2016 Reading Challenge: a book published before you were born

Honestly, the challenge in finding a book for this category was in narrowing it down to just one book!  I'm pretty sure that ALL of the canonical classics were published before I was born.  (That year was 1991, so booknerds, please let me know if there are any classics that are younger than I!)

Before I spent too much energy trying to decide on a book, I went to my town's Labor Day weekend festival with a friend.  (People from Berkley: it's basically like Berkley Days, but for Labor Day!)  There was a used book sale going on in one area, and books were ALL $1 each!  Ahh!  I grabbed two mysteries that seemed interesting, a Kathy Reichs book, and then I happened to notice sitting there a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth.  It's a very nice hard cover, with a built-in bookmark ribbon, and by the inscription it was evidently a Christmas present for someone named Connor in 2009 from his aunt and uncle.  I kind of really like knowing who it used to belong to!  I hope that Connor at least read the book, and willingly donated it to the sale.  If he lost it and it somehow wound up donated to a book sale, I'd feel bad.

Anyway!

Yet again, Jules Verne's writing style kind of disappointed me.  It was nowhere near as bad as getting through Tolkein, but it definitely did drag every now and then.  Some of it - the high formality of the language, for example - could be the fault of the translator.  There were definitely a few sentences that I had to read a few times in order to understand.  (My beginner's knowledge of German could imagine the different grammatic structure of the German sentence, and then imagine the translator struggling between a literal translation which probably felt more "true" to him, vs a more casual English sentence structure that reads easier but is perhaps a technically less accurate translation.)

I ended up reading this a lot more quickly than I normally would have.  When I read the first few chapters, it was at home on my couch as usual... and I kept struggling to stay awake, due in part to my odd fatigue all summer long, the slow/formal language of the book, and how comfy my couch is.  But before too long, I got an internship with The Advocacy Project in downtown DC!  I decided to take the Metro rather than attempt to drive during the morning rush hour, and boy oh boy does that ~40 minutes each way 3 days a week make for a lot of great reading time!  One day, there was a 20 minute delay on the Metro, and rather than get all frazzled about being late to work I simply smiled and read for an extra 20 minutes that morning.

When I saw the 2008 movie with Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson, I either heard or figured (or both) that it was quite different from the book.  But, wow, it was REALLY different.  It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but I remember them doing a lot of running from dinosaurs and something about a ground that was over a bottomless pit, and said ground was very fragile and dangerous to walk on.  Not to mention that they spent the majority of the movie actually in the center of the Earth.

But the book?  They didn't even enter the extinct volcano (from several thousand feet ABOVE the surface) until HALFWAY THROUGH the book.  Then, while they certainly spent several months and a good portion of the book very deep beneath the surface, they actually never make it to the center of the Earth!  The book is definitely more about the journey TO, while the movie is about the adventures IN.  So, that was definitely a surprise.  Of course I figured that the book would be slower and a little less action-packed, simply because of the time period it was written in, but I guess I also expected some of the scenes that I remembered from the movie to be in the book.

Despite the differences, I did enjoy the book.  I don't think it quite earned a place on my list of favorites, again mainly because of the formal language, but I'm definitely glad that I read it!  It also amused me that I read the bulk of the book on the subway, which averages about 4 stories below ground.  Here are my heroes several hundred leagues under the Earth, and I'm suffering from the pressure on my ears less than one thousandth of a league under the surface!

Coming up next in the challenge: probably a book chosen for me by a friend.  Last night at my crochet meetup, we talked a lot about books and I complained about how many difficult books I've read this year.  My friends had a looooot of good recommendations for me!  I'm excited to read some of them.  I'm also planning on reading The Magic Kingdom of Landover series, which I discovered on Goodreads and am very intrigued by.  Also, I started watching Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell on Netflix, and I'd reeeeeally like to read the book!  I got the audiobook on Audible (woo free Gold subscription trial!), which I think will be great on the Metro because I'll be able to let my eyes rest but still get through my book.  If you had told me this time last year that I'd be flying through much more than one book per month, I'd have been pretty surprised!

