Read more

Okay so I was bad. I sort of messed up my goal. My book for April didn’t get finished in April. I thought the “Catcher in the Rye” was boring and slow for the first for chapters. I just couldn’t get into it. Then I ended up working and didn’t have time to just read through a bunch of it all at once, like I had for my other books before. But really I figure if I just read 12 books this year then my goal is met. Sure that doesn’t seem like a lot of books, but I am sort of a slow reader and it just seems to make me tired. It’s a great way to give me something to do while I’m at lunch at work now. Plus I had all sorts of SOP’s and such to read so it wasn’t like I wasn’t reading at all. And of course there are my RPG’s that I’m behind on.

I dunno I wasn’t too crazy about this book. I just thought it would have something more to it. It didn’t really have a point. But I wasn’t too upset by the fact. I thought it was funny that Holden talks about “The Great Gatsby” in it when I just read that book not too long ago. The book did do one thing, effected me and my impressionable ways. There for a week or so I was all upset about people being phony. And how he says all the time so and so is this or does this, they really do or they really are. That suck with me. In fact I ended up putting it in the post I wrote last night for one of my RPG’s. So another classic down. I’m almost done with my book for May, good thing too cause the month is almost over.

I’m bad at book reviews. If I like something too much I don’t often like to write about it. Sure I’d be glad to have a conversation, but to put it down in words? I don’t feel like I could do a lot of things the justice they deserve. I liked this book a lot. It is very true. And definitely clever. I love things that are clever. If I could just have it work out for me… (Ellipsis, this is my new thing lately. Don’t ask me why, or if it’s worth going off topic for, but too late I did.) Despite the melancholy tone of the story, I found myself laughing every once in a while as I read. I put off reading this book until late in the month instead of starting it, and stopping in the middle. I actually read it in two days, finally closing it at a quarter till two this morning. Of course technically that’d be three, but who looks at it like that? I don’t. If I stay up late and write a poem, I give it the date of the day before, just seems more like that day to me than the next. If you had a less than perfect experience in high school, and who didn’t, I’m sure you can take something from this book. I thought about renewing it, and reading it again, but I think I’ll save that for some time later.

My reading this book is the perfect example of me procrastinating. The first night I opened the book, which I think was February 2nd, I ended up reading almost half of it. But then I was afraid that I would finish it too soon for some reason. Like you can really finish a book too soon. So then it got put off. And then it got put off even more, just because that’s what I do. And I ended up having to try and finish it on the 28th, even though I had done some reading in between.

I also started a word list for chapters 4 and 5, like I’d done for 1 – 3, to be posted in my expand my vocabulary goal, but I read chapter 6 away from the computer and so it was harder to just look up the words. I figured I could go back through and find them. Yeah, that didn’t happen either.

All and all I thought this was an alright book It wasn’t anything that makes me go “wow that was good,” but it wasn’t bad either. My favorite thing about this book was the character introductions in chapter one, particularly of Daisy and Jordan. After that it sort of leveled off for me.

My book for March is “Speak.” And it comes highly recommended by my sister. I read the liner notes the other day (they were rather good, hehe), since I’d already checked it out from the library, but I’ve yet to crack it open anymore than that. I do have at least a partial excuse for this one, I joined a new RPG and so I’ve been trying to catch up on a lot of posting lately. But seeing as it’s the 13th I should probably get a move on actually reading it.

Well I have finished my book for January, even if it was after midnight on the 31st. It’s close enough for me. It wasn’t a terribly good book. I like how everything is interconnected, but the author is too secretive in doing so. I felt that it was too long between each part, so that when it all starts coming together you don’t realize everything that you are supposed to. At least I don’t think that I did. I was proud of myself though, for a while I was reading a chapter every night before I went to bed. Even the night I stayed up past 2 am out at my dad’s and still read. I figure to meet this goal I only need to read about a book a month. I know that isn’t a lot by other people’s standards, but hey it gets me reading more. I also do read more than I give myself credit for. I am now in four role-playing games, and unlike a lot of other people who play in them I do usually read most of the other posts even if they don’t concern my character, if not all of them. That in and of itself can be a lot of reading. It just isn’t always as proper, I guess I could say, as an actual book might be. My favorite part about “The Dew Breaker” was that within the story there is a math problem: Two trees, 10 feet apart. Taller tree, 50 feet tall, casts a 20-foot shadow. Shorter tree casts a 15-foot shadow. The sun’s shining on each tree from the same angle. How tall is the shorter tree? I actually tried to solve the problem in my head, because I didn’t care about it enough to write it down and try to work it out, but it had been too long since I’ve had any geometry, and wasn’t sure how to solve it. But the best part is that in Edwidge Danticat’s acknowledgements she writes out the solution, and the answer is 37.5 feet tall.

So much for dedication. Five pages is all the further I got in the book that I drove through the snow for. I made the mistake of trying to start it while I was out at my dad’s. I should have known I wouldn’t be able to read it out there. I can never really concentrate when I try writing out there. And I like to write. Not that I don’t like to read. I just lack the motivation to get started, but once I do, and if the book is good, then I don’t really have any problems. I was also tired, and some times reading can make me sleepy. So that didn’t really help either. I think another one of my problems was that I tried non-fiction. I mean I was interested in the book I chose. But some times, I’m honestly too lazy to think. How sad is that? At least think in a way that takes work. So when I turned the “Frankenstein’s Footsteps” book in I found something fiction to read. Not the book I wanted to find, but it looks interesting nonetheless. I had turned in the gnome book already. I was going to give “Frankenstein’s Footsteps” another chance, or at least try to, but when I checked the library website the other day it was overdue, and you can’t renew them more than once. So hopefully I’ll actually make some progress with “The Dew Breaker.”

I had put a book on hold the other day at the library; it’s called “Frankenstein’s Footsteps” by Jon Turney. I was thinking that I’d pick it up after I’m done with the book about gnomes I got to do research on a possible RPG character. But that book is thicker than I expected and will take me longer to get through it, since I’m taking notes and such. So I checked to see if my hold on this one had come through yet or not and it had.

I’m not sure how much snow we got last night, maybe two or three inches. But I decided to go out and scrape off all the windows of my poor Arizona registered Lancer, with a short little plastic scraper that I jacked from my sister, cause of course I don’t have one, just to go to the library. I turned my windshield wipers on to try and cheat some at the windshield but they didn’t budge. I thought I’d turned them off, but the best part came as soon as I opened my door and they decided to work and piled up a good deal of snow in my car. Lucky though I wasn’t stepping out just yet so I didn’t get plastered with it. The roads really weren’t too bad; there’s been plenty of time to clean them up. I did manage to slide but not fishtail at all though. I just know I’m going to ditch my car this winter. Never failed before, and it’s been what 4 years since I’ve driven in snow.

But I made it to the library nonetheless. Hopefully this book will actually give me something intellectual to do. Put me back in the biology swing of things. I just hope I can get through the whole thing, I have a bad habit of not doing that. It’s only 222 pages not counting the notes, which isn’t bad. But then again it is printed in a smaller than usual font. Must be a smart people book.