I haven’t managed a Shout it Out Monday in a while and I just began reading Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House and wow! is it good. Actually, I have no idea yet if the story is good, but the writing, oh so smooth and creamy. So I have to share a piece with you – a Friday Find!

What is a good life? What is its opposite? These are questions to which no two men will give the same answers. In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain — hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause — will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiffs, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. We are so divided, so hostile to one another, so driven by sanctimony and scorn, so lost in cynicism, that we call our pomposity idealism, so disenchanted with out rulers, so willing to jeer at the institutions of our state, that the very word goodness has been emptied of meaning and needs, perhaps, to be set aside for a time, like all the other poisoned words, spirituality, for example, final solution, for example, and (at least when applied to skyscrapers and fried potatoes) freedom.

The writing is smooth but the sentiments are sharp. This is shaping up to be a delicious book.