Myla Goldberg: Bee Season

My decision to read this book isn't actually part of the 2016 reading challenge.  That's right, after so many years of barely reading, I'm reading an extra book on top of the 12 that I've decided to read this year - before I've finished the challenge!  I'm definitely loving reading more often.

Back in early July (or maybe it was the end of June?), I checked out several books from the library.  My library is only about two or three blocks away (although I don't actually walk on the streets - it's much faster if I cut through the series of parking lots between my apartment and the library).  Sort of on the way home from the library is Roosevelt Square, a quaint little plaza with a Co-op grocery store and a few restaurants and even a movie theater.  (Have I mentioned how much I adore the community in which I live?)  Right outside the grocery store is one of those Little Free Libraries - a small kitchen cupboard unit where people drop off unwanted books, and hopefully pick up a book or two in return.

So as I was walking home from the public library, I decided to check out the little free one.  After all, I'd just returned two books, so why not pick out one or two more?  There were more books in the shelf than I expected.  Most of them didn't really appeal to me, but this one did.

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg proved to be... an experience.  Based on the description on the back, I was expecting it to be on the lighter side and mostly kid-friendly.  But, wow.  The first few pages (the book doesn't really have chapters - just line breaks with asterisks to denote a scene change/time passing) were mostly what I was expecting.  After a few scenes, things started to change.  I don't want to say enough to spoil it, because I'm definitely going to recommend that you read this book.  But... let's just say that because the book is written not just from Eliza's perspective but from the whole family's, things get emotionally heavy.  Much more so than I would ever have understood or liked as a kid.  We get insights into Eliza's parents' struggling relationship, into Eliza's brother's struggles as an unpopular 16-year-old, and Eliza's struggles to understand what is going on with her family.  Towards the end of the book, things get REALLY intense.

There weren't many lines in the book that stood out to me as profound, but there was one very early in the book that I really liked.  As we learn in the beginning of the book, Eliza has never been particularly smart or special at anything.  Her fourth grade class is divided into two reading groups: she is placed in the Racecars group, while the other is called the Rockets.  At first, Eliza enjoys being a Racecar, until she learns the name of the other group.  "... [S]he can't get it out of her head that, while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop, other kids are flying to the moon." (p 7).

Something about that line just really struck me as special.  Picturing a child, proud of herself for being a speedy race car, suddenly feeling less than special because her classmates are rocket ships, made me smile sadly.

The climax of Bee Season was very intense.  It felt more like an actual climax than most of the books I've read this year, which was super satisfying.  For really only the second time this year (Cursed Child being the first), I was completely unable to put the book down until I finished it.  Dinner ended up being a little bit later than usual that night.  Derek reminded me that it was 5:00, but I had a few pages left and didn't want to put the book down yet.  (Yeah, we eat super early.  I often start cooking at 4:30ish because we're apparently 60 years old.)  To be honest, it kind of felt like the book ended during the falling action.  It was like climax, some falling action, and not really much of a resolution.  Then again, I was always terrible at figuring out the exact moments that define the story arc.

Don't get me wrong, it was a good ending.  It's just that the emotions were so high and so much was happening at once until just a few pages before the end.  Still a satisfying ending, but I kind of wished there was a little bit more to it, you know?  I guess that's partly because I like a perfectly rounded, happy-for-everyone ending.  When a book ends on a sort of "will it work out or won't it?" note, I'm like "show us that it will work out!"  I know that's not realistic, but that's what I like and I'm not embarrassed to admit it.  I think I've matured enough that I can still enjoy a book (or movie) that doesn't end with the sentence "All was well," but I still generally wish it was there.

So, what's next?  I'm hoping to check off the book chosen for me by a BFF category next.  A friend of mine at my crochet group is distantly related by marriage to the author of a successful fantasy series, but I'm on a waiting list at my library for the first book.  If that takes too long, I might skip to a book that I previously abandoned.  Of course, there's a HUGE plethora of amazing books that were published before I was born, but I have to figure out which one of them I want to choose for the challenge!  And, I've preordered all 3 of the new Pottermore Presents books on the Google Play Store.  They're all super short but I'm definitely going to read them, though they don't count for the 2016 challenge.

