This page was last modified Sunday, 09-Nov-2008 15:14:04 EST.
... books I've read, what I think about them, and books I plan to read. Eventually I'll have it so you click something to show my reviews, and click it again to hide them. I don't currently know how to do that, though...
I list the recently finished first. (It makes more sense to do it this way because otherwise I'd have to constantly be scrolling to the bottom.)
I finished this book at 7:37 pm – look at that number! – and when I get back to update this site, first thing I do is
open Rhythmbox, go to my 5 Star Playlist (shuffle on) and click play – and Beautiful Day
by U2 starts.
Read this book. If I marry and have children, this book will be mandatory – not only was I never given any the birds and
the bees
talk, but I was never told any of what's in this book. This book contains more revelations than I can count,
explanations for rarely discussed Catholic doctrine. Did you know that sex is sacred? I didn't. Did you know that sex is
one of the means of divine revelation? I didn't. This book discusses the true meaning of our sexuality, as we live in a confused
world, surrounded by a culture of death. It is a must read; I wish I'd read it seven years ago.
I'm still reeling a bit; hard to believe it's over ... (I had to take a five minute break before reading the
Epilogue.) This series dominated the decade; I have friends who grieve now
that it's over. Books truly are wonderful things. I'll have to keep an eye out for any future works by Rowling ... It's
odd, though. I found myself hating Harry in the latter books; things he did made no sense and I found myself asking,
Why is Harry so stupid?
I was getting a bit sick of it halfway through this book, too ... by the end I was
content, applauding Neville, etc. The end was very calm, peaceful, and I wasn't disappointed.
I dunno what to say about this book. It's C.S. Lewis's perspective of Christianity. What he says is reasonable, although
sometimes rather peculiar ... Like in the last chapter, he basically says for three pages, Becoming a Christian is a bit like an
evolutionary process, except not at all.
He has some pretty humorous analogies at times: Imagine everyone setting sail in
their own little boats, but they're all leaking ...
Definitely worth reading if you know little about Christianity, although
some parts of it will probably be confusing. I'd say it's worth reading even as a Christian of fourteen years; it's a very
articulate perspective that may provide some insight for your own beliefs.
I didn't dislike the book, but it left a bad aftertaste, and overall it was just meh.
It wasn't bad, but it wasn't
particularly good. This book was a good read in that it was written as much like a novel as possible. It was also annoying
at times for the
same reason; Larson refers to motes of dust
drifting through the air at least three times, references to icy mists
of breath in the cold winter mornings, etc; he tries a bit too hard to be a novelist. This annoyance was compounded at the
end, when I realized that most of his narrative involving H. H. Holmes was pure speculation – only through examining
the appendix of notes, which I bet many of my classmates neglected to do. Larson justifies his imagination with the
statement, Based upon the information we have of him, this scenario is one of those probable,
which isn't that bad:
I understand that reenactments are done at crime scenes and historically, saying, to the best of our knowledge,
something like this likely happened.
That's fine, but to lead the reader into thinking everything is fact, until you say
that after the end of the novel, ... It seems tantamount to intellectual dishonesty, when one presents a theory as
fact. It also makes me wonder if Holmes' murders were a bit exaggerated: perhaps he killed thirty people, so let's say he
killed at least fifty.
So, ultimately, I was annoyed with this book after finishing it. It was anticlimactic, as all books of this form inevitably are: The fair was successful, the murderer was arrested, and everyone dies, and we move on. Yet it was worse than that, because I had a feeling of being lied to: much of what I read as historical narrative could very well be false, and I have no way of ever knowing, so what's the point in bothering to remember the details of it? I had the same feeling after reading Midnight's Children, as Rushdie mixes fact with fiction, and hell if I know which is which.
This work is incredibly biased, obviously, since it comes from a Knight of Columbus drawing from official Roman
Catholic Church doctrine: ... Finally, the term orientation should not be used in reference to [same-sex
attraction] SSA, since the only genuinely sexual orientation is heterosexual
(4). If you want to find out where the Roman Catholic Church stands,
I think this is pretty much it. I was first very offended by what I read, but I suppose their arguments make sense, within their reference frame.
However, Harvey attempts to provide an explanation for the origins of homosexual inclinations ... It's very Freudian, and appears largely speculative.
He claims a bad relationship with one or both parents, and a failure to learn proper gender roles as a child, and that's essentially all he has to say
about it. Not very convincing ...
The book I started to and should have read years ago; read it in roughly a single afternoon. What is there to say except, "Wow." It is the most random book I have ever read, and probably the funniest. Major respect to Mr. Adams.
