goingwest

I think it’s safe to mark this goal as complete. I stopped reading for a long time because I couldn’t find anything that interested me, but that period is definitely OVER!

I haven’t really read much of anything so far this month, so I wasn’t sure I’d make my goal- but I went book shopping tonight (er…last night)- so that’s definitely helped move the process along!

10. Brave New World– Aldous Huxley
– Great read. Found it online and read the first 2/3’s of it and decided I had to buy it. Lots of really moving quotes. Revamped my love for Gattaca- Gattaca was all I could think about as I read this!

11. The Perks of Being A Wallflower- Stephen Chbosky
-Not entirely sure of what I think about this. It was cute at first, then my interested started to die down…but I think it won me over in the end. It wasn’t one of those books that really left me with anything to think about, so it’s left me in a strange spot. Then again, that could be due to finishing it at 5:30am!

12. Night- Elie Wiesel
-Holocaust account. Haunting. It seriously showed me that I read The Diary of Anne Frank at FAR too early of an age. This book is extremely short, but it took me 2 days to read…I found myself having to stop to process a lot of the stuff. This particular translation is much shorter than the original text, which I “enjoyed” (if you can even use such a word), because it allowed me to kind of continue various stories in my mind, imagining myself in the situation. This will stick with me for quite some time. Truly I was not emotionally developed/mature enough at the age of 10 to properly read The Diary of Anne Frank. Might have to revisit that.

13. A Lion Called Christian- Anthony Bourke and John Rendall
– Decent book. The writin is super repetitive, which became incredibly annoying, and the first half kind of lagged, but it really picked up in the end. I was surprised by the fact that I found the second half far more interesting than the “awww…a baby lion!” first half haha! 5-star story, 3-star book if that makes sense.

14. Tuesdays With Morrie- Mitch Albom
-Great story. I knew the basic idea of the book, but I didn’t realize it was a true story before I started reading. It’s like the Last Lecture, just…stripping away any possibility of it being egotistical or self centered. Very nice.

15. Five People You Meet In Heaven- Mitch Albom
– After being so impressed with Tuesdays With Morrie, I decided to give Five People a try. Bad decision. I know I’ll eventually give “For One More Day” a shot- but Five People just bored me to DEATH until the final 6 pages, so it could be a while

Movie 15: The United States of Leland
My Rating: 4/5
Reason for watching: story sounded good
Date Released: January 18, 2003
Date Watched: February 25, 2009



I really enjoyed the first half, then I started to realize how “mile wide & skin deep” the movie was becoming. It was an interesting story, but it was jumping around to too many different story lines, and while it wasn’t hard to follow, it wasn’t really always worth following. But I stuck with it, and in the end they provided the depth to the stories to make them all fit together.



Ended up being a pretty good film, and one that looks at things in a different way, which I had my doubts about originally. 



It was a pretty impressive cast too.



Ryan Gosling

Don Cheadle

Chris Klein

Michelle Williams

and Kevin Spacey