It's Right There in The Title!

It's right there in the title!  I'm saying that right off the bat because this time I will be revealing spoilers about this book all over the place...  and I don't feel bad about that.  Well... maybe I should because not everyone has read about Bovine Spongiform Encephelopathy (BSE), so I guess it wouldn't be as readily apparent to everyone!  When I first became vegan, I did a lot of reading: The Mad Cowboy by Howard Lyman, Diet For  a New America by John Robbins, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Markus, The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson, Vegan Freak by Bob Torres etc.,  plus I've watched  a few programs about Mad Cow Disease and the Creutzfeldt-Jakob variant. 
So when the protagonist of this book, Cameron Smith, starts to show some symptoms, it's not too hard to leap from the big fat hint in the title to BSE.  It didn't stop me from tearing up when his symptoms were confirmed however...  and tearing up again after he is hospitalized and his brain can no longer tell his lungs how to work.   Everything fades to black.   
What happens next I can only describe as an odyssey of the mind.  Cameron's hallucinations take him on a wild ride across America with a classmate and a possessed garden gnome, having bizarre adventures, and experiencing life ...making friends, fighting bad guys, getting lucky with his high school crush.  I know that sounds a little bucket-listy, but Bray really crafted a great story here.  While there is no way to feel good about the fact that Cameron is dying before he really got to live, his hallucinations give him a kind of peace.  A gift before dying.  So yeah...I got a little teary-eyed at the end too. 
 It doesn't really come up at all, how Cameron contracted this disease... and I won't go into it here, except to say that I appreciate the fact that this book wasn't used as an opportunity to preach or teach about this issue.  This was story telling at it's finest and I am grateful to have read it.

 

Doctor Zhivago

                                           

I must admit that I was disappointed when I finished reading this book.  To begin with I had a hard time reading it straight through, I had to take breaks and look at something else for a while, and in the end I made myself finish it.  I had expectations.  I was biased perhaps.  I had heard so much of this wonderful movie (which I have not seen yet, and seriously doubt if I will), and the book itself was referenced in certain other movies making me believe that this was some great Russian epic which was romantic and beautiful.
There was the potentiality there...I liked some passages (which incidentally were not about Zhivago),  but the politics (or as I think of it to myself, the historical lesson / social commentary) actually detracted from this already weak story about a weak man who was, in my opinion, repugnant.  Honestly, at the end I didn't even have the stomach to read the poetry collection, I just wanted to distance myself from this character. 
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, perhaps if I watched the movie I might see it differently.  I know there is still much that I don't know about Russia, and I haven't read nearly as much of it's literature as I wish to.  It is a work in progress.  But when you have masters like Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol,  Solzenitsyn, and Bulgakov, who provoke deep emotions of  awe, wonder and even tears, I want to know, whats so damn special about this book?

With All the Best Intentions...

                         
I began my reading this year with the best of intentions, I would choose randomly from my stacks, read carefully (and slowly), savour the language on each page and take my time to digest what the author is saying to me.  Taking my time meant thinking more about each individual book, and having more time to do extra research rather than just counting on Wikipedia for most of my information (not that I am dissing the website in any way...it is still my first choice for fast facts). 
With these ideas in mind I set out read my very first Goethe.  I wanted to read Faust of course, but I have always been really anal about how I start a new author, and preferably it will be with their first works and then progressing on to read the rest (this modus operandi of mine is currently getting a re-evaluation).  So I began to read Goethe's  The Sorrows of Young Werther. 
One other firmly established habit of mine is to ignore introductions in books.  I do this for a few reasons, it is hard to understand the references made because I have not read the book yet (why is this at the beginning of a book?), sometimes they can be extremely boring (not everyone is as funny as Charles Dickens or Mark Twain) and last, but not least, they might contain spoilers.  Quite by accident, I briefly scanned the first page of the introduction in this book, and right there, right on the very first page, in two little sentences, the whole plot was revealed.
I have always been a fan of the epistolary novel, but knowing what I already did, or possibly because I had to go back to work this week after  Christmas holidays, or perhaps because the moon is getting fuller, or even maybe it was just because it is January and the weather is dull and grey (post holiday blues?), but I was not inclined to like this story.
Werther impressed me from the beginning as self indulgent.  On top of that he is a very artsy, whiney, flowery, wordy, (I discovered a new hatred for the word effulgent) correspondent which had me rolling my eyes almost from the first page.  Add to that his obsessive behaviour which really brought back to me those feelings I experienced when I was reading Nabokov's Lolita .  So going in, I was miffed, already spoilt, mildly grossed out,  and I think too biased  to give Sorrows a fair chance.  There are other writings in the book, which I didn't even look at because by the time I forced myself through Sorrows (rapidly I might add, no savouring these words), I was not interested in looking further, I knew that it had been a bad idea, and that Goethe deserves a better effort from me.
I have since read that this first book of Goethe's was kind of a bad boy for it's day.  Inciting some protest about it's content, it was also an influence for the upcoming Romantic literary movement. 
For now, I will put this aside for another time when I have forgot these preconcieved notions, and recommend to you (whoever you are who read my blog posts), to be careful of your books...they might contain introductions that could ruin everything!