This book made very little sense to me. All throughout Zechariah speaks of God smiting adversaries in thoroughly brutal, even cruel (by human standards) ways, and setting men against each other, seemingly contradicting Jesus' message of love and forgiveness in the New Testament. I understood very little of it.
Read in about two weeks for a speech required for my speech course.A great book about a terrible tragedy.
We read a little over half of this epic poem. Good, relaxing stuff.
This novel was weird. A very short, easy read; I think I read the entire thing in two hours, averaging 58 seconds per page,
instead of 2.2 minutes as with Rushdie. It's the narrative of a girl's life growing up. She loves her mother, but then her
mother begins to treat her as more of an adult as she grows older. She learns to hate her for it. So at the beginning you
have a girl who loves everything about her mother and wants to always live with her, and at the end you have a
seventeen-years-old who dreams of killing her mother, and crosses an ocean just to be rid of her.
It's weird, and in this sense is harder to understand than Midnight's Children. It's an interesting novel about
growing up and dealing with gender expectations.
I really don't know what to say. Horribly depressing, and I'm not entirely sure what the point was of this 533-page
novel. It seems to be a Bildungsroman, except everyone dies, and there is no point except to realize that you will be
crushed into oblivion by future generations, always pressing for the same thing, for life for death and for nothing. It
was amazingly well-written, and the most bizarre work I've ever read. Part of me wants to give it a 7/10 for these
reasons -- and it won the Booker Prize probably for these reasons (as the cover and every review boasts), but I think
I'll give it a 6/10, since, after reading 533 pages of text, I have gained nothing except an example of
nihilistic thought -- I'm listening now to "Deliverance" by Opeth while I write this; something dark and
melodramatic, maybe the only
band in my music library that could satiate the mindset the end of this novel put me in -- and a brief glimpse of what
life in India and Pakistan was like for some; unfortunately brief, considering the novel supposedly chronicled life
there, with historical figures that I knew nothing about, and so couldn't bother to remember names and dates, as half
of it is fabricated anyway.
The entire thing was horribly anticlimactic. He makes a huge fuss over nothing, perhaps to state in a rather
indirect way that it amounted to nothing anyway, as he says in the outset of the novel. I am sad. After class discussion, I
feel a 7/10 is more appropriate than a 6. I neglected to consider the novel in relation to the world around me ... it does
raise good points about how history can be subjective as well as fabricated, how sensory perceptions affect emotion and, in
some sense, reality itself. It also serves as a sort of wake-up call, that what a nation does is not always what it seems,
and that intentions may differ, however bizarre and obscure they seem at first glance.
There's a plot spoiler here. A very interesting novel, about growing up as a woman in Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia. Sexism, racism, opression, suppression is very prevalent. Moreover, the clash between colonialism and the white man's ways and the old society and the African ways creates such a conflict that both ways are adopted, the more educated rejecting one and the less educated rejecting the other, creating a division between families. The story centers around two girls in particular; one goes crazy because she was raised in England and, back in Rhodesia, can be neither African nor English.
I had to read this novel again, this time for "Themes in Literature" at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The topic
here is again postcolonialism. Dr Lutz addressed this at MTSU, but he covered it more broadly, including feminism and German
heritage, things which were of great interest to him. (They were interesting.) Anyway, about this book. I've copied and
edited what I've said about it from before:
African culture -- specifically Igbo culture -- out to here. This novel doesn't really go anywhere, although it doesn't
need to. It's an illustration of how colonization by the English affected the life of Africans, for the better but perhaps
more for the worse. Achebe refrains from making judgments, but his cynicism shows, with the arrogant and pompous Commisioner
who condemns tribal life as simplistic and inferior while claiming the region to be under the rule of a woman no one has ever
seen or even heard of. This novel serves to introduce the reader to the African Igbo culture, and then shows how Europeans
invaded and conquered and destroyed large parts of it. Whoohoo. A nature documentary but without the pictures. Still, a
glimpse of a culture other than your own is refreshing, assuming you can keep an open mind about it.
The Case for Christ
by Lee Strobel.
Finished April 1st, 7:20 pm.
A very good book; it answers many questions many seem to have in regard to the Bible and its authenticity. It has a
slight bias in that
the narration is slightly one-sided, but the effect it has on the outcome of the arguments is negligible. Definitely worth
reading if you are a skeptic.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons through Collected Poems were assigned for (Honors) Experience of Literature the Spring of 2006.
