The Time Is Precious, I Know. In Time, It Could Have Been So Much More.
Time is a cruel mistress.
Needless to say, this month flew by. It feels like Halloween was only yesterday. And now I can really feel the impending tick-tick-ticking of that ball being dropped. Can you hear the ringing already, the ringing in of a new year? I feel no sympathy for what has been a year of questionable occurrences and a helluva lot of loss. Other than getting married, 2016 has been a sour one. But I will discuss that next month. For now, I'm simply looking forward to The Big Fat Quiz of the Year to squeeze some laughs out of a year that surely produced a cabernet that merely consists of spit and tears.
With November whizzing by like an errant Frisbee, my disappointment should be apparent as to how little I was able to read in that stint of time. It's going to be a hard-won battle, this challenge.
Book #33: A science fiction novel
The Internet, how glorious a thing. I was not looking forward to this prompt. I'm not a big sci-fi reader, although I love me some sci-fi film and television.
But when it comes to reading, I never thought I'd find something human, something more akin to Orphan Black than Star Trek.
So, I went looking and found this. And thus I picked up Mermaids in Paradise .
This book reads like chick lit at first, focused on a woman that prattles on about getting married and where her honeymoon shall take place and what her friends think and keeping up appearances and blatty-bla-bla. On her trip to a beach resort in the British Virgin Islands, she becomes acquainted with a bunch of people that she thinks about purely in the negative as too-this, too-that, and simply not cool enough to be her friends. Keeping everyone at a safe distance, she is pulled toward this clan of alleged misfits by her husband Chip who is all-too-friendly. One of these people is a woman named Nancy, a marine biology expert who is obsessed with parrotfish. And one day, she becomes entranced by something else: mermaids. She's seen them, of course, which seems like poppycock to everyone else. But buoyant on the paradise of the island, they decide to venture out and look for these mermaids, this time with a camera. And they see them, too. They even get footage. Unfortunately, the resort catches wind of this sighting and decides to take advantage of these marvels, these people of the deep, and therein lies our conflict. The resort vs. this rag-tag team of tourists. It can be quite thrilling at times.
And the sci-fi aspects don't seem so apparent, but when I get past the surface, I find that this novel tells the tale of environmental disaster, frankly. Deb, our barely likeable protagonist, waxes on about technology, asteroids, evolution, climate change, and the future. These topics are typical sci-fi fare, but her Valley Girl tone distracts from it.
So, there it is. I read some sci-fi. I think I may have even liked it. Although I'm not so sure I liked Deb.
Book #34: A book with a protagonist who has your occupation
I have three jobs, so I had to pick one. I chose writer. That brings me the most joy and is the most authentic representation of me.
Luckily, there are tons of books about writers: Atonement , The Help , Misery , The Hours , The World According to Garp , Wonder Boys , The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. , The Shining , The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , ... and the list goes on.
If you'll notice, two of those books on there are written by Stephen King.
Stephen King is the consummate writer, the kind of iconic figure known by all, including people who don't read. His reputation precedes him, so I figured, there's a writer who writes about writers.
I thought I could check off the box, but no, the question is, which novel of his vast collection to read?
I first considered Misery, but I don't feel that I am that kind of writer, the world-famous but overly private type who writes out best-selling manuscripts on a typewriter in the woods. Sure, I'd love to be that cliche, but I'm just not that caliber. Instead, I saw myself more as a sentimentalist with a somewhat disturbed undercurrent.
What could be better than his novella The Body ?
That speaks more to me: the family-oriented writer who looks back as a framing device to narrate the book. To be fair, I didn't know if this was how the book was, but I presumed based on the wonderful coming-of-age film Stand By Me , which is an adaptation of King's The Body. I think I write about the past and wax nostalgic, so I definitely leaned toward that.
Plus, The Body is a quick read, which meant I had more opportunity to dig into another book for this challenge. I gotta keep that pace to cross the finish line.
Now, The Body is, without a doubt, a good book, but as I read (instead of watched Stand By Me), I actually felt sad. There's a lot of sorrow in nostalgia, just as much bitter as there is sweet. And in the case of the four boys in this book, it cuts like a knife to hear about their fates, about their limited prospects, about the society that gave up on them before they gave up on themselves. It truly hurts.
