While in Turkey I have supported myself by teaching English, working a maximum of twenty-five hours a week. In addition to cooking, exercising, and studying Turkish, I have been reading a lot. Doing my MA in Portland, Oregon, I never had time to read for pleasure – being swamped with Political Science texts. So this ample free time is a blessing that I have taken full advantage of, but there is a catch. Good books in English are hard to find in Izmir and are also pricey. So I have developed a system; I read book reviews in newspapers and order them via Amazon.com to my family’s address in the USA and have the next visiting guest from the States lug some over for me. Also, my mother was kind enough to send me a box of books through DHL for Christmas, and as anyone who has ever lifted a box of books knows, that package couldn’t have been cheap. As an added bonus she also included little post-it-notes throughout the books with little hand-written love messages. There is nothing like getting half way through a book about Medieval Grimoires and finding a note from mom that says how much ‘she loves her boys.’ As a result of the steady supply of literature procured through the kindness of family and friends I have burned through a lot of books. However, some I leave half way, and this is the topic of this web log.
Many friends disagree with me on this point – but if I can’t get into a story or topic, be it a movie or a book, I will give it up without a second thought. A lot of people will refuse to get up in the middle of a movie, no matter how terrible it is. Those friends argue that you have to give the story a chance to unfold, and that the story as a whole may be redeeming when the component parts are not. True, but I don’t think it happens that often. A novel I recently read about Sudan, Something is Going to Fall Like Rain by Ros Wynne-Jones, redeemed itself after a slow start by being unconventional even though I knew the ending (spoiler alert, it’s genocide!). More often than not you just waste time. How many times have you had the following thought while coming out of a movie theater?; Well, thats two hours of my life I’ll never get back! And you never will. Never! So, here are a few books which I have recently put down before their conclusions.
Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. A work of fiction 431 pages long, it is futuristic, apocalyptic, and annoying. The story centers around a cult of roof-top gardeners who preach unity, organic living, and rejection of the corporate society around them that has fallen into degradation and despair. Atwood paints a vivid picture of how the world had so imbibed consumerism and scientific advancement that humaneness was nowhere to be found. Sounds interesting, right? It was, at first. I usually like science-fiction, especially regarding possible future worlds. The Year of the Flood, on the other hand, focused too much on painting a picture that plot was lacking. Throughout the novel the author kept making up lots of different names for the fictional-future; for example, CorpSeCorps, BlyssPluss, Tex-Mexicans, Sewage Lagoon, SolarSpace, HelthWeyzer, etc. I got to page 195 before I realized nothing was happening.
Albert Camus’ A Happy Death. I was surprised at this one. I had read Camus’ The Stranger and The Plague and enjoyed them both immensely. However, A Happy Death was too existentialist for my taste. It’s not all Camus’ fault – I have a requirement of stories; I have to identify with, and maybe even like, at least one of the characters. I can’t help it. A Happy Death was purposefully empty of ‘good’ characters, but unlike The Stranger and The Plague, the storyline and philosophical quality just didn’t justify reading on. I got about half way through.
Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. I had seen the author plug the book during an interview on The Daily Show, and despite not liking him very much I thought the topic was fascinating – a tribe of indigenous peoples, the Tarahumara, who dwell in the vast Copper Canyons in Mexico were among the premier marathon runners in the world, and were almost unknown. Unfortunately, like in the Daily Show interview, McDougall, who is a character in the book, got under my skin. There were too many cliches about how natural running is and how it sets you free. I thought it especially ironic how McDougall repeated how precious the canyons’ isolation was to the Tarahumara and how they were the world of sports’ best kept secret, when he decided to write a book that would become a national best-seller. In addition to not liking the narrator, after 94 pages I realized there wasn’t much first-hand information about these people at all, and I started to question how much contact he actually had with these elusive canyon-residents. Instead the book had become about running and anecdotes about famous runners or people in the business. I stopped well shy of 287 pages.
Maybe these books do blossom into excellent reads, but there are so many books on my reading list that I just can’t give them the time.
-Charles P. Pearson
Let’s be honest, you don’t read. I recall many occasions in which you were going to “study” at the libarry at UCSB. Thus the man who says “reading is for chumps” has me at a loss for his attempts reading books that don’t come with a set of vibrant colored crayons.
It’s not a surprise to me that you haven’t finished these reading. Perhaps it’s the fact your choice of literature is, for the lack of a better word, retarded. One thing that I do agree with you about is not to finish a book deemed as a waste of time. There are many books about and the last thing you should do is spend time reading a book you don’t connect with, doesn’t have a valid point, doesn’t inspire and has you cringe at the though of reading another page of word vomit.
Good reading should be exactly as my comments read. They are full of information that has been deemed good for the body and soul. That is a fact. At least no man has ever disputed the mountain of results I have accumulated from my years of writing in APA and (insert other academic style) format.
One thing that I advise you to do, as a friend, is to never stop writing. You might not fully understand the difference between cantankerous and misanthropic, but you can certainly win over this cantankerous misanthrope to reading all of your entries.
Second time around:
Let’s be honest, you don’t read. I recall many occasions in which you were going to “study” at the libarry at UCSB. Thus the man who says “reading is for chumps” has me at a loss for his attempts reading books that don’t come with a set of vibrant colored crayons.
It’s not a surprise to me that you haven’t finished these reading. Perhaps it’s the fact your choice of literature is, for the lack of a better word, retarded. One thing that I do agree with you about is not to finish a book deemed as a waste of time. There are many books about and the last thing you should do is spend time reading a book you don’t connect with, doesn’t have a valid point, doesn’t inspire and has you cringe at the though of reading another page of word vomit.
Good reading should be exactly as my comments read. They are full of information that has been deemed good for the body and soul. That is a fact. At least no man has ever disputed the mountain of results I have accumulated from my years of writing in APA and (insert other academic style) format.
One thing that I advise you to do, as a friend, is to never stop writing. You might not fully understand the difference between cantankerous and misanthropic, but you can certainly win over this cantankerous misanthrope to reading all of your entries.