— Five Questions: A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook

1. Why do you blog?
I’ve waited for years to have a website but being deprived of knowledge of HTML, Java and techie skills, I never knew how to establish one. Then the review community at Amazon.com seemed appealing to me and I began submitting book reviews to the site in 2000. A few of my friends began blogging and I felt my reviews over at Amazon were under appreciated and didn’t get as much noise as they should have - so I decided to start a blog that devotes most to but not exclusively of books and reading. The blog becomes a verbal pondering of what happens in my daily encounter in life.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
A difficult question. I have always been drawn by Russian literature. I don’t know if The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, has influenced me the most but the meaning has registered in me for years. I manage to re-read it every year and I have finished the three or four translations available. Satan disguised as a foreign magician, and along with his thrice-cursed assistants, penetrated a theatre in Moscow with black magic and hypnotic tricks. The novel is meant to deliver the message, and to guide one of a state of enlightenment in which the demarcation of humanity into good and evil is no longer useful and the transcendence of the need for retribution is the goal. The characters eventually are brought to see beyond apparent identity to the real identity, and to understand that Woland and Jesus being the same message. On top of the philosophical depth in redemption and death, the novel bespeaks details from Bulgakov’s own life and a more personal tone in the satire of Woland and the retinue versus the literary powers.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Work in Progress at: http://danitorres.typepad.com/workinprogress/
Life’s Colorful Brushstrokes at: http://lifescolorfulbrushstrokes.blogspot.com/
A Life in the Day at: http://mrgregoc.blogspot.com/

4. Why do you read fiction?
Literature/fiction has the power to afford such chronological and culture diversity so remote from my own experience that makes it very appealing to me.

5. What makes you laugh?
It could be anything really. Goof off with my friends or a funny movie. Mad TV?

Matt blogs at A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook, which can be found here: http://mattviews.blogspot.com

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