25. Looking for Alaska, by John Green. I like this author. You can see that I read his (and David Levithan’s) book Will Grayson, Will Grayson as Book #12 this year (though don’t bother looking up the blog post about it). I have also read his book An Abundance of Katherines and hope to read more of his in the future. Yes, his books are for teenagers, but they still cover important themes like Alaska) mourning, self-blame for death, teen sexuality, the afterlife, life as suffering; Katherines) what to do with unreached/stagnant potential, the feeling of not being special, the dynamics and [un]predictability of human relationships; and Grayson) responsibilities to friends, anger/betrayal, depression and its effects on (teen, gay) romance. This book was good. There was quite a lot of mischief going on in the book, what with all the underage drinking/smoking/sex/pornography/miscellaneous pranks, and a book so full of characters making decisions the opposite of anything resembling what I would do tends to prevent me from getting super attached to any of them, and I can’t really say that Alaska was a book where I related to anyone (well, slightly to Pudge), but the characters were still thoughtful and I enjoyed the philosophy of it all. Also, on a more personal note, I really liked the short info about the woman who wanted to destroy both Heaven and Hell so people would love God for Who He Is, not for what He will do with them upon their death.
26. Room, by Emma Donoghue. Notice that this is one of three books by women I have read this year. That’s 12% women, 88% men… and two out of those three women authors are Jane Austen, where the heroine gets married and lives happily ever after in the end. This does not make me a good feminist. Room, on the other hand, is about a woman and her son who are held captive in an 11×11 room, and who have been there since before the child was born. The mother has been there seven years; the boy Jack is now five and has never known anything else. In fact, he has grown up thinking that Room is the whole world and Outside is only Outer Space, God (and possibly Baby Jesus), and Old Nick who brings them groceries and Sundaytreat and makes the bed creak and the door go beep beep at night when he is asleep in Wardrobe. The book is told entirely from Jack’s perspective… except that he IS a reliable narrator, which is odd considering he is five, but I think the author made a fantastic choice in doing this. Consequently his narration is all in childspeak but all other characters talk normally. He even relates his mother correcting him to say “brought” instead of “brung,” even though he still says “brung” in later narration. He asks a lot of questions to the reader about stuff he does not understand and makes poignant observations and overall is a very powerful voice. The author does an excellent job making the book realistic and meaningful. I will say that reading this book did cause me to feel a little bit claustrophobic about my life. I mean, in the beginning the two characters do the same things every week because they have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, whereas I do the same things every week because– because why? So I got out of the house and took walks and raked leaves. I saw a deer and an owl right up close and I felt a lot better.
Speaking of doing things I don’t normally do, I made a friend on Wednesday. I was getting overwhelmed by reading Room and, being done for the day, was going to put it back on the display when I paused to look over the books in the psychology aisle on my way. After lingering for a second, I am approached by a similar-aged man whose name is Saddam and we talk about his love for psychology and mine for psych/sociology, our mutual love of books and our vastly different reading speeds, our philosophies of what a “successful” life means. We recommend books to each other. We exchange phone numbers. We are hanging out over coffee tomorrow. Saddam is a highly motivated man who as a child immigrated from a country (yet unidentified) that limited free access to books. He now reads mountains of books all the time. That is, when not working for his self-owned technological business (I don’t understand what it is, to be honest, but I think it has to do either with consulting with networking sites or programming networking interfaces?) for which he did not go to college. Nor did he go for anything else (because of the financial impact, I believe), but he’s still obviously brilliant. Due to general social ineptitude I have no idea whatsoever how tomorrow is going to go, but I’m living outside of Room and trying new things. Let’s do this.