The author captures something unique when he says (and this is just as much Stephen as it is our protagonist) that "the only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality." Death is a big part of The Body, sometimes not taken seriously enough, but brutal in its face-to-face reckoning. When they see Ray Brower's corpse, it's no longer giggles with the boys. It's real. And it sticks with them forever.
I myself remember the first time I saw an open coffin. I was too young to really appreciate the concept of death, to really understand the finality of it, and so, I wasn't upset the way older individuals would be. But it carried some weight because the image sticks in my mind. Perverse as it is to describe it like a movie scene, that's what it is. A tiny videoclip that plays on and on for about five seconds that left me with something, although I cannot be sure exactly as to what that was.
There are many great lines in The Body, but none are as vitally important as this one:
"At an age when all four of us would be considered too young and immature to be President, three of us are dead."
Although the boys are walking across town to see a boy's dead body, the book is far more about the passing of his friends, his three dear childhood friends, that he cannot shake after decades of not quite being buddy-buddy anymore. They all went their separate ways, and that, for many of us, is its own kind of death, a finality of something that, no matter how hard we try, we can't seem to get back. But there are also literal deaths, and although I can't imagine what that is like, since I am fortunate to not have suffered the death of a close childhood friend in my life, I can understand the weight. That would stay with you. I feel the weight thinking about my pets that have passed, how wonderful and unique each one is, and how I will never get that back. As I'm writing this, I am verklempt. I can't imagine what losing a person would be like, someone who spoke to you and shared their thoughts and passions and dreams and jokes and disappointments and regrets and everything else that filled their body.
It is hard to talk about these kinds of things. But, like King writes in this very book, "the most important things are the hardest things to say."
That leaves me with seven books to read in a month. Seven! That's a lot of pages, especially since I foolishly left the prompt for the chunkster book of more than six hundred pages to this point in the game. Oh, well. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. I am well on my way to finishing two of them this week with any luck.
Until then, happy reading!
Needless to say, this month flew by. It feels like Halloween was only yesterday. And now I can really feel the impending tick-tick-ticking of that ball being dropped. Can you hear the ringing already, the ringing in of a new year? I feel no sympathy for what has been a year of questionable occurrences and a helluva lot of loss. Other than getting married, 2016 has been a sour one. But I will discuss that next month. For now, I'm simply looking forward to The Big Fat Quiz of the Year to squeeze some laughs out of a year that surely produced a cabernet that merely consists of spit and tears.
With November whizzing by like an errant Frisbee, my disappointment should be apparent as to how little I was able to read in that stint of time. It's going to be a hard-won battle, this challenge.
Book #33: A science fiction novel
The Internet, how glorious a thing. I was not looking forward to this prompt. I'm not a big sci-fi reader, although I love me some sci-fi film and television.
But when it comes to reading, I never thought I'd find something human, something more akin to Orphan Black than Star Trek.
So, I went looking and found this. And thus I picked up Mermaids in Paradise .
This book reads like chick lit at first, focused on a woman that prattles on about getting married and where her honeymoon shall take place and what her friends think and keeping up appearances and blatty-bla-bla. On her trip to a beach resort in the British Virgin Islands, she becomes acquainted with a bunch of people that she thinks about purely in the negative as too-this, too-that, and simply not cool enough to be her friends. Keeping everyone at a safe distance, she is pulled toward this clan of alleged misfits by her husband Chip who is all-too-friendly. One of these people is a woman named Nancy, a marine biology expert who is obsessed with parrotfish. And one day, she becomes entranced by something else: mermaids. She's seen them, of course, which seems like poppycock to everyone else. But buoyant on the paradise of the island, they decide to venture out and look for these mermaids, this time with a camera. And they see them, too. They even get footage. Unfortunately, the resort catches wind of this sighting and decides to take advantage of these marvels, these people of the deep, and therein lies our conflict. The resort vs. this rag-tag team of tourists. It can be quite thrilling at times.
