• LOOKING FOR ALASKA
• by John Green
• [rated by pbs readers as #92]
• 221 pages

I came upon John Green and this book circuitously. I have no idea how his second book, The Fault is In Our Stars, came to be in my hands. The movie wasn’t made yet and I must have gotten ahold of it a long time back cuz I took a long time to get to it. Make no mistake. I have found some of my best reads that way – buy them for no reason and then just sit on them! It’s a talent I have.

But eventually I opened up the book and a hurricane slipped out! I was dazzled by the force of nature that I found in Green’s writing, storytelling and hugely refreshing dialogue. A masterpiece lay in this small package of a book.

I have to also add that my hat is always off to adults who can find the pacing and the words of youth. Green’s Fault and Meyer’s Twilight have both blown me away with their ability to take me back to high school and thereabouts. I certainly remember living through it but never memorialized it. That is a special talent.

So with a list packed with huge books left to go, I looked at this little book, Looking for Alaska, Green’s first opus, as a little treat to give myself at some point.

Halfway through it, I must say that I am a little bit disappointed. Where Fault is packed with life, as two kids with illnesses contemplate love, life, writing, living, dying, this is, so far at least, about a small group of nerdy friends that hang out at college together, spearheaded by Alaska, the most beautiful girl any of them know. The lead character is in love with her and in service to her as a friend for years, even though she has a boyfriend.

Like I said, I’m halfway done and I hope I’ll change my mind, but so far, this feels like the warm up to Fault. The dialogue is good, but not as good. The life and death angle adds a gravitas to the gaiety in Fault, something that this book has nothing like. And truth be told, I’m bored with the beautiful girl dragging the nerds around angle of things!

DONE.

Wow. For people who have read this book, I wrote all the words above the split second before the book radically changes. Since I can’t imagine I’m ruining it for anybody, I will say that very abruptly someone dies and the second half of the book is dealing with that.

It is a sharp departure and meant to be, but I confess that I found the change weird. If that had happened earlier, I think I would have gotten it. Sure, the set up was just that. A set up to the main course. Or corpse, as it were.

Or if it had happened later, it would have been a book about something else. But half and half? I really can’t remember a book changing that radically – half. way. through.

In the end, you return to John Green and his almost mystical connection to younger minds. This is a book that perhaps people newer to the planet than myself can really synch up with. I can’t imagine adults calling this a stupendous read. Although I’m already wrong because it was adults who picked this.

Adults who read it in their teens, that is.

I didn’t hate this. I love Green’s dialogue. But it didn’t land right for me. I can’t imagine 100 grown ass people reading this and loving it. A discussion group for this book with them would dry up. I’m in the dry up group.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Since it is aimed for teens and teen suicide is sharply on the rise, I also wonder if this book glamorizes suicide at all. It might not. But if you are that age and you love these characters, might you decide that it is okay to take that step? Hope not.

• LONESOME DOVE
• by Larry McMurtry
• [rated by pbs readers as #22]
• 858 pages

I just want to say that I am facing one of my biggest fears upon embarking on this journey. I am reading what I have always referred to as my favorite book.

At 858 pages with print I can’t even see without my reading glasses on, will it hold up? What am I talking

about? Will it hold up? Will I hold up is the bigger question.

But my heart is calm. McMurtry is like coming home for me. I have probably read about 25 of his books. I’m ready for the voyage. It is almost the end of September, so I figure it will take me till the end of the year.

I’m sorta looking forward to it.

DONE. AFTER MONTHS.

So. I needn’t have worried about whether I would like the writing or not. It is so achingly beautiful that I’ll love it till the day I die. And though it took me months…I know I will now revisit it again.

When I moved after college in LA to the Hollywood Hills, there was a B Dalton nearby with relatively easy parking (way more important than you’d think). I would look at their special shelves that employees recommended. Now, every book store is filled with that. But then, it was brand new. As I think about it, I found two lifelong literary loves in that first little shelf – David Ritz and Larry McMurtry.

Picking up a slim volume of McMurtry’s called Desert Rose, I instantly felt like I belonged in this writer’s orbit. Who is to say why? Why do I instantly feel at home with McMurtry as opposed to someone else feeling that with Stephen King? Does anybody know that? Are we even allowed to know?