2016 Reading Challenge: A book that was published this year

Since Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been out for less than 24 hours, I promise you that there will be NO SPOILERS in this post.  This post is just my general reaction to the book as a whole, and to keep with the continuity of how I've been doing this challenge.

At first, I was happy that this is a script instead of a novel because everything moves faster in a script.  No descriptive paragraphs, no pages of a character's internal struggle or confusion.  Everything  just happens.  But as I finished Part One in under three hours, I realized that a novel would last longer.  After all, it took me at least two full days of binge-reading to get through Deathly Hallows.  I finished Cursed Child within 13 hours of owning it, and that's including breaks for 7 hours of sleep, two meals, and doing a load of laundry.

Still - and obviously -  I loved every second.  I absolutely devoured it.  I considered forcing myself to stop for the day, to preserve the length, but really, there was never a chance of that happening.  Rowling's fast-paced style and tendency to end a chapter (or in this case, a scene) on a very intense moment if not an outright cliffhanger were not marred by the presence of the other two authors.  So it was pretty painful to put it down for five minutes to go put the laundry in the dryer.

For years, I've been wishing that I could temporarily delete everything that I know about the Harry Potter series, just so I can experience it for the first time again.  The suspense, the thrill, the wonder and joy, the twists and reveals.  I finally got to experience all of that again, and as an adult at that.  Of course, it happened all too quickly and once again I'll be cursed with the knowledge of what happens, unable to feel surprise because I knew what was coming at every turn.  It's a blessing and a curse.

One more thing, because I fear that if I keep going on I'll reveal too much: I WANT TO SEE THIS PLAY.  The stage directions in the script must be beautiful.  Of course I can picture them in my head, what's happening, as it would in a movie or as I would picture a book happening... but some of these things seem so impossible to happen on stage without the use of CGI!  Some of the stage directions actually gave me goosebumps as I tried to imagine how incredibly magical they would look when enacted on stage.  It makes me hope that Cursed Child will wind up like Phantom of the Opera - it'll have its home base theater for at least 30 years, and there will be occasional tours so that people outside of London can see it, and maybe after about 18 years they'll turn it into a movie.  (I hope it takes way less than 18 years.)  The effects should be as well-known as Phantom's falling chandelier, but I don't think that would take the magic away because everyone still adores the falling chandelier, even after 30 years.

Okay, that's enough out of me.  Maybe, probably, I'll write an entirely spoiler-riddled post that anyone who hasn't read the book yet will know to avoid so I can share my reactions to specific points.

I only have four books left for this challenge!  Once I finish them, I'll officially have out-challenged myself.  Hoorah!  I'm so glad to have gotten back in to reading.  I didn't realize how much I'd missed it. <3

2016 Reading challenge: A book that has been banned at some point (update: I'm finished!)

For this challenge, I decided to go with another book that my 11th grade English teacher often talked about: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  I honestly don't remember when or why be brought it up - I just remember scribbling the name in my quote book (an amazing part of my life in which I wrote down hilarious moments from the day and occasional random notes).  For all these years, I've had the book on my read-eventually-maybe list but never gotten around to it.  I'm not entirely sure I was aware that Lolita had been banned, as I wasn't at first sure what to read for this challenge.  But while I was perusing a random list of banned books, I saw the title and I immediately decided on it.

I have one word to describe this book so far (I'm about halfway through the book at the time of writing): Ugh.

Let's ignore for a moment the content of the book and focus on Nabokov's writing style.  I like to call it "fancypants smartybutt."  There are lots of random big words that sound like a high schooler used a thesaurus to impress his English teacher.  (I realize that I've kind of been pooping on high school English teachers while writing this series; I do apologize to any teachers reading this and want to stress that it's nothing personal.  I actually really liked four of six of my high school English teachers (I had three in one year thanks to maternity leave and a semester switch), but you know... high school English classes are obnoxious.  I don't think it's entirely the teacher's fault 100% of the time.)  And, UGH, why are there so many French words, phrases, occasionally sentences?  Okay, the narrator is from France.  But the author is from Russia and he wrote the book in English while living in America.  There shouldn't be so much French in a book that takes place in America.  It's annoying and it sounds pretentious and, again, makes it sound like either the narrator or the author was trying to prove himself as a fancypants smartybutt.