And the sci-fi aspects don't seem so apparent, but when I get past the surface, I find that this novel tells the tale of environmental disaster, frankly. Deb, our barely likeable protagonist, waxes on about technology, asteroids, evolution, climate change, and the future. These topics are typical sci-fi fare, but her Valley Girl tone distracts from it.
So, there it is. I read some sci-fi. I think I may have even liked it. Although I'm not so sure I liked Deb.
Book #34: A book with a protagonist who has your occupation
I have three jobs, so I had to pick one. I chose writer. That brings me the most joy and is the most authentic representation of me.
Luckily, there are tons of books about writers: Atonement , The Help , Misery , The Hours , The World According to Garp , Wonder Boys , The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. , The Shining , The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , ... and the list goes on.
If you'll notice, two of those books on there are written by Stephen King.
Stephen King is the consummate writer, the kind of iconic figure known by all, including people who don't read. His reputation precedes him, so I figured, there's a writer who writes about writers.
I thought I could check off the box, but no, the question is, which novel of his vast collection to read?
I first considered Misery, but I don't feel that I am that kind of writer, the world-famous but overly private type who writes out best-selling manuscripts on a typewriter in the woods. Sure, I'd love to be that cliche, but I'm just not that caliber. Instead, I saw myself more as a sentimentalist with a somewhat disturbed undercurrent.
What could be better than his novella The Body ?
That speaks more to me: the family-oriented writer who looks back as a framing device to narrate the book. To be fair, I didn't know if this was how the book was, but I presumed based on the wonderful coming-of-age film Stand By Me , which is an adaptation of King's The Body. I think I write about the past and wax nostalgic, so I definitely leaned toward that.
Plus, The Body is a quick read, which meant I had more opportunity to dig into another book for this challenge. I gotta keep that pace to cross the finish line.
Now, The Body is, without a doubt, a good book, but as I read (instead of watched Stand By Me), I actually felt sad. There's a lot of sorrow in nostalgia, just as much bitter as there is sweet. And in the case of the four boys in this book, it cuts like a knife to hear about their fates, about their limited prospects, about the society that gave up on them before they gave up on themselves. It truly hurts.
The author captures something unique when he says (and this is just as much Stephen as it is our protagonist) that "the only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality." Death is a big part of The Body, sometimes not taken seriously enough, but brutal in its face-to-face reckoning. When they see Ray Brower's corpse, it's no longer giggles with the boys. It's real. And it sticks with them forever.
I myself remember the first time I saw an open coffin. I was too young to really appreciate the concept of death, to really understand the finality of it, and so, I wasn't upset the way older individuals would be. But it carried some weight because the image sticks in my mind. Perverse as it is to describe it like a movie scene, that's what it is. A tiny videoclip that plays on and on for about five seconds that left me with something, although I cannot be sure exactly as to what that was.
There are many great lines in The Body, but none are as vitally important as this one:
"At an age when all four of us would be considered too young and immature to be President, three of us are dead."
Although the boys are walking across town to see a boy's dead body, the book is far more about the passing of his friends, his three dear childhood friends, that he cannot shake after decades of not quite being buddy-buddy anymore. They all went their separate ways, and that, for many of us, is its own kind of death, a finality of something that, no matter how hard we try, we can't seem to get back. But there are also literal deaths, and although I can't imagine what that is like, since I am fortunate to not have suffered the death of a close childhood friend in my life, I can understand the weight. That would stay with you. I feel the weight thinking about my pets that have passed, how wonderful and unique each one is, and how I will never get that back. As I'm writing this, I am verklempt. I can't imagine what losing a person would be like, someone who spoke to you and shared their thoughts and passions and dreams and jokes and disappointments and regrets and everything else that filled their body.
It is hard to talk about these kinds of things. But, like King writes in this very book, "the most important things are the hardest things to say."
That leaves me with seven books to read in a month. Seven! That's a lot of pages, especially since I foolishly left the prompt for the chunkster book of more than six hundred pages to this point in the game. Oh, well. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. I am well on my way to finishing two of them this week with any luck.
Until then, happy reading!
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