In the introduction, he mentions that he wrote Desert Rose because he was in the middle of this huge book about a cattle drive and he didn’t know what to do with them so he was taking a break.

I fall in love hard. So I went in search of this 900 page book about a cattle drive. Found it. Lonesome Dove. Earned (and richly deserved) the Pulitzer Prize that year. It became my favorite book. Didn’t want to read it again. Hermetically sealed in my heart and brain.

But that was stupid. It is gorgeous writing and I am instantly home again in the verbiage. I don’t think you can explain why you love, but with this man’s writing, it is majesty. Certainly majestic in that its backdrop is the whole, as yet uncorrupted plains of the nation. But also majestic in quietly revealing a shy man’s heart. In allowing for the innocence of these boys and men, based on few of them having any life experience. Till now, anyway.

McMurtry characters are complex, strong, weak, aimless, funny, achingly alone, yearning without knowing what they are yearning for.

Lest you think this a simple book, it is touching, shocking, and so easy to be with.

When you finish the story, the book ends but the majestic reverberations continue. What a beautiful, perfect read.

One last note – though I can’t imagine any other writer that I would want to go on a 3000 mile cattle drive with, even this one was still that journey and it didn’t fit well enough into my mind and life to go fast. So it put my reading goal behind cuz it took a lot of time. But I’m so glad to visit it once again. Whew.

One more last note. McMurtry writes dialogue like none other. Okay. Done now.

• THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
• by Mark Twain
• [rated by PBS viewers as #17]
• 251 pages

I think that most every one of us has had the feeling of reading, watching or listening to a classic. Something that you know will last forever. That last book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance. Or listening to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life for the first time. Viewing the

Grand Canyon. Gazing at Monet. Listening to Bob Marley…

I think we have all probably also stared at or witnessed something others call a classic. And we stare and stare. Until we finally have to throw up our hands and admit that we just don’t get it.

It is with regret that I say this about Mark Twain. I know, I know! How could I?

This short book took me a long ass time to get through. Partially because I sort of hate when dialogue is suggested through a million apostrophes. And this book is the king of all that.

I get it. It reads a bit laboriously for me but I get it. The story is still vivid, if not a bit belabored. But hey. It’s a classic.

Of course, this could be solved by a little bit of research. Find out why he is hailed by some as our greatest writer

ever!

Sadly, that is a little bit of research that I’m not willing to do. Getting through the book was enough for me.

I played Aunt Polly in a fifth grade play so I somehow remembered most of the story. Does that make it a classic? Hm. I don’t think so.

My only guess is that he writes this just shy of 150 years ago and that it marked to opening up of writing and story telling to be more casual. To produce anti-heroes. Am I getting close?

No idea.

I know that scholars who revere Mark Twain always  mention Huck Finn as the big ass book. Does that make me anxious to read that one? I think you can guess my answer to that.

Glad I read it, though. Looking forward to moving on to the next one.

• THE GREAT GATSBY
• by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• [rated by PBS viewers as #15]
• 180 pages

So how does my surprise motif come into play with the re-reading of this book? You know? It doesn’t. Unless you count the surprise every day and every page when reading an absolute masterpiece. It isn’t just surprising but actually luxurious to be an adult, sitting at the feet of an exquisite story teller.

Fitzgerald’s language was of such a descriptive depth that I had to go over paragraph after paragraph to take it all in. It was put down perfectly, though. My endlessly re-reading was completely reader error. I had to make myself be worthy of the words, deep enough for the constant imagery.  

Some stories have one or two elements that you remember. Such is the fame and praise deservedly bestowed on this book that virtually every element in it is remembered. If I started to explain the memorable elements here, I would retell the entire story

Fitzgerald is a perfect writer. This was apparently his third book and the one he wrote to prove that he didn’t have to write autobiographically. And yet, its perfection, story and theme wise, ends up feeling deeply personal to all of us.

May this never be removed from shelves. People need to know that someone can write this way. That one person can write this way.

Though I could only read 20 pages at a time, in the space and time between those 20 pages, I still felt bathed in the book.

I love the balance of beautifully descriptive passages with an equal leaning towards brevity. There is nothing extra here. It’s as if he was challenging himself to say worlds in the fewest words necessary. He employs these amazing visual descriptions while storytelling with a bulls eye.