Finished sometime between Thursday, December 28th, and Friday, December 29th. David, Papa, and Miss Mary were taking a nap, or maybe David had gone with them; Mom and Nick went to Target to purchase some things we needed which we had left at home. (For me, it was underwear. My mom bought the ugliest banana-pouch-type underwear I'd ever seen. It was funny they were so horribly designed. (She didn't notice when she bought them.) I had read half of it on the drive down to LA, and then finished it over the next two days while we were there.
Summer reading, and RAs are required -- or strongly encouraged -- to read it (just like the rest of the MTSU/Murfreesboro community, but moreso, as we're supposed to be rolemodels for students.) You can tell he's a journalist and social commentator, not a writer (I guess like myself.) This novel is very informative -- and rather biased in regard to immigration -- but it's nothing else. It's a report on America's fat history, and nothing more. Heller McAlpin of Newsday says "A fluidly written, riveting tale ... [an] impassioned, graphic account." What a load of crap. It's a research paper. It's not fluid at all; when he starts a new topic he even goes so far as to include "* * *" in the formatting to make it clear he's beginning again. It's not impassioned -- it's very dry -- and it's not graphic at all, unless she's specifically referring to 151 - 154, where he "spend[s] an imaginary day with a typical [fat] American, circa 2050." Read this book if you want; it tells you a bit about the relationship America has with the food industry. Don't expect it to do much else, though.
Wow. "Ready or not, the tremendous ending of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will leave stunned fans wondering what great and terrible events await in Book 7 if this sinister darkness is meant to light the way." - Daphne Durham That's all I can really think right now. Such a shock -- even though Adam was an ass and gave it away (along with countless others.) I can't help but wonder if it was really fair to the reader, though: 545 pages of rising action, action for 61 pages, climax for 13 pages, denouement for 35. I'm not sure if that's very well-balanced. I also don't know how Rowling will sufficiently conclude the series with just one book (if it's still a seven-part series), unless it's well over a thousand pages. I also don't think Harry has been shown to be capable of succeeding without the help of everyone else.
Good book, although I had some problems with it. Why is Harry such an unbelievable idiot? Every chapter I wanted to smack him. What was the point of Sirius giving Harry those mirrors, and how could he forget them so easily? What was the point of introducing Cho Chang as a love interest if Rowling suddenly decides Harry's "oh. darn. not interested." What purpose did Chang serve except to 1) draw out the novel and 2) make Harry even more stupid? Did that novel really need to be 870 pages?
The class covered this novel - or rather, Dr Lutz did - before Gilman and Larkin. This novel took me that long to read. I don't know if it was her writing style or what, but I was averaging five minutes per page for a while. A great novel, indeed; no wonder it is so famous. If I were to write an essay about this, it would have to be about how she spins a cut-and-dry romance (analogous to a romance on TV today) into subtle satire and criticism about the society she writes about... I would say, "Read this novel if you haven't," but I'm not sure why. It is very well written, and I had to look up a few words (nuptials, equipage, importuned being the most recent.) It is very entertaining; perhaps that's the only reason you should read it: It's a good, entertaining novel.
Definitely worth reading. Good poetry, very dark: chronic melancholia, obsession with death, etc.
Easily the most offensive novel I have ever read. Read my essay about it to find out why.
Butterflies, melancholia, and suicide. I'm successful but I'm going to kill myself for obscure reasons! Betcha can't find out why! I don't see the point Sebald was trying to make here except that the mind is a complex thing and a number of issues can cause one to become suicidal. Well-written, but obscure.
African culture -- specifically Igbo culture -- out to here. This novel doesn't really go anywhere; it's just introducing the reader to the African Igbo culture, and then shows how Europeans invaded and conquered and destroyed it. Whoohoo. A nature documentary but without the pictures. Still, a glimpse of a culture other than your own is refreshing.
A very sharp contrast from Powell; Dr. Alfred Lutz extricated us from the shallow objectivity of Powell and submerged us in the rambling tidal wave of Conrad's introspection. Powell spent four hundred pages saying very little; Conrad spends 72 saying a great deal. It's like comparing a massive brick to a slippery bar of soap (or, I suppose in Kurtz's case, ivory.) I would consider it anticlimactic except this is a novel that has no climax; philosophy from beginning to end, and an abrupt end of both the framestory and the novel. I'm going to have a fun time trying to write an essay about this; I have a difficult time grasping what Conrad is trying to say. A good summary of the novel is provided by SparkNotes.
Conrad really pissed off Achebe, which amused me greatly. He uses Africa as a backdrop to philosophize (or rant) about human nature, and since Africans aren't the focus of the novel he effectively eliminates their importance and reduces them to extras in a play. Achebe, being African, naturally pulls the racism card and chucks it as him with all the fury a professor at a university can. SparkNotes has something to say about Achebe as well. I'm going to see if I can put Achebe's response up here; if I can I'll hyperlink it... (Only thing I have to say is Achebe is wrong in stating that the Great Wall of China is visible from the Moon.)
