Reading Challenge and Recommendations

Currently Reading: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hello everyone! After the success of my November challenge for myself – nine new blog posts in one month – I’ve decided to take on another one. However, this time I’m switching my focus. Instead of setting a writing goal, I’m turning my attention to my reading habits. Thus do I embark on my February challenge:

One Book a Week for this Geek! Four for February

Why yes. I am proud of that title.

And more importantly, that’s right! I’m determined to read one book for every week in February (i.e. four books for the month). I figure that was a fairly normal reading pace for me in college so it can’t be too hard an undertaking. Yet, it will hopefully help me to fulfill a personal goal, which is spending more time with my nose in a book rather than with my eyes glued to the TV. Fortunately, my favorite television shows are making it easier and beginning to endlessly suck… but that’s a rant for some other time and a different blog.

So with The Return of the King as my first book for the month (despite beginning it two days ago, in January), I will read four books in February. Furthermore, I’m holding myself accountable for this goal by proclaiming it on my blog, which, theoretically, means I’m holding myself accountable to others.

In the meantime, since this is likely to decrease my posting for the next month, I decided I’d give some more reading suggestions for you to fill the time in my absence. Again, the summaries come from the books’ back covers.

1. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

“Pi Patel, a God-loving boy and the son of a zookeeper, has a fervent love of stories and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family and their zoo animals emigrate from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship. Alas, the ship sinks – and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi. Can Pi and the tiger find their way to land? Can Pi’s fear, knowledge, and cunning keep him alive until they do?”

I’m not sure if I’ve made it clear or not from the five or six times I’ve mentioned Life of Pi in this blog, but I really love this book. It’s beautifully written and despite the lack of action, Martel does a great job of making the plot compelling. But the reason I keep mentioning this book is that it keeps me thinking and guessing after the fact. I’ve read it twice, my best friend has read it four times and we still find new nuggets of metaphor and meaning each time we read it. It’s not a great book to read over an extended period, in short intervals, but it’s a wonderful novel, especially when you have a chunk of time to dedicate to it.

2. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

“With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.”

It’s been a while since I’ve read this novel so the details of it are a little fuzzy. What isn’t fuzzy is how wonderful and complex the characters and stories are; how tragic and romantic the plot is. Even if you’ve seen the movie, it’s nothing compared to the book. In fact, part of what I find so frustrating about the movie is that it barely touches on the depths of the characters I loved best, Hana and Kip. Believe me, there’s a reason this novel is a prizewinner and is taught in so many English courses.

3. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

“We hear the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. Unfortunately, Sister Mary Loquacious of the Chattering Order has misplaced the Antichrist. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride motorcycles. And the representatives from Heaven and Hell have decided they actually like the human race…”

This recommendation is partly for my friend who is reading this for her book club as encouragement. It really is awesome. If you are at all a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you will certainly enjoy Good Omens. It has the same style of humor, subverting expectations, playing with words and cleverly reworking one of the most well known stories – the story of the Apocalypse. It’s light and fun reading, despite centering on such a morbid topic. 

Here’s hoping these suggestions will entice you to also put your nose in a book this coming month.

Bizarre Life - of Pi - Decisions

Currently Reading: 1984 by George Orwell

I’m committing Novel Ideas treason a little bit today and discussing a movie rather than a book.

The reason I find this mini act of betrayal excusable is that the movie is a film adaptation of one of my favorite books, a book I’ve actually mentioned more than once in my blog to this point, it’s been that significant to me.

Again, this post includes spoilers, both of the book and of the movie so... you've been warned!

On November 21st, Ang Lee released his film adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel, Life of Pi. This past holiday weekend, my best friend and I saw it.

As strong lovers of the novel, we both knew we were going to see it at some point, if only out of curiosity. However, we entered the theater with a healthy dose of skepticism, a habit of most avid readers who attend movie versions of their cherished novels given that 9 times out of 10, the movie is far inferior to the book.