Another great thing. This is a story firmly told but in reality, it is through innuendo. Gatsby, for instance, is a character whose feelings you are called upon at times to unearth through what isn’t said. And just about everything Daisy says is ethereal, not to the point and not even her truth. But the writer is good enough to give us a firm grasp throughout.

I could go on and on, but I wouldn’t be adding one thing to this masterpiece. When the PBS contest happened, I voted for it every day. If you haven’t read it, you haven’t read. And if you have, maybe visit it again.

Of course, I have to end as the book ends, with possibly the greatest last line of a book ever written. It’s certainly the best one I’ve ever read.

“So we beat on, boats against the current,

borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

THE HELP

• by Kathryn Stockett
• [rated by PBS readers as #16]
• 522 pages

Well, in keeping with the surprising theme throughout this little journey, this book, The Help, a tome I had read previously mind you, stopped me cold.

When I first read it, quite a while ago, I vaguely remember really liking it. The varied viewpoints felt fresh and the attack on the subject matter felt unique and approachable.

But not this time.

I don’t know if it is the increase in woke-ness that changed its effect on me this time. But it if caused my sensitivity to these theme to spike, then I’m grateful to it. Reading a 500-page novel about white people being prejudiced, unaware and unfeeling and black people paying with their lives, their hearts, their children and their dignity is no longer sad. It is intolerable.

So walking into that world became something that I quietly just could not face. Weeks went by, months. It was a good thing that I was ahead in books read because

I sat on this long enough to hatch it!

The last third of the story gives you heroes and change in the air and bad people getting their comeuppance. So you know that was easier going on the reading end. By the end of the book, there was great parity in struggles all around.

I particularly liked the relationship between Skeeter and her mom. Though her mom committed some horrible acts that affected Skeeter’s life drastically, she is dying and that brings up the other side of their relationship, that of love and interdependence. Refreshing to see a complex relationship in the middle of what seemed, for two thirds of the book, to be a battle between the good guys and the bad guys.

I would have recommended this to anyone after the first time I read it. I didn’t love it but I admired it. And now? The writing still works but the lives depicted are quite hard to endure.

I’m glad I had another look at it, though. But mostly, I’m glad I’m done with it!

• THINGS FALL APART
• by Chinua Achebe
• [rated by PBS readers as #82]
• 209 pages

I’m not sure why but this book keeps reminding me of The Good Earth. Well, I am sure why, now that I think of it.

Both are unsentimental accounts of life in a completely unknown place to most of the readers. Both are sparsely told but with the perfect detailed storytelling to allow yourself to be in the story.

Both have central characters that you can’t really like. You can occasionally feel for them but in no sense are they lovable.

And then – the dates. The dates they were written are a huge part of why they are so brave. Pearl S. Buck wrote the Good Earth in the 30’s, I think. And Things Fall Apart was written in the year of my birth, 1959. This makes them outrageously ahead of their time.

It also, sadly, adds a lot to my Breathless analogy. By the time I saw Goddard’s Breathless during college, I knew that it was too far away from when it had been made for me to get it. I grasped its originality but I had also seen 30 years worth of knock offs from it’s originality – so much so that I could never get that “my head was blown off” experience that you could only have gotten in the 60s when it came out.

I only started Things Fall Apart and I’m already about half way through. It is sort of a fable, explaining the life of this central character, Okonkwe, his wives, his kids, his excessive beatings given to all of them when he was upset (see what I mean? lovable!)…

It’s possible that this story will turn and become very deep. If not, it will be Breathless. I will end up admiring it but not having it swing me sideways. Time and another hundred pages will tell!

DONE. Well, it got deeper, as the Christians came and the cultures crashed up against each other. I’m not entirely sure that it felt congruent with the rest of the book’s direction, but I guess so.

The last third of the book felt like an enormous painting of life in this part of Nigeria. Every detail mentioned but in the end, life was life.

In the end, I still compare it to The Good Earth but then it becomes comparable to Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. I know no one but me will ever compare these two books except me.

And it is for one reason. They are both remarkable in their skills of writing, description and uniqueness. But then, when you see that they were written in 1959, the year I was born!, they become great a bit more than is contained within.