Horrible book. The pictures give more insight than his narrative, and his account (however biased) of the natives is of more value than his ramblings about the Colorado River and its canyons. His descriptions of the rivers and mountains are all the same. Imagine walking through the Louvre with smeared glasses on; all you can see is vague outlines and indefinite shapes. Photographs are far better.
I thought I hated Aron Ralston's book, and then I read this. At least Aron's has a point. Dr. Lutz claims not all books are meant to be entertaining, and that students who hate this novel must first realize this fact. This is true, but irrelevant. It's okay for a book to not be entertaining if there's something else of value within it. Powell's novel is dull, uninteresting, and pointless, and the only thing one can gain from it is a perspective on 'Indians' and a sense of the era in which it is written. This is better understood once one realizes what the novel actually is (according to his Preface): It's his journal. He published it because people wanted something to read about his voyage through the Colorado River. Journals are usually only interesting to the one who makes them. Why? Because a journal is nothing more than a recording of an individual's thoughts. I have one, but if you read it you'll probably be bored to tears. Not necessarily because I'm a boring person, but because it's written for me, not for you. Same thing here. Powell wrote this for himself, not for others.
Read my essay about Powell's lack of emotion, if you're interested. The first essay I've written since my major author paper in 2005... I am beginning to understand why he assigned this book; it's a decent starting point for the course he's decided to take with this class. I still feel that my time was mostly wasted, though there is always the fact that experiencing bad novels helps one appreciate the good.
The story of this dumbass's life, anything else he can think of, and a few things he didn't. What in the world were they
thinking when they assigned this book? They never had me do anything with it; the school handed out worthless buttons to
everyone saying "I
READ [this book]," regardless of whether they did or not. Such a joke. This was
our summer reading assignment, which they decided to drop on us during Customs.) I still am not
sure why I had to read it; I didn't even take an English course that semester!
I wanted to go out and get a fatted calf to sacrifice to the Lord and give thanks the day I finished this 'book', I really did. I started out
hating him, and while reading this did give me a little more respect for the guy, it still was a complete waste of time. I was going to write
an essay about it and try to win that $100 or whatever, but apparently part of the contest was knowing when the deadline was... (August
5th.)
Beowulf through Pygmalion I had to read for Senior English, 12th grade. Some of these novels and plays I read in Fall 2004; I'm not sure which were read when. I think we started our Major Author projects in December, and I'd chosen Agatha Christie.
For a while I read daily segments of it. Then I decided to read each book systematically, so I'll know when I've read them all.
I read these one day during Winter Break, sitting in Books-A-Million. I was sat across from this old woman, who was sitting there with a few magazines, drinking something. She looked foreign. I sat there (on the floor, as it was more convenient than the chair), with Spanish childrens' books spread out before me, frequently flipping through a Spanish-English dictionary. She finally said, "Are you teaching yourself Spanish?" I replied that yes, I was, and she said it was wonderful -- she knew English as a second language -- that many Americans today don't see the need to learn another language, that they're content with English, and that it's so sad... I said yeah, that one of the hardest things about teaching myself Spanish was that everyone ridiculed me and said it was a waste of time. She smiled and said God bless you for trying, and we smiled and said goodbye and she left. I've sinced checked out more from MTSU's Walker Library.
Here's the list of books I plan on reading, if I ever have time. Please do not spoil anything for me!
Most of the links lead to Amazon.com, and are merely for info. If currently reading a book,
I try to link to the exact edition of what I'm reading.
One problem I've encountered when trying to find time to read these is that it's much easier to watch television while
eating dinner than to read. It's hard to hold open a book with one hand and a fork and knife in the other. Maybe I should
find e-books.
The Giver seriesby Lois Lowry:
the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic Gospels
... and I'm going to finish The Bible eventually (I tried reading the Daily Readings Catholic.org recommends, but am now trying one of BacktotheBible.org's Reading Plans.)
Spent a great deal of time attempting to read this boring book; even spent some time in Germany reading it, which I now feel would've been better spent looking out the window at German landscape, or even watching German television. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone; it's very boring and has no real point. It's just his autobiography. Thanks but no thanks, Dr. MacDougall. (The reason I endeavoured to read this book was that I was very enthusiastic about starting my scientific studies. Dr MacDougall said it would help get one into a Chemistry state-of-mind. He was wrong.)