I finished reading my second Roald Dahl book ever this weekend. (James and the Giant Peach was the first.) Danny, the Champion of the World was a recommendation of sorts. It was a fun sort of read that ultimately inspired me to be a…better?…dad. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a whimsical tale.
I’m currently reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I’m on page 7, so I can’t make much of a recommendation yet, but it’s going well so far.
Good night.
Dear Blog,
It’s not that I’m avoiding you. It’s that my job seems to consist solely of grading test upon test. As soon as I finish this batch, I’ve got a new set coming in. We’ll catch up over Christmas.
Love always,
Regan
P.S. I finished reading Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett a few weeks ago. I haven’t finished a Newsweek article since, let alone start a new book. I only give it a 5 out of 10.
P.P.S. I saw an interesting interview with T. Boone Pickens a few days ago. I should tell you about it sometime.
It’s been a good while since my last post. Truthfully, I don’t feel like posting now, but I owe my readers a little something now and then. So here you have a few unrelated snippets.
Sophie got her first haircut this weekend. Maren finally broke down and let her have some bangs so now she can see without tilting her head at a 45 degree angle. I think she’s still hyper cute and she reminds me of Haley Mills a la “Parent Trap” (not “Saved by the Bell”). Plus, since I’m responisible for droping her off at school, I’m responsible for her hair. For the first time.
I’m teaching five sections of College Algebra and one section of Trig this semester. I’m glad I taught College Algebra this summer. I’m sometimes excited by Trig. It was the first math topic that got me excited about math. However, it’s the first time I’ve felt if I were to develop a course from the ground up, I would tackle it in an entirely different way than their textbook. That part is frustrating.
The other night as Maren and I were going to sleep, my brain was doing something funny. If that is any indication of what the brain does when we are asleep, it’s no wonder we don’t remember most of our dreams. It was the most random collage of images. It was like watching the T-1000 from “Terminator 2″ on acid. So I’ve decided the only dreams we recall are the ones that we can make any sense of.
I freely admit that I am a bad driver. My biggest fault is my tendancy to speed. That usually compounds everything else, but speeding is the root of it. Otherwise, I would say there are many things that I do right on the roads. I never cut off other drivers. I make lane changes well in advance. I seldom ride others bumpers, though my impatience gets the best of me in certain situations on certain roads. But, on the whole, I do not pretend to be a good driver. This has earned me a certain reputation among friends and I have tried to handle it all graciously. However, I am increasingly annoyed by friends who consistently poke fun at my driving while they are not the drivers they pretend to be. If I can admit to being a subpar driver, you can, too, my friends.
Two weeks ago, I finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It was a fair read, but I don’t feel much after having read it. I’ve been trying to get into The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. After roughly a week, I am 30 pages into the book and I haven’t picked it up in 5 or 6 days. Only 943 pages to go. Maybe I should read something else.
So, I hope you’ve all gotten your fix.
I finished George Orwell’s Animal Farm a few nights ago. When I remarked to Maren that I liked it, she said they read it in 9th grade. Apparently, I have found my appropriate reading level.
My interest in Animal Farm was very similar to my interest in The Wizard of Oz. While I didn’t quite see how Wizard related to the Populist Movement, I clearly saw how Animal Farm is an allegory for the rise of communism in the U.S.S.R. If you know anything about Stalin, I think you’ll enjoy the book. If you haven’t read it, the last two chapters are powerful illustrations of how communism can fall short of its ideals.
Coming up next is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. That one may take me a while. I’ll be teaching again soon and probably won’t have much reading time. I’m thinking I may give Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness another go. I was supposed to read it before my senior? year of high school, but…ran out of time? interest? I remember it was short, though. Or I may just rent “Apocalypse Now”.
I finished reading L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz a few nights ago. After being disappointed by Through the Looking Glass, I thought about taking a break from my reading list, but I already had the book bought and was interested in reading a good 10 years ago.