Why do I say "either the narrator or the author"?  Because of the format of the book.  It's written in the first person, past tense, and presented as Humbert (the narrator)'s memoirs that he wrote while in jail awaiting his trial.  And it's obvious that Humbert thinks very highly of himself.  So I do understand that he, as a character, would want to use big words and French sentences to sound smarter to the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or to the "dear reader."  Buuuuuut I also kinda feel like there's a way for the author (Nabokov) to do that without grinding on the reader's (me) very last damn nerve with all those French and fancy words that need to either be looked up (ain't nobody got time for that) or skipped over and not understood.  Or, I guess, there's the third possibility that Nabokov really was such a fancypants smartybutt that he assumed that everyone who read his book would be equally as smart and fancy and know all of those French and fancy words.  (Or that he only wanted fellow fancypants smartybutts to really understand his book.  hmm.)

Anyway, so the author's writing style makes it hard enough for me to get through the book.  Like Tolkein, Nabokov enjoys writing long-ass run-on sentences that take up an entire paragraph and need to be read about four times before you can really understand what it means.  Or, again, simply skipped over and not understood because at page 179 (halfway, mind you) I am getting real sick of these long-ass sentences and their fancypants smartybutt language, I tell you what.  Ugh.

Okay, so, there's my complaint about the writing.  Now on to the content (obviously, spoilers).

I can definitely understand why this book was banned.  Going in to it, I did know that the book was about an adult male who had a relationship with a minor female, but... wow.  I did not think it would be like this. 

Through the first quarter or so of the book, Humbert presents Lolita as a young girl of twelve who has a crush on him because he looks like an actor that she likes, and because he is an attractive (ugh, he likes to remind us of his looks) European guy.  So, even though that doesn't make it okay, it's still at least consensual in his eyes.  And it would at least maybe be exciting for Lolita, even though I know damn well that she can say "yes" all she wants, but it's still rape because she's only 12.

But... then.... Humbert.... is going to... protect Lolita's purity (ugh)... by drugging her up... and fondling her... while she sleeps.  UGH WHAT.  That's not how it works.  That's not how anything works.  So now I'm totally disgusted.  But then.... after Lolita's mother dies and Humbert goes to pick Lolita up from summer camp to deliver the news.... and he does it bluntly and horribly... he whisks Lolita away and takes her on a year-long tour of America wherein he has to constantly threaten, bribe, or spoil her, or some combination of the three, in order to keep her "satisfied" enough to have sex with him every morning.  UGHHHHHHH.  So now it's not even a real relationship, he's just got her as this sex slave that he's carrying around the country in order to get his creepy rocks off and carry out his pre-teen fantasies.  Ugh.

That's pretty much where I've left off.  He seems to have just signed her up for some school that wants to teach young girls how to succeed in society (this takes place in the early 1940s, by the way) by being good housewives and knowing how to dance and have social etiquette and general not actual education.  Ugh.

And the several chapters in which Humbert describes their year-long trek?  Ugh so boring.  It doesn't read like a novel so much as a really bored guy's notes.  It doesn't even sound like Humbert was enjoying remembering that year as he wrote it down in his notes.  So many long-ass run-on sentences, so few conversations, so few actual scenes, so little imagery and emotion.

All right, well those are pretty much all of my thoughts on Lolita so far.  I might (probably will) write another post when (if?) I finish the book.  Literally the only thing that's keeping me reading this book right now is the knowledge (thanks to the forward, which is actually a part of the fiction) that Humbert dies in prison.  Which means he gets what's coming.  I just hope that poor Lolita doesn't also die or suffer any worse than she already has.

