This Is The Last…

I just finished reading In a Sunburned Country. This book is about the journeys of travel writer Bill Bryson in Australia. I’m not surprised that I really liked this book; I’ve yet to read anything by him that I didn’t like. His writing is funny and insightful, including many historical facts told in an interesting way. Bryson’s got a knack for telling a good story. A couple times I actually laughed out loud, while reading this book. This is a terrific read.

Bryson tours the outback, the big cities, the coastline. Bryson relays his fixation on the dangers of Australia (from being stranded in the outback and having to drink your own urine, to jellyfish, poisonous snakes, and stories of crocodile attacks). I thought it was amazing how there’s so much of Australia that is still untouched and unexplored. Australia has so much to see and do, but its like we forget that Australia’s there.

One of my favorite stories out of the book, is when Bill and his friend, Allan, end up spending the night in Daly Waters (a very small town). There’s nothing to do in the town so they hit the bar and start drinking. They have a drunken night of fun and Bill wakes up remembering very little. The next morning Bill asks Allan, “Did I disgrace myself?” Allan says,”No, but you’re doing a house swap next summer with a family from Korea”. Bill says,”You’re making this up, right?” Allan pulls a business card out of Bill’s pocket that says “Park Ho Lee, Meat Wholesaler”. Underneath it in Bill’s handwriting it said, “June 27-August 10. No Worries.”

The last paragraph of the book says…

Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn’t have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight a round in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely yours.

It seems like Bryson is pleading with his readers, don’t overlook this place. Not that he needs to, this book has more than whet my appetite. I’ll admit that previous to reading this book, my knowledge (or should I say ignorance?) of Australia has been limited to INXS, Nick Cave, and Vegemite. I never knew what a mix Australia is of American and British influence. Save for the things Quinton and Daniel have told me about their journies, I knew very little about this country. This book is great. One of these days, Jason and I are just gonna have to go and see for ourselves.

Naive.Super, by Norwegian author Erlend Loe, was our book club choice of December. Our 3 month theme has been crazy people that aren’t that crazy. I really enjoyed this book and hope to find more works by this author in the future.

The narrator of our story is a 25 year old guy, that’s recently hitten a wall. I think they call this the quarter-life crisis. He’s feeling anxiety about life, he’s not sure what the point of everything is, he doesn’t have the feeling that everything will be okay in the end. He decides that until he can figure everything out he’s gonna start making lists. Lists of things that make him happy, things that he liked when he was a kid, things that he has, things that he wants.

The character is really likable. He becomes obsessed by time and whether it actually matters. He yearns to get to the bottom of life and how best to live it. Part of this book takes place in Norway and the other half our main character has a vacation in New York. This book is really simple, a little odd, and funny here and there. Sometimes I think I just need to sit there with the hammer and nail like our main character.

This book was a quick read, it has a big font with big margins. I really liked this book. If you haven’t read this book, pick it up. It’s well worth the 3 hours it’ll take to read.

This month our book club choice is Naive.Super by Erlend Loe. This is the third and final book in this 3 month period. Our theme for these last 3 books were crazy people that aren’t that crazy.

This book is a little difficult to find. I couldn’t find it at Barnes & Noble. I was able to get a copy through Amazon. The last two books were a bit dark, but this one is a little more light-hearted.

Starting January, we’ll do another 3 month series with a different theme. Any suggestions?

Our Book Club choice for the month of November was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. Our Book Club theme for these three books are crazy people that aren’t that crazy.

The novel was first published in 1962 and was developed while Kesey was still a graduate student at Stanford University. In 1975 it was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson. While the film was very much a success, it was heavily criticized by it’s author for changes in the screen adaptation. The main difference being that the novel is told from the first-person narration of a deaf and mute Indian named Chief Bromden, who isn’t really deaf or mute. Kesey also opposed the casting of Nicholson as McMurphy. Ken Kesey never saw the film.