This inferiority isn't usually the movie creators’ fault, though. A lot of what makes novels better than movies is that they can provide a more detailed, extensive, and personal experience that no movie can based on logistics alone. Aspects of the story almost always have to be cut in a film adaptation because almost no one will sit through a five-hour movie – even if it meant every loved plot point and character could be included. Furthermore, a movie immediately becomes less personal since it doesn’t allow for imagination; the faces of the characters, the way a monster looks, the landscape are all given instead of created within the individual’s mind. Therefore, if a plotline you love is removed from the movie – I’m looking at you The English Patient – or characters don’t look the way you envisioned them – that’s right Weasley twins from Harry Potter – it’s a lot harder for you to love the movie with the same fervor you loved the book.

In short, the film creator is at a severe disadvantage since his audience is much more critical of his work.

While Life of Pi was not nearly on the level of movie adaptation catastrophe as, say, Ella Enchanted (which I will never forgive that director/screenwriter for!), it still had some directorial choices that I just don’t understand. So I’m venting here.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s not a tremendous amount of action in Life of Pi so I recognize that Ang Lee and David Magee (the screenplay writer) were limited in how action-packed a movie they could make. However, it seemed to me that they decided to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the less interesting aspects of the story. It felt as if Ang Lee was so focused on creating breathtaking visuals that he lost the story. I mean, instead of including the pivotal hallucination that’s actually important to the plot – the first hint that there’s more to the story than first meets the eye – Lee decides to create a fanciful, crazed, glowing vision of fish and zoo animals culminating in a woman’s face and then the wrecked ship at the bottom of the ocean.

Why?? Yes it was beautiful and a good break to the somewhat monotonous scene of Pi in the lifeboat on the ocean endlessly, but why??? Why choose to create this hallucination instead of the one in the story that’s actually relevant?

Then to add to the frustration, after spending about an hour on the repetitive story of Pi’s life at sea, Lee zips right through one of the most fascinating and mysterious parts of the story in about ten minutes. Of course, I’m referring to the illusive meerkat island, the element of the novel that has sparked endless amounts of discussions with my best friend in which we analyze and dissect all the possible meanings for hours. I wish I were exaggerating. Actually, when I heard they were making a movie, I somewhat held on to the fleeting hope that maybe Lee would have gotten together with Martel and be able to explain this bizarre plot point. 

Nope. Lee not only offers no new explanations, he creates absolutely no build up to the big reveal, the fact that the island is carnivorous. Plus, Pi and Richard Parker spend weeks on this island in the novel, but in the movie, they only spend a single night there. Thus there’s no real recovery period and no discovery.

Again, why??? You finally have a great visual and exciting plot point with which to work and you choose not to spend any time on it? Ugh!

My final complaint, and then I will silence myself of the subject, is about Lee’s (or Magee’s, I don’t honestly know who made the choice) addition to the cast of characters. Before leaving India, Pi suddenly has a little love story that appears absolutely nowhere in the novel. In the movie, he becomes bored with his life and then his love, Anandi, brings the change he’s looking for and reinvigorates his life. None of this is necessary in the book because, in the book, Pi’s life is plenty full from his passionate love of religion and God. What’s extra irritating about this addition is that it actually isn’t an addition in any sense to the story. Anandi pretty much never comes up again in the movie. Her relationship with Pi barely impacts his life in the long run and the love story itself doesn’t really add to Lee’s overall message. So why did Lee/Magee decide to waste time on this unimportant, uninteresting puppy love story instead of spending that time explaining meerkat island or adding in the important hallucination or visually explaining the seedy under belly of the story instead of simply having Pi relate it in a monologue?

Overall, the movie wasn’t a gross deviation from the book, which is always a relief, but I’m fairly certain it would be a bore for those who haven’t read the novel or who aren’t fascinating with new visual effects. Therefore, I'm not entirely sure if I would recommend it...

I just don’t understand these choices.

And even worse, I still don’t understand those damn meerkats.

Read Light, Green Light: Stop and Go Reading Frustrations

Currently Reading: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

If you just looked at the “Currently Reading” and thought to yourself, “Still?” – trust me, you’re not alone.

For the record, I had intended to be done reading The Sirens of Titan in time to make it my third blog post. However, I have finished neither reading the book nor coming up with a specific and interesting enough topic related to it to warrant a post. Nevertheless, I’m afraid of losing oh-so-precious momentum, so I decided it was better to post something, even if I’m still not discussing a particular book like I’ve been promising to do, than to just not post at all.

So instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to vent a little about the main frustration I’ve encountered while reading The Sirens of Titan: the importance of pace.