On a happier note, there are precisely 22 days and fifteen minutes until the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child!  I am SO looking forward to being able to complete the challenge of a book that was published this year. <3

PS Are you on Goodreads?  You can follow my progress with this book (and all of the books I read this year, for the challenge or not!) by being my friend!  Here's my profile.

UPDATE  7/28

I finally finished the book!  I put it off for about a week or two because I was so fed up with it.  But I'm not a quitter, so I decided to finish it off before Harry Potter and the Cursed Child releases IN JUST OVER TWO DAYS AHH.

I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that there were about 10 pages of "also by Vladimir Nabokov" stuff and something of an epilogue by Nabokov.  I read a few paragraphs of the epilogue and deemed it unnecessary, so woohoo!

In case you couldn't tell, my opinion of Lolita did not change in the last half of the book.  Yeah, it was cool to see how depressed Humbert was after Lolita left him, but there wasn't anywhere near enough emotion or action involved to truly make it interesting.  After writing the initial part of this blog post, I found myself having to stop and say "You started to read this book, so finish it" quite often.  Pretty much a couple of times per paragraph, because of how many goshdarn run-on sentences there were that had me so confused I had to re-start each sentence about three times before I could finish it.  Why do authors get away with that crap?!  Their editors should say, "listen, I get what you're trying to show here, but the readers are going to be confused because their brains won't be able to follow what's going on.  You've got to make your sentences shorter.  End a thought every now and then before throwing in the next one and then jumping back to the first thought with no transition."

So, yay, I have now read Lolita.  I can check that off on my list of "Books that probably everyone should read because they're written by dead white guys but really aren't all that modern white guys have cracked them up to be."

I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am to get back to some young adult fiction after this!  My next step is, of course, Cursed Child as a book that was published this year.  After that I'll be turning to a book that I previously abandoned - either James Dashner's The Death Cure, which I never started but I did kind of give up on trying to get a hold of it for a while; or Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch.  That's Goblet of Fire translated into German.  My thinking is, I've read the book at LEAST 12 or 13 times in English, so what better way to study up on my German than by reading a book that I know so well?  I've started to give it a try a few times but usually given up and either said "I'll just read it in English yet again" or moved on to something else.

 

Should we ban cars too???!!!??!!?!?!

In the wake of almost every mass shooting in the past year or two, I have seen dozens of people use the analogy of "well people die from cars too, should we ban them? should we ban cars that can go above 75 mph, since higher speeds aren't legal outside of race tracks?"  Frankly, I am sick of it.

Mainly: cars are already heavily regulated.

You can't legally learn to drive until you are 14 years and 8 months of age in the US.  From there, you take Driver's Education.  I'm sure the types of programs offered vary from state to state, but in my home state of Michigan, it's 24 hours of classroom time, 6 hours of in-car learning, and 4 hours of observation time while driving.  That classroom time is limited to a maximum of 2 hours per day.  After all of that plus a written test, you can get your Segment 1 Learner's Permit.  From there, you have to wait a minimum of 3 months before taking another 6 hours of classroom instruction and another written test before you can take the final test to get your driver's license at the age of 16.  That is a LOT of work.

I will interrupt myself to give you my example.  I never took Driver's Ed because of reasons that I don't want to go in to.  Instead, I took a written test after I turned 18 and got a learner's permit, and then I learned to drive from my sister.  Then, I was able to take a driving test and get my license without having to go through all of that coursework.  This was a much cheaper and technically easier route to take, but it had its sacrifices: I didn't know how to drive until long after I graduated high school, so I was entirely dependent on my parents and friends for rides in high school and half of college.  This was a few years ago; I don't even know if you're allowed to get a permit without going through Michigan's Graduated Driver Licensing program anymore.

So, obviously, it is hard to obtain a driver's license.  It takes time, learning, and testing.  I nearly failed my road test because I was bad at parallel parking and backing into a spot - two things which are not guaranteed to be a part of every driver's life.