The entirety of the book is set inside a mental institution and focuses on the introspective nature of Chief Bromden and his isolation from society, as well as the struggle between the authoritative Nurse Ratched and patient Randall McMurphy. McMurphy is sent to the hospital after being kicked out of other work farms and correctional facilities for being disruptive. But the other doctors and Nurse Ratched speculate is McMurphy is only pretending to be insane to get out of hard manual labor. McMurphy is the protagonist of the novel who enjoys gambling and sometimes brags that he is a psychopath. He is full of energy and mischief and a lack of control; and his character represents everything opposite Nurse Ratched. .

For being in a mental institution, McMurphy is quite well adjusted and holds clear thinking ability, unlike many of the other Acute patients in the ward. At one point in the book, McMurphy learns that unlike jail with a definite release date, he is committed to the institution until Nurse Ratched releases him. This news causes him do change his behavior due to the fact that being disruptive could hinder his chances of being released. Later McMurphy asks the other patients why they didn’t tell him this earlier. They reply that they forgot, since most of them are there voluntarily. McMurphy is astonished that they would choose to stay in a hospital full of Nurse Ratched’s rules instead of enjoying a life of girls, fast cars, and freedom. A young man with a speech impediment named Billy Bibbit becomes upset and screams furiously and says he’s too scared to leave. He begins crying and stuttering hard and the wounds on his hands begin bleeding. This scene made me wonder about choices we make in our own lives not because their easy, but because we’re afraid of change.

The novel presented many other scenarios between characters that symbolized the counter-culture era and beatnik movements of the fifties and sixties. I really enjoyed the style of writing that authors like Kesey, Kerouac, and Wolfe developed during that time. What did you think of making the Chief the narrator of the story? I like how his narration would drift between his consciousness and hallucinations of a fog. Which other patients on the ward caught your attention? In the book, McMurphy bragged that Nurse Ratched’s oppressive nature was pent up sexual frustration and could be easily cured by one night with him. Why do you really think Nurse Ratched treated her patients so severe and cold heartedly?

I just finished reading Lynne Truss’ book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. This book leads you through common mistakes in punctuation, in a non-textbook kinda way.

It really bothers me to see things like a sign that says…Come inside for CD’s, video’s, book’s, and DVD’s. I’ve been out of school for a few years now. I have to admit that sometimes I’m a little foggy on when to use its or it’s, when to use colons and semicolons, and dashes.

Punctuation can completely change the meaning of a sentence. The book gave the example below.

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.

If you’re looking to freshen up on punctuation, then this is the book for you. Its a short book, only about 200 pages. I had fun reading this book and will definitely keep it around for a quick reference.

If you’re still wondering what the rule for its and it’s. Well, let me tell you.

It’s stands for it is or it has.
Its denotes possession. As in…I don’t have its lid anymore.

This is our second month of doing the Book Club. We’re doing 3 books of the same theme over 3 months. Our Book Club theme is crazy people, that aren’t that crazy. Last month we read Veronika Decides to Die.

Our Book Club choice for November is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey.

Please feel free to share your thoughts. We’ll be putting up reviews shortly.

Enjoy.

Our book club choice for the month of October was Paulo Coehlo’s Veronika Decides to Die. Our book club theme for these 3 months are crazy people, that aren’t that crazy.

As the book starts, we’re introduced to Veronika. She’s young, beautiful, and seems to have everything going for her. Yet, she has decided that she wants to kill herself. Not because she’s depressed just because she’s bored. She feels that the world is messed up and she feels powerless. She is unsuccessful and lands herself in a mental hospital. Veronika is told she only has a week to live, because of the damage she’s done to her heart.

Veronika develops friendships with some of the other patients at the hospital. She hears their stories of how they ended up there. This book gives us an interesting perspective on asylum life. Faced with death, Veronika starts feeling a deep desire to live. She starts playing the piano late at night, passionately and unrestrained. She pours her heart and soul into it. She plays like she never had before.