So much of how you feel about a book depends on the pace at which you read it. It’s truly a shame that life very rarely allows for you to completely indulge in reading a book and escape into its clutches to the point where you can read a 300 page book in a day. I don’t think it’s an unfair claim to say that no one can have a career as a professional bookworm – but if you can, please hit me up and I’ll send you my resume STAT! – so for the most part, we all have other commitments that get in the way of this uninterrupted pace that allows for the most enjoyment. And it’s frustrating to me that it can absolutely affect your feelings about the book.

For example, I love the book Life of Pi by Yann Martel. In fact, I just finished re-reading it. It’s one of my most recommended books and has one of the most beautiful, symbiotic viewpoints on world religion I’ve ever come across with a fantastic twist that messes with your head and gets you thinking. So when I began dating someone not long after finishing the book the first time, I insisted that he read it! I just knew he would love it as intensely as I did and was excited to start discussing it once he was done. (Because who wouldn’t want to go on a date where all you do is discuss a book? Hot stuff, right?) To my disappointment, it took my boyfriend months to barely get halfway through the book. I’m fairly certain he finished it, but we definitely never had any discussions about it beyond him saying, “I thought it was good, but I didn’t think it was that good. Not a lot happens.”

I was indignant. WHAT?! Not a lot happens?! The kid is only stranded at sea with a TIGER! And who cares either way when the book is so beautifully written?!

In my mind, this was almost a dump-able offense.

However, I realized upon my second reading of the book that the fact that he and I initially read Life of Pi at vastly different paces validated his opinion. I forced the book on him during his second semester of junior year in college, a notoriously stressful time at my college. He had papers, tests, service trip fundraising, club positions, and a job to fill up the time he wasn’t actually in class. Not to the mention the not insignificant time-suck that was dating me… Finding time to read for pleasure in that kind of environment is almost on par with finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So major kudos to him for even making the effort let alone actually finishing the thing!

On the other hand, my first reading of Life of Pi was pretty much in the polar opposite environment. It was my travel book for what was essentially a day-long trip from South Carolina to Pennsylvania with a layover in Chicago. I was cut off from other distractions – friends, school, phone calls, emails, Facebook, DVDs, etc. – and had no commitments, just time to kill. It was glorious uninterrupted, guilt-free reading for hours! I devoured that book, resenting the airplane for landing in my final destination when I was so tantalizingly close to the end! So upon returning to my dorm room, I promptly ignored my suitemates and homework (that had piled up from a weekend away) until the shocking twist had been revealed and I could close the book with intense satisfaction.

It’s a small wonder that for me the book was fast-paced and addicting while he found it somewhat slow and good, but not great. After all, reading it a second time – when I also had a full time job and other commitments to contend with – I realized that the protagonist is stranded at sea for over half the book. It’s not like there’s a whole lot changing beyond his developing survival skills until he discovers the incredibly bizarre and confusing Meerkat Island (seriously, does anyone know what that was about?!?!?!).

Despite the fact that it seems like a well-written book should be considered a great book no matter what, pace will absolutely factor into that evaluation. I’m not saying it’s impossible to recognize the merits of a novel on its own, but I contend that your enjoyment level of the novel is almost directly related to the pace at which you read it. If you constantly have to stop and start a book, it’s almost impossible to get a good flow going and you’ll never allow the book to transport you into its world, one of the most amazing experiences reading has to offer.

To me, it doesn’t seem like stop-and-go reading should be this way. I often get as attached to characters in a novel as I get to my flesh and blood friends so I consistently think that picking up a book after a long break should be like picking up with friends after a long separation. You may have to refresh each other on what’s just happened in your lives, but it should feel comfortable and easy. Unfortunately, the experience is usually much more akin to driving in D.C. traffic during rush hour. Either you’ll inch along painfully slowly or you’ll get chunks where you can go the speed limit but still end up slamming on the brakes every 3 miles. It’s jolting and frustrating and usually leads to fits of road rage from even the most mild-tempered person.

So if you’re thinking of starting a book in this kind of environment, it might be worth it to just wait until rush hour’s over. Because it won’t matter if you have great music on the radio, nice enough weather to keep the windows down, or a scenic drive. The stop-and-go flow will still make the experience suck at least a little bit.