Books I've Read

Time for another edition of books I've recently read. Ok, so I physically read two of them and listened to the other three on Audible. Which is the best thing ever invented for someone like me who loves books and clocks a lot of driving time. Two birds, one stone! Nothing like a long morning commute with Lolita to keep you company.

This book. THIS BOOK. AHHHHH! It is so frustrating. Of the five books here that I'm reviewing today this was the first one that I started with and I'm still not done with it. I'm listening to this one and it's about 21 hours long. I still have 7 hours to go and I CAN NOT make myself finish. It's such a weird book. It's interesting enough but at the same time, it's going nowhere. I'm 14 hours in and I still don't get the point of it. I've read so many things about how this is such a classic, must read and how it's so many people's favorite book and I'm just like WHAT IS HAPPENING? I was powering through despite my uncertainty until (**spoiler alert**) the main character's young son is killed and then I just threw up my hands like, enough already! I can not handle that shit. Same thing happened to me when I was really into watching Rescue Me, as soon as they killed off Tommy's son in the second season I was like, nope, I'm done. I'm not sure I'm actually, really done with this book. I mean I've invested 14 hours into this thing and it seems a shame to not finish it. But, ugh. Has anyone read this? Is it worth finishing? More importantly WHAT IS THE POINT?!

Oh, David Giffels. Do people not from NE Ohio read Giffels? I'm not sure how far reaching his books actually are but he's sort of our hometown literary hero round these parts. I loved his first book but this one was was just sort of ok. It's actually a collection of short essays rather than a full, cohesive book like All The Way Home was. Some of the essays were really good, others kinda boring. All pretty much saying the same thing. The whole collection focuses on life in our shared hometown of Akron which was fun for me to read being from here and all, I'm just not sure how interesting it would be to people from places other than Akron? If you're from