Friday, October 25, 2013

And Then There were None

I would like to make my perspective on this topic immediately clear: I am a scaredy cat. Saw? I did not see Saw. Paranormal activity? I did not go near. I can hardly read Edgar Allen Poe without getting the willies.

So, when I put And Then There Were None was on my list, I was somewhat cautious. The only thing I knew about this book was that it was a murder mystery. The only thing I knew about Agathia Christie was that she holds the title as the "Queen of Mystery". After reading just the Author’s Note, however, I was hooked to the concept:

"I had written this book because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me"

The book starts off developing the stories of ten people. Don't get too attached, though. Those ten people are about to die. Nope, I did not just ruin the book. The foreshadowing, epigraph and general ominousness make it clear what is about to take place. The suspense is in the journey.

No one is innocent of committing a crime, but somewhere along the line I began to side with the helpless guests. The terror of being in closed quarters with a murderer is frightening, and it is heart wrenching to read.
  
This is considered the beginning of the "who done it" genre by many. The phrase "and then there were..." would have originated/been popularized by this book. I consider this a great classic for anyone's repertoire. Anyone watch Family Guy's "And Then There Were Fewer"? BLAMO. Perfect pop culture reference.

The book questions what you think about justice. Who is right? Who is wrong? What do either of those things mean? It questions what you would do (sit in a locked room, with a gun, crying, thanks for asking). It makes you think beyond the last page.

It is a quick read. The suspense moves the plot along without a pause. It’s so intelligently approached and so full of twists and turns that I would read this again in a heartbeat. Once I finished, I almost went back to the beginning immediately.

Friday, October 18, 2013

Dad is Bossypants

Jim Gaffigan’s Dad is Fat and Tina Fey’s Bossypants are two solid autobiographies. I read them both back-to-back and because there isn't a lot of plot, I thought I'd write a two-for-one. 

Dad is Fat
Prerequisite of reading: Having watched Jim’s “Hot Pocket” stand-up
My favorite part: "I am undeniably lucky to have married a women liek Jeanie. However, during our marriage there have been periods when she has become rather lazy. Jeannie describes these periods as "pregnancy.""

Jim fills his book with joke after joke after joke. His humor comes from every day situations and observations from a pretty self-centered guy. The people in his stories are more prop than human. There are no intimate details or personal reflection, just trips to the park and "don't tell Mom" ice cream. He's a father of five, an albino and super lazy. His life is obviously hilarious.

I read through this once and could read through it a hundred times. But, it wasn't a quick read for me. Although extremely funny, each joke was reminiscent of the last. If I read a chapter, it felt like nearly and hour of stand-up. He likes to break the forth wall, and in that way, you'll never truly feel like you're reading a narrative.

Bossypants
Prerequisite of reading: Having watched the 30 Rock pilot and SarahPalin SNL skits
My favorite line: "No, you don't get to say that about me. My parents loved me. You can't treat me like some abused adult child."

Tina has a slightly different style of humor. To me, the stories of her early beginnings and career evolution are fascinating and funny. Each story is interesting, improbable and riddled with self deprecation. I identify with this book because, like Tina, I'm extremely famous and funny. Or rather, I am socially awkward and unable to keep my mouth shut. I like that she develops her characters, and I can't help but love the behind-the scene feeling of it all. 

Her love letters to the people she's worked with make me feel like I learned more about her. With Jim's book, I pretty much know as much as the inside flap. I've read Bossypants now 2.5 times. While riding on the (#!%*) shuttle bus to work, it's my book of choice to fill the time. 

My personal autobiography (release date 2035) will probably contain some worthless dribble about loving my family.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Life of Pi

Did everyone see the movie trailer of this? If you haven’t, please see *here* because you’re about to call me a lair.

It’s about a boy on a boat with a tiger. Seriously. A tiger.

The main character, Pi, lives in India at a zoo. He was raised Hindu, but dabbles in Christianity and Islam. He finds solace in the rituals of each religion and is adamant that they can all be combined into one spiritual experience. His family decides to travel west to relocate the zoo. The ship inexplicably sinks, leaving Pi on a life boat with some of the zoo animals: “Orange Juice” the orangutan, a Hyena, and “Richard Parker”, the infamous tiger.

Ready for a tangent? Since I was five, I've hated meat. Beef, pork, chicken and fish: I hate it all. I’ve not eaten meat for so long that the thought grosses me out. I wasn't some brilliant child activist, and my parents never encouraged the movement (there were many nights I sat at the table staring at a pot roast). But somehow, I still turned out vegetarian. Thanks Obama.

I think about what it would take for me to eat a hamburger. The truth is- I don’t think I would do it for a thousand dollars. Maybe not even two thousand. Maybe I would do it to make my husband do the dishes once in a while (buz-zing!), but in general, I simply would not.

I can hear my carnivorous friends scoffing, so I’ll get to the point. What if that’s all I had to survive? Yes, then I would eat hamburgers. Even though it makes my stomach churn, and in many ways has become a part of my very being, I would do it. If it meant (somehow) saving my husband or friends, I wouldn't even think twice.