Then once you get a car (which can be very difficult if you are not financially blessed), there are all kinds of rules for driving.  Speed limits on every road.  Tickets for speeding, for making illegal turns, for running red lights even if nobody was around, for using your phone while driving, for not wearing your seat belt, for driving hazardously (guy who always swerves through traffic cutting everyone off going 25 mph above the flow of traffic, I'm looking at you).  Points on your license for getting caught breaking the laws.  Too many points and they suspend your license or take it away all together.  DUI laws that have become so severe, you don't even get a warning anymore - one instance of drunk driving and you're done.  If your reaction time and/or vision can be proven to have deteriorated to the point that you become a hazard on the road, your license will be taken away.

And then there's registration.  Every car must be registered with the state in which it resides, even if it's not in use.  To illustrate: years ago, my parents were selling their old car to a friend.  They had already gotten a new car, so they took the license plate from the old one and used it for the new one.  The old car was parked at the top of our driveway for maybe a week without a license plate.  A nosy neighbor saw it and phoned the city, and then we got a notice from the city stating that we needed to register the car or either it would be impounded or we would be ticketed/fined.

And then there's insurance.  Each state varies slightly, but in the US it is illegal to drive an uninsured car.  Insurance covers you causing an accident, someone causing an accident against you, unnatural damage to your car (such as a branch falling on it in a storm), etc.  Any time you make a claim on your insurance - any time you ask for your insurance company to pay to fix something - your rates go up and it becomes more expensive for you to drive.

Okay, so all of that to say: Cars are heavily regulated to protect both drivers and pedestrians.  The ability to drive a car is heavily regulated.  Sure, one can steal a car and drive it without a license, but the penalties for that would be huge.

On to some other types of reasons why banning cars is a stupid analogy when talking about gun control.

Cars were invented for transit and recreation.  People rely on cars to get to work, school, the store, etc.  Some people also drive their cars for fun.  But cars were not invented to be weapons of mass destruction, or of minor destruction for that matter.

Guns, on the other hand, were invented strictly for the purpose of killing.  The earliest gun was invented in China in the 13th century AD and it was meant to be a weapon of war.  "But some people use guns for recreation, like skeet shooting!"  Yes, true.  But that sport did not surface until the 1920s.  And guess what?  That sport was invented by a guy who liked to hunt (read: kill) birds.  So it's safe to say that that sport is meant to practice or imitate hunting (read: killing).  I don't inform you of this to judge anyone who likes to shoot skeet or go to the firing range; I merely want to remind you that guns were invented with the intent to kill.  So there's another reason why we shouldn't ban cars even though sometimes people die from them.

Now, I really wish I could provide you with factual, statistical evidence regarding the way in which people die from cars.  By that, I mean comparing the number of accidental car crashes to the number of purposeful car crashes.  I've looked, but I haven't been able to find any of that type of data.  This causes me to suspect that the number of purposeful car-related deaths in the US is statistically insignificant.  Meanwhile, the number of purposeful deaths caused by guns in the US is, well, staggeringly high.

Cars have an incredible amount of built-in saftey features in order to prevent accidental deaths.  Air bags, side air bags, bodies that crumple on any impact (example: I once hit a parking structure pay station, going about 2 mph, and the body of my car crumpled so badly that I couldn't open my front passenger door all the way), seat belts, child locks, the design of head rests, etc, etc, etc.  Upgrades such as rear-facing cameras to avoid backing over things.  Millions of dollars have been spent on research in order to make cars safer.

And yet.

Guns have one little button or switch to prevent them from being shot.  Children and toddlers are constantly fining Mom and Dad's gun, which is for some reason stored unlocked within their reach and loaded, and shooting themselves or their parents.

How many toddlers do you see accidentally unlocking and starting the car, putting it into gear, and rolling into traffic or crashing into the house?

So please, for the sake of everything that is good in this world, STOP suggesting that we ban cars because they are dangerous.  It is a BAD analogy and using that analogy makes you sound desperate.  Over the last 60 years, cars have proven themselves to be safer and safer, while guns have become a bigger and bigger threat.  Sure, the linked chart shows that guns and cars kill the same number of people every year right now; but car deaths have declined drastically while gun deaths have increased drastically over time.  That right there should be enough reason for us to not ban cars, and reason enough to place stricter control (and perform more research) on guns to avoid gun deaths.