Regarding the book itself, it was a quick read. The movie embellished some parts, but left out major plot points (as movie renditions tend to do). My primary interest in the book was how it supposedly was an allegory for the populist movement of the late 1800’s. I can’t pretend to be an expert on that part of history, but it feels like a stretch to definitively connect some of the dots. I can see how one might consider the green standard vs. the gold standard (the Yellow Brick road that leads to the Emerald City, the Golden Cap that summons the Flying Monkeys, etc.), but I don’t think the characters in the story relate to actual people or events surrounding the movement, and there aren’t enough connectives in the story to support a metaphor for Populists.
That being said, it’s worth reading for yourself for the sake of ingesting a piece of Americana, and perhaps you’ll disagree with my assessment. It did, however, cause me to do a little research about the Populist Movement, and so I assume I grew a little.
Finally.
I have finally finished reading Through the Looking Glass after longer than I care to find out. I’m pretty sure I’d be embarrassed. Suffice to say it wasn’t a page-turner for me, though. I had planned to read L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, but I may need a break from classic children’s literature. I’ve had Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz) on my shelf for a while. It might do me some good to read something spiritual that has the metaphor spelled out for me.
On a tangental note, I watched two movies today that I had been meaning to see for some time. “No Country For Old Men” was outstanding and deserving of its Best Picture win. There is a scene near the end of the movie that sealed the deal for me. I’m going to make Maren watch the movie because of it, even though she has no interest in the film. Tonight, we both enjoyed “Little Miss Sunshine”, a movie that was long overdue in viewing, but a casualty of my tour of duty in grad school. Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) annoyed me the whole movie (I realize he was supposed to, still…he did), but Olive’s (Abigail Breslin) performance in the pageant was such a comedic pay off I will definitely rewatch someday.
“You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity: “It’s very rude.”
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles–I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
I remembered watching the cartoon version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland once, maybe twice as a child. I remembered all the main characters like the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen. However, I did not remember the delightful conversations Alice had that seemed to border on the absurd, but nuggets of truth are always buried just beneath the surface. At its end, I believe Lewis Carroll intends for us to ponder what reality is, and how much our perception of it can be altered without question.
This has been the most enjoyable read in awhile. I began the sequel Through the Looking Glass last night, but already I can tell this story has a different tone than Wonderland. I hope I enjoy it as much, regardless.
[Editorial note: I wrote this more than a week ago thinking I would come back and finish it. Apparently, I won't. Enjoy.]
I finished reading Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck a few nights ago.
It’s the story of two migrant workers who travel from job to job, dreaming of earning enough money to own some land of their own. I’m not a literary person, so I’m not sure if what I read was social commentary, allegory, or just a tragedy. If it is one of the above, I would appreciate enlightenment.
Next up, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. This is mainly pleasure reading so I would expect about as thorough a “review” as you received for Of Mice and Men.
I’ve been meaning to sit down and write this for awhile, but everytime I’ve tried, I couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say. I still haven’t, actually, but I want to write something regardless.
Just before the semester started, I began reading Watership Down by Richard Adams (426 pages, for those of you who count that sort of thing), mainly in the evenings to read myself to sleep. It’s the story of a rabbit who leads a gang of rabbits from one warren (That’s where rabbits live in the wild. I did not know that.) and tries to establish another warren. It really is about rabbits. The characters speak, but they are only concerned with matters a rabbit should be concerned about, and they are even dumb like rabbits are. Even so, I found myself slowly drawn into their story.
Correction: I said it’s a story about rabbits, but really it’s a story about how societies function, the role of individuals in a society, and how we are often mislead what a leader is supposed to be. The book is split into four sections, and the fourth section had me pacing my living room while I read about the ensuing adventure.
This book may not crack my list of Top Ten, but I imagine I will read it again some day.
Next up should be Of Mice and Men. But the reading is really slow. I’m averaging only one page per day out of approximately 100 because I’ve been tired at nights and the font is really small.