I won’t know enough to get a chronology but I imagine that Achebe paved the way for thousands of writers inspired by his no nonsense accounting of a community’s sea change. And in that, I’m sure his efforts move into the priceless realm.

• TWILIGHT
• by Stephanie Meyer
• [rated by PBS readers as #73]
• 498 pages

This book is nothing but a 498 seduction.

Sign me up.

As I write, I am over 300 pages in and though I don’t read particularly fast, I might be done tonight!

In the interest of fair disclosure, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a fan of vampire stuff. Never attracted me in the slightest. So once again, this ten year trek has offered me up something that I’m loving that I would most assuredly never have read.

There are all kinds of seductions here. Meyer is so uniquely skilled at telling this tale, that while he is seducing her – she is seducing you!

From the first pages of this book, when the lead character goes to a new high school (I am going to stay purposely vague in details with this one, because if you are attracted to reading it, you deserve it to be fresh and new), I was IN high school. Now, high school is so far in my rear view mirror that I would absolutely fail if you gave me a quiz for details. So feeling like I was truly back in high school was delightful and first rate storytelling.

When I would feel a little reading thrill, I would go back to see if I could see how she did it – a little detail here, a little one there – but I absolutely didn’t see it. More than once, I looked deeply into the hat and couldn’t spot the rabbit!

The story unfolds just as seamlessly – like a flower blooming in sped up photography.

Oh, and lest I forget, Meyer uses the vampire thing to the greatest effect I have ever experienced. It becomes the ultimate plot point in the seduction.

The main two characters are exquisitely unique, believable, heartbreaking, two literary characters I know I will never forget. Talk about rooting for them? Off the charts. Will check in when I’m finished.

FINISHED.

WOW! I just finished Twilight and I’m so happy and grateful. I just finished an utterly fantastic read. That, as an avid reader, is pretty much the best thing you can hope for out of life! And I just had that, with a book I would NEVER have read without this blog.

I realize I have a habit of speculating on whether I will pick up more of any of the series I read here. I would probably read them after I finish the list….

Let me put that to rest. I’m ordering the next Twilight from Amazon as soon as I finish writing this! And I may not read it for a while, but the point is – I’m dug in deep. I want to live with an outlet to this world and these amazing characters Meyer has written.

No convert to any other vampirism either, it is this story alone that has me bonded to it. I will admit that the last third of the story suddenly speeds up in a massively manipulative way that doesn’t do justice to the pacing and intimacy of the first two thirds, but you know? I don’t care. In for a penny, in for a pound.

What a blazing, fun read! Great, great, great.

ONE DAY LATER…

Where is my next installment of Twilight? Gimme, gimme, gimme! I ordered it last night and it isn’t coming for two

more whole days!

You see what I’m saying here. Seriously hooked. I may not read it for ten years, but it’s killing me that I don’t have it here to be able to make that choice! Hm. I find that last sentence to be vaguely vampiric… Uh oh.

• THE HANDMAID’S TALE
• by Margaret Atwood
• [rated by pbs readers as #34]
• 295 pages

I’m well aware that the most prominent theme of this whole project for me has been surprise. Surprise at every turn. So I knew I would be surprised by The Handmaid’s Tale. I just didn’t know in what way.

It took me a long time to open this one up. I don’t think I built up to it or anything. It just so happened that when I picked it this time, I didn’t feel as scared, so it seemed like as good a time as any.

Of course, reading this book is preceded by the images and dystopian world it conveys. Most likely due in large part to the amazing (according to others, I haven’t seen it yet) mini-series done only a few years ago. But to be honest, I knew what was in here before that. I think every woman knew.

We all knew because Atwood has given words and a story to all of our deepest fears. Well, not all of them necessarily but the woman slayed an awful lot of dragons with this one sword.

For that reason, nothing in the book really surprised me. So I guess my surprise was how not surprising it was. I knew what to expect, perhaps more than with any book I have ever read.

The writing is stupendous. Many times while reading it, I had the distinct sensation that I was reading poetry. I would blink and know that wasn’t true, but Atwood’s artfully and tersely worded descriptions felt deeply poetic.

Just to pick one, try this one out.

“Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.”

Hello?!

Atwood’s ability to visualize and then have us see what she is seeing in this universe of hers is really second to none.