/endrant

2016 Reading challenge: a book you can finish in a day

A book I can finish in a day turned out to be a book I can finish in one sitting.  It took me less than an hour to read Haruki Murakami's The Strange Library. 

I saw this book on the shelf while I was looking for Nabokov's Lolita - M being close to N and all that.  And it looked so cool.  I was intrigued by the flaps, and then when I realized that underneath the flaps was the first page instead of another cover page, I was pretty much sold.  I didn't even read past the first page or the back of the book - I totally judged a book by its cover.  But can you blame me?  Just look at it!

Almost every other page is an illustration, and the font is pretty big, so it was a super short read.  It would have been even shorter if I didn't take a few moments to absorb every illustration - but there was pretty much no way I wasn't going to study each illustration.

The book is about a young boy who gets lead through a strange labyrinth in the basement of his public library.  I honestly don't want to say much more than that because the book is so short that the journey through the labyrinth takes up nearly half the book.  But it's..... weird.  It escalated from "hm, okay, this book is getting started" to "HOLY CRAP this book is weird" in less than 20 pages (out of 96).

I don't think I really understood it.  I mean, I was easily able to follow what was happening, but... I feel like there must be more to this book.  A high school English teacher would probably go crazy over it and force their students to write a 10-page essay on what they think was actually happening to the boy or if the boy was even real or if this book actually exists (because, let's face it, high school English teachers make up so much that they might as well make up an entire book).

Anyway, it was a pretty neat book.  I'd recommend it to anyone who likes cool illustrations or really weird books or very pretty books.  Because it was very pretty.  There was a character who didn't have a voice and spoke with her hands, and her dialogue was printed in blue.  I liked that a lot.

Being so short and odd, there wasn't much that truly resonated with me, but there was one quote at the beginning that I liked.  The boy had asked for some books, and when the old man brought them to him, he told the boy (yeah, nobody had actual names in this book) that they couldn't be checked out and he'd have to read them in a special Reading Room.  The boy wanted to go home because his mother would worry, but the old man got so angry about having gone to the trouble of getting the books for the boy that he agreed to stay and read for a half hour.  Then the boy thought to himself:

"Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?" (p 21)

Oh, little boy, how well I know how you feel.  OH WAIT I THINK THAT THE BOY'S ANXIETY KIND OF MAKES THE WHOLE BOOK INTO A SYMBOL OF HOW PEOPLE WITH ANXIETY ACT IN ORDER TO AVOID DISPLEASING OTHERS.  Have you ever been at a party and kind of wanted to leave but didn't want to seem rude so you ended up being the very last person to leave?  And the whole time you just felt trapped under these societal pressures to be social and polite and seem normal?  I would say with about 65% confidence that what happens to the boy in the Reading Room is a symbolic representation of that feeling.  Ha, take that high school English teachers, I could write a good three or four pages about that!

So now I have two other books that I got from the library last week.  One of them is my banned book, and the other may or may not be the book that I abandoned at some point.  I'll explain that when I write my blog post for that part of the challenge!  In the mean time, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child releases in 42 days and 10 hours.  I'm so excited for my book that was published this year ahh!

2016 Reading challenge: A book you should have read in school

This is the first challenge that I kind of had to interpret loosely.  I was a pretty great student who read almost every book she was supposed to (except for textbooks in college).  There was one book in my Greek mythology class that I kind of skipped over, but I can't remember the name of it or what it was about, so I have no way of finding it again.  I also gave up on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in high school - it was not at all what I expected and I literally couldn't read more than two paragraphs without falling asleep, even when I got well into the Rising Action.  Plus it was the end of my senior year and I'd already been accepted to college, and bombing one unit in English class wasn't going to lower my GPA so drastically that I'd lose my spot at MSU.  So sue me.