Of Mice and Men

 

   Since I did not study this book in highschool it was shocking to realise just how much this particular book has invaded popular culture.  It immediately occurred to me on reading certain lines spoken by one of the protagonists, Lennie,  that Looney Tunes had parodied this character and it was disturbing to realise that, because this story is so profoundly sad, that the folks at Warner Brothers thought it darkly amusing to feature this in a children’s cartoon.

I have always been reluctant to read Steinbeck.
Of Mice and Men was simply awful.  Well written, but about such an ugly topic.  I was impressed by Steinbeck’s imagery of the outdoors at the beginning and end of the book (it is curious that he did it that way instead of establishing scenarios throughout the story and changes of scenes).  It is almost as if he can see only beauty in nature and that humans are not worthy of the same effort.  The book was clearly written as something to be acted out in a play, and I can honestly say that I will not be attending any performances.  I was left feeling nauseated, sick at the ugliness of human nature which even Steinbeck’s descriptions of the scenery in the last act did nothing to cleanse from my heart.  
I hope that rest of his work is unlike in character to this one, but I suspect it will be.

Bobcat and Other Stories

These short stories are well written and, I only guess here, have a unifying theme of desire.  Not, of course, of the same type of desire.  I have to admit I was pretty bummed about the topics.  There wasn't anything here that uplifted me emotionally (it was mostly in the other direction...down, even with the story Slatland), and I was very thoughtful after reading each story.  This isn't something I am comfortable with, but I welcome it because each new experience is a challenge and I felt that I could probably spend a lot of time pulling apart each story and finding new nuances I hadn't experienced the previous reading, which means that at a later date I will come back and re-visit this book, and of course, I will keep an eye out for Rebecca Lee's future works.

The White Tiger

DH bought this for me one Christmas, and the first time I tried to read it I had to put it down after a while because I absolutely loathed what was happening to the protagonist. 
Four years later I looked at it again, surprised to see how far I actually had got (about half way) before I turned away.  So I was a little anxious about having to re-read so much especially when I might be overcome again with that intense feeling of anger that repulsed me the first time. 
Distance and time, I guess, heals all wounds, so that this time I was able to read the first part with equanimity.  I felt a deep sadness about the fact that what Adiga had written was probably pretty close to the mark of what conditions actually are like in rural India. 
I’d like to believe that I have more insight now into a part of Indian culture, but not the whole.  I have read too many other influences to believe that this is all India can be or is.    Paramahansa Yogananda and Mohandas Gandhi at the least tell me something else.  Despite knowing this, the book depressed me anyway because it was such a faithful description of the ugliness in all of us (though there is more ugliness in some than others). 

A Scanner Darkly

This is my third book by Philip K. Dick.  Right off I will say that his future/alternative universes really kind of suck!  They aren't light reads, however well written.  I will plug on and read the rest of his work (seeking for something...I know not what, I'm pretty sure that it won't be sunshine and happiness), but perhaps I will limit it to once a year so that I can choose how often I want to be bummed out. 
A Scanner Darkly was just awful.  Awful in it's subject content.  I am pretty rigid in my stance on drugs and alcohol (hate, hate, hate it!), so reading a whole fictionary book about users was a real chore for me.  And it was predictable too, though some of the conversations between the characters that were high was interesting (in print!  If I had to actually listen to this kind of talk, say like in the movie with Keanu Reeves, I would be shutting that off in a very rapid manner).   
Just imagine what Dick would have been capable of if he hadn't been a user himself?