Would I read it again? I can’t see that happening. But it was a great read, that’s for sure. And strangely, for something as ceaselessly sad as this, I have a vague notion to see the mini-series. For two reasons. The first is to see how they visually constructed this story. Atwood left them an amazing trail of bread crumbs with the unspoken taunt that they better do it up right. From all the millions of awards it got, I guess they did.

Also, sitting in the center is Elisabeth Moss, so brilliant in Mad Men and then over to this in quick succession. That juxtaposition is a message in itself. Men have always tried to gain the upper hand in society after society. In doing so, they lose any advantage they thought they had.

Because ulimately, male dominance is not only an aberrant viewpoint – it just isn’t in the cards.

Additional Note: In the preface, Atwood mentions that nothing, no ritual, no practice in this book has failed to be present in one religious practice or another.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a living, breathing, daily cautionary tale. The gauntlet is right there. We ignore it at our own peril.

THE NOTEBOOK

• by Nicholas Sparks
• [rated by pbs viewers as #56]
• 207 pages

Written in 1999, The Notebook was one of a tripod of books remembered at that time, that typified a softer,

gentler way of wrestling with love. The three legs would have to be this one, Bridges of Madison County and the third leg was everything written that tried to be the other two!

I’m not sure if I read this. I know I saw the movie back when. The story of two lovers for life, they meet in high school, fall in love, are separated by her moving and her mother hiding all the love letters he sent her afterwards.

Then they meet again, fall in love again and then the book switches to old age where they have been together for life, she now has Alzheimer’s and he stays by her side, though she doesn’t recognize him.

Oh, I’m sorry, did I give it away? I kinda doubt it. Because anyone alive at that time remembers the story of the Notebook, however vaguely.

I went back and forth with this book. I was affected by its emotions – you’d have to be dead not to be. On the other hand, it was not deeply or craftily written by any standards. When Sparks wants to have birds dip into the water, that’s what they do.

All along this blog, I have underlined and written down the unique and great way that authors have captured something – a thought, a scene, an image. Didn’t underline once in this one.

Perhaps the most divisive for my little head is that Sparks goes for the absolutely most dramatic way of saying or posing anything. So on almost every page, I am a little moved and a lot wanting to yell “enough already!”

But I am different and the whole world is different from when this story took flight. I would have to say that I don’t think this book fly now. Very sudsy, very dramatic, put a little cloying in there and I don’t think it would fly. Or at the very least, it would fly to far fewer people than at the time it came out.

I have no doubt that Sparks felt this with all his heart and soul. This story is clearly his ideal. But if I met him, I think that, after shutting this book, I would have to slap him and say “snap out of it!”

I finished the last 100 pages of this in one sitting, partly

because I wanted to see what happened but for the last 50 of those pages, I just didn’t want to read it for one more day.

Am I glad I read this? It’s funny. There were books in here that I liked less but was still glad I read. This book I liked a bit more than some of those but I would just as soon not have read it or visited it again.

• LEFT BEHIND
• by Tim Lahaye & Jerry B. Jenkins
• [rated by PBS readers as #77]
• 391 pages

From a totally different angle, this Christian book about the Rapture afforded me the opportunity that the huge Stephen King book did. The opportunity to open a book that I would never have opened otherwise.

And I’m glad I did! Millions of people believe in the Rapture and it is easy to see how seminal this book has been in shoring up supporters.

The book starts with a pilot who is fantasizing about the sexy flight attendant he has been flirting with up until now. His marriage has been distanced by his wife’s born again Christian faith. Suddenly, Hattie, the flight attendant comes rushing in to the cockpit, saying they have lost a third of their passengers. That is where it starts, with Jesus’ true followers gone to heaven in an instant, leaving all others behind.

I deeply appreciated many things about this opus. Blessedly, though deeply diving into faith, it is a very fun read for anyone to pick up. I also appreciated that, though dealing with a worldwide catastrophe, the authors steadfastly stayed with only a few characters. That made it a fun and an easy read.

Do I quibble with the underlying premise? Of course, in small and big ways! But for me, that could take a handful of cocktails or, even better, a week with great minds to discuss.

But I’m here to read the books that have moved people. This one has moved a lot of people and I can see why. And the overarching truth is that I enjoyed the read and admired the way it was written.

I appreciated the opportunity to walk in this part of the population’s shoes for a while. I’ll remember it.