Reading is for losers

Just kidding!  But now that I have your attention, please finish reading my post!

So lately I just haven’t been doing a ton of reading.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s because the several books I’m reading just haven’t totally stoked my interest.

Take Dear American Airlines for example.  This book has gotten great reviews, notably by the New York Times (who of course, is never wrong).  But I can’t seem to finish this book and it’s not even 200 pages!  I mean there are a few very funny moments but for the most part, it’s a bit bland.  Every so often, there’s a great passage that makes me keep reading but the book needs more of those to genuinely pique my enthusiasm.

It reminds me of the time I tried to read And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris – another book that got rave reviews for being so funny and witty.  And yet I found it rather boring and pointless.  Maybe I just have no sense of humor or wit.  Or maybe (and this is def. more likely) I’m just too damn witty for my own good.  I really think I could write a book as good.  Now, do I have the will and determination to write a whole book?  Well that’s another story.

Anyways, here’s one of my favorite passages from Dear American Airlines.  In it, the narrator is describing his artistic mother’s suicide attempt as a teenager by swallowing her oil paints :

One by one, she emptied all of her oil paints into her mouth, cadmium yellow and lead white and arsenic-laced cobalt blue – a garish, self – annihilating palette squeezed down her throat….My grandmother found her lying on her bedroom floor, rainbows of drool leaking from the corners of her mouth, but Willa vomited up the paint before her stomach had to be pumped.  It was, I’ve sometimes imagined (albeit abstractly), the world’s most beautiful vomit:  a gastric rendition of Joseph’s coat of many colors, its wild variegation and vivid chromatic streaks a pooling rebuke to the black mind that sought to swallow them.

Samara finishes yet another book!

I just finished reading Now the Hell Will Start by Brendan Koerner.  This is the story of a black GI during World War II named Herman Perry who was shipped off to Burma to build the boondoggle Ledo Road under deplorable conditions, only to shoot and kill an unarmed white officer, flee into the jungle, start a family with the chief’s daughter of a local headhunting tribe, only to eventually be recaptured and eventually executed by the U.S. military.

I thought this was a good book.  It was definitely well-researched and certainly a compelling story.  But sometimes I found myself getting a little bored, as Koerner went into detail about the history of the Ledo Road and some other mini-tangents.  I recognize that it’s important to give background, but it seemed like overkill in some places.

I do feel that I learned a lot about a side of World War II that isn’t often brought to light.   I hadn’t realized that the number of blacks who served during the war, and the conditions they worked under were deplorable in Burma.  And it must have been a bitter pill to swallow to be expected to serve in the military and fight for a country that viewed them as second class citizens.

However, in some places in the book, it seemed to me that Perry is portrayed as almost martyr-like which seems unfair to his victim.  The officer didn’t sound like the nicest guy around, but he was unarmed when he was shot.  I mean, why not track down the slain officer’s family and see how their lives were also affected by this series of tragic events just to get their side of the story too?

Anyhow, still reading For the Love of Animals.  I’m currently reading about how animals were often tried like humans in courts as recently as the 18th century.   The author cites a number of cases involving uh, intimate fraternization between animals and humans.  In some cases the punishment was death (for the person and the animal)!  (And yet apparently people still did it -  Whoah Nelly!)   There were of course cases where people were wrongly accused, reminiscent of the witch hunt days, so it’s hard to say how many of these cases were legit. Anyhow, it’s all quite disturbing!

I’ve started another book called Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles.  It’s about this old guy stuck in an airport, writing an angry letter to the airline as he’s about to miss his daughter’s wedding – then he starts reminiscing about his life – the mistakes he’s made, the joyful moments, etc.  It’s actually quite witty and it’s really short too so I’m going to whip through this baby.