Coehlo threw in his usual mix of philosophy/spirituality into the story. But despite that, I really liked it. I like his writing style. I liked how Paulo Coehlo dropped into the book, and then quickly dropped out again. Its very interesting to me that Paulo Coehlo spent time in an insane asylum, when he was young. His parents put him there, not because he was crazy, but because he wanted to be an artist. That wasn’t socially acceptable to his parents. So Coehlo has an intimate knowledge of asylums, treatments, the relationships between doctor and patients, and the comforts and harrows of living in a place like that.

I liked how Veronika was comforted by the fact that when you’re in a mental hospital you can do whatever you want. Nobody thinks anything of it, because you’re crazy. Like when Veronika, walks up to the member of the Fraternity and smacks him across the face. On hearing the news that she is soon to be released from Vilette, Zedka reflects, “Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of madness and becomes addicted to it. You no longer have to take on responsibilities, to struggle to earn your daily bread, to be bothered with repetitive, mundane tasks.” What do you think about that quote?

I really liked this book. What about you? What do you think of Dr. Igor’s theory about Vitriol, the name he gives to a “disease of the soul” that affects people who have grown embittered? How do you feel about Dr. Igor’s experiment on Veronika?

Have you ever noticed that you read a book once or maybe twice, and then it just sits on your bookcase collecting dust? Maybe instead, you want to get in the habit of leaving a book behind in a public place for another to enjoy. Inspired by the Where’s George site, the makers of BookCrossing wanted to do the same thing with books.

How it works is…you read a book, register it on their website, and then leave it somewhere (park bench, phonebooth, somewhere public). You then post on the site where you left it and then somebody will come along and find it.

On Sunday, Jason was checking the site for books that people had “released” into the wild. We went and found two of them. They were left in a phone booth in front of Office Depot.

This website is a really cool way to share books. Its free. Its easy enough. It works both ways - you can leave books or you can find books. Some feel its a good way to exert your intellectual influence on the world. Either way, its the ultimate literary treasure hunt.

Starting today we’re going to be doing a book club. We’ll read one book a month. Three books of the same theme.

All of our choices were inspired by the song lyric….

See the sea wants to take me,
the knife wants to slit me,
do you think you can help me?

All 3 of these books are about crazy people, that actually aren’t that crazy.

Our first choice is Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coehlo.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this book. We’ll be writing reviews of it very soon.

Enjoy.

I just finished reading Seize the Daylight. I’ve always wondered why we spring forward and fall back every year. I knew there was a good reason for it. This book tells the story of the origin of Daylight Savings Time, the drama that surrounded it, and the slow adoption of it around the world. I doubt anyone reading this post will actually want to read this book, its no Da Vinci Code. But I found it quite interesting for being non-fiction.

The purpose of DST is to change the hours of human activity to make the best use of daylight, as opposed to wasting time (by sleeping in long past sunup). Germany was the first to adopt DST, during WWI to save energy. Britain and America soon followed.

Some people really wanted DST because they conserved energy, they had more time in the evening for sports and recreation, more sunlight meant less car accidents in the evening and lower crime in the evening. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to realize how much could be saved by saving the daylight.

While other people fiercely opposed DST because they thought it was a huge inconvenience to change their clocks twice a year, they were concerned about their kids walking to the bus stop while it was still dark out, and they didn’t feel that they were really gaining anything. The farmers especially opposed DST. Farmers complained that they could not change their daily schedule and start work an hour earlier just because the numbering of the hours had changed. Owners of drive-in movie theaters did not appreciate the extra hour of sunlight, either.

This book is full of funny anecdotes and the participation of remarkably quirky individuals who felt passionately about saving the daylight—Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Franklin Roosevelt. An interesting read, to say the least.

p.s. We’re gonna be doing a book club starting in October. We’re gonna do three books in three months. All with the same theme. If you have any suggestions, let’s hear ‘em.