsby’s failure suggests that it may be impossible for one to disown one’s past so completely. There seems to be an impossible divide separating Gatsby and Daisy, which is certainly part of her allure for him. This divide clearly comes from their different backgrounds and social contexts.

Throughout the novel, Nick’s judgments of the other characters are based in the values that he inherited from his father, the moral “privileges” that he refers to in the opening pages. Nick’s values, so strongly rooted in the past, give him the ability to make sense out of everything in the novel except for Gatsby. In Nick’s eyes, Gatsby embodies an ability to dream and to escape the past that may ultimately be impossible, but that Nick cherishes and values nonetheless. The Great Gatsby represents Nick’s struggle to integrate his own sense of the importance of the past with the freedom from the past envisioned by Gatsby.