Anyway, I decided to interpret this challenge as a book I feel should have been a part of my curriculum in school.  And so I chose the book that my eleventh grade English teacher talked about almost more than some of the books that we actually read: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  Junior year honors English focused heavily on existentialism, a theory (religion? lack thereof?) that I never really understood.  We read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle that year, and I remember Mr. Duffy frequently talking about Slaughterhouse Five as well.  He also talked about Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita a lot, but I'll get to that later. :)

I've sort of been meaning to read Slaughterhouse Five for all of these years, but never really had a reason to until this challenge.  The moment I saw this particular challenge I knew that I was going to read it.  To paraphrase Vonnegut, me reading this book was meant to be, and it always was and it always will be.

So, it took me less than a week to read Slaughterhouse Five.  I can't even remember the last time I read a book that quickly!  (Okay, it was probably two summers ago when I re-read Harry Potter, because the first three books are so short.)  The quick pace of this book was a huge breath of fresh air after crawling my way through The Fellowship of the Ring.  Vonnegut's short, easy sentences were so easy to get through that I occasionally caught myself wondering why he didn't combine a few of those sentences.

Overall, I liked it.  I've always enjoyed satire.  I even noticed a few bits of symbolism in this book, which is rare.  I don't really know what they mean, but I noticed them.  The train that Billy Pilgrim and the other prisoners of war were transported in was marked with orange and black, to denote that it was not to be bombed.  The tents at Billy Pilgrim's daughter's wedding were also orange and black.  I noticed that, said "huh, that must mean something," and then kept reading because interpreting symbolism has never been one of my strong suits.  (I struggled very hard in all four years of honors/AP English.  I think the only reasons I managed to earn good grades were a) my teachers could tell that I was honestly trying and b) I had an English major for a mother who helped me to write my papers.)

The whole Tralfamadore thing and their view on time was at once interesting and obnoxious.  After their first introduction, I was like, "wow, they seem to be able to handle death in a very cool way, I wish I could see it like that," and I kind of liked their tradition of saying "So it goes" whenever they learned of a death.  But the more I read about the Tralfamadorians, the more Billy Pilgrim learned about them, the more I was kinda like "they sound really pretentious."  And the more the narrator said "So it goes" every time death was mentioned, even so much as "they were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not" (p 205), the more it got annoying.  The sentence feels like you're distancing yourself from the death, shrugging it off and basically saying, "whatever."  Of course, I understand why Vonnegut uses the phrase that way.  This book is a satire of war, or more precisely a satire of American films/books/TV shows that glorify war.  This book is criticizing people who look at war as a big, beautiful thing fought by strong, valiant 35-year-olds and say, "Well, the millions of deaths were necessary and not that bad when you consider the alternative to fighting."  (Just gotta point out that I don't know how well I would have picked up on that if it wasn't literally spelled out for us on pages 14-15.)

As usual, there were a few quotes in this book that really resonated with me, and I'd like to share them now.

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep" (p 18).  The narrator says this after talking about visiting the World's Fair and seeing what the past was like and what the future might be like.  (I wish I could have seen a World's Fair!)  I just really liked that quote.  How big is a moment?  Can we hold on to a moment forever?  Do we get to keep moments that were once the present with us as they become the past?  Deep stuff.

"It isn't much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams" (p 104), spoken by Billy Pilgrim's mother.  All I have to say about that one is: Amen sista, I hear you on that.

So, yeah, certain aspects of the book got a little annoying at times but overall, I really liked it.  I wish I'd stayed in touch with Mr. Duffy so I could tell him that I finally read it!

Interjection: has anybody noticed how my writing style in each blog post is influenced by the book that I've been reading?  I've always struggled to find my own voice when writing.  I also struggle to find my own voice when singing - I tend to try to copy every sound, every fluctuation of the singer whether I'm listening to The Beatles or Regina Spektor. 

When I checked Slaughterhouse Five out from the library, I also snagged three other books.  Two of them are definitely for the 2016 challenge, while I still have to decide if the third one is or not.  So I'm not entirely sure which one I'll read first, but I'll definitely be getting started on my next book and challenge soon oh boy!

And uh.  A book published this year?  You KNOW I'm gonna go with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which releases in 44 days AHHHHHH!  I'm so stoked for my first Potter-related midnight release in five years!!