Survival. What would you do to survive? What’s your hamburger?

Pi gives up his vegetarianism to survive. He fights fiercely against hunger and insanity. He consistently fights, when it would be easy to give up. The book is a compelling thought experiment on the will to live. Some parts are disgusting, but bare-bones living isn't going to be pretty.

Though it’s not necessarily my favorite book, and not something I would read again, I did feel more in tune to the world because of it. I’m, at the very least, glad to have read it.


*Spoiler* At the end of the book, Pi reveals that there are potentially two different versions of the same story. My opinion, after much thought, is that the second story does seem more likely. I believe that Pi was facing a manifestation of his own thoughts, and that the animals are in fact something else. I also think that it doesn't matter. The focus of the book is on survival, and if those delusions are what kept him from insanity... so be it!

Friday, October 4, 2013

You better not never tell nobody but God

I’m not an expert on books. I am not the most read, intelligent or insightful authority on literature. But I enjoy reading and writing about myself (= book blog magic).

From a young age, I slipped into different worlds through words. If you immerse yourself in a book, it forces you to experience things you may never come across. You can identify completely with the hero, or despise their actions. Even if you would rather sit at home, the book takes you to Hogwarts*. Either way, the story doesn't change.

No, reading Dad is Fat did not make me funny. Reading And Then There Were None did not make me a murdering mastermind (as far as you know). But books like The Color Purple do change you. If not in an epiphany sort of way, then perhaps it makes you occasionally more self-aware.

When left to my own devices, I often read similar books. Although it’s great to have personal favorites, seeing the world through the same lens can become boring. When I found out that there is a secret guild of people making long, long lists of books they want to read, I was intrigued. I love a challenge.

So here I am, powering through the good, the bad and The Fountainhead. I’m half way there and I’m ready to share the journey. Maybe I’ll review new books. Maybe I’ll revisit some of the old. Maybe I’ll just talk about my lively shenanigans. I’m sorry and you’re welcome.

(*That’s a bad example, everyone wants to go to Hogwarts.)

Books I've read:
1.       Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2.       Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
3.       Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
4.       To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
5.       Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
6.       Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
7.       Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
8.       Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
9.       Middlemarch – George Eliot
10.   Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
11.   The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
12.   The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
13.   Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
14.   House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
15.   Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
16.   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
17.   The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
18.   Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
19.   Animal Farm – George Orwell
20.   The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
21.   One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22.   Lord of the Flies – William Golding
23.   Life of Pi – Yann Martel
24.   Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
25.   The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
26.   Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
27.   Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
28.   Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
29.   Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
30.   The Color Purple – Alice Walker
31.   The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
32.   The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
33.   The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French)
34.   Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
35.   The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
36.   Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
37.   Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
38.   Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
39.   Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
40.   And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
41.   Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
42.   All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
43.   Dad is Fat – Jim Gaffigan
44.   The Help - Kathryn Stockett
45.   The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
46.   Bossypants – Tina Fey
47.   The Code of the Woosters - P. G. Wodehouse
48.   Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
49.   I Know this Much is True – Wally Lamb
50.   Matched (Series) - Ally Condie
51.   Hunger Games (Series) - Suzanne Collins
52.   The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
53.   The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
54.   Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
55.   The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
56.   A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
57.   Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
58.   A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
59.   A Separate Peace - John Knowles
60.   Holes - Louis Sachar
61.   The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
62.   Spud – John van de Ruit
63.   My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult
64.   Chocolat – Joanne Harris
65.   The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith
66.   The Red Tent – Anita Diamant
67.   We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
Books I want to read:
68.   The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
69.   Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
70.   Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
71.   Rocket Boys - Homer Hickam, Jr.
72.   Beloved – Toni Morrison
73.   The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
74.   Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
75.   The God of Small Things
76.   I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
77.   If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
78.   An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
79.   The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales - Oliver Sacks
80.   Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
81.   Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
82.   The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
83.   Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
84.   Emma - Jane Austen
85.   Gulliver's travels - Jonathan Swift
86.   The World According to Garp - John Irving
87.   Atonement - Ian McEwan
88.   The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
89.   The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
90.   Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
91.   Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
92.   What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
93.   Freakonomics - Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
94.   A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
95.   Q & A – Vikas Swarup
96.   Mort – Terry Pratchett
97.   The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory
98.   Magician – Raymond E Feist
99.   A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
100. Saturday – Ian McEwan
101. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
102. Libra – Don DeLillo
103. She’s Come Undone – Wally Lamb
104.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith
105. Blackbox - Nick Walker
106. A Million Little Pieces – James Frey
107. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson
108. Jamilia – Chingiz Aitmatov
109. The Third Eye-  David Knowles
110. Most Talkative - Andy Cohen
111. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
112. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
113. Dale Loves Sophie to Death - Rob Forman Dew
114. The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrad
115. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
116. The Silent Wife - A.S.A. Harrison
Books I will NEVER read:
 Lord of the Rings
The English Patient
Grapes of Wrath
War and Peace (because I don’t like tourture)
Twilight
Fifty Shades of Grey

Feel free to add, discuss and slander the list.