White Teeth

Just finished a book called White Teeth by Zadie Smith. One of the better reads I’ve had in a bit. Story of three, families, one immigrant, one native, and one mixed in London, period 1945 to 1993. Funny, sad, lyrical…The author has a real touch for the use of language and idioms. She provides some insights into the how, why and results of alienation. Published in 1999. It seems that, at a deeper level, she has a lot to say about the nature of choice and how people deal with the results of those that they have made. She explores two views; those who look to religion, particularly of the fundamentalists’ stripe and those who look to reasoned rational thinking…Age-old questions. Her contribution would appear to be that neither offers any answers. The world around us is much too complex to be able to predict, with any degree of accuracy, the outcome of our decisions (reason/rational). Religion is flawed because it offers no answers other than God’s will which keeps you fixated in the past and that it is populated with people of dubious motivations. When making a decision, flipping a coin is as good as using reason or payer to divine the results. At the end of the day…Do it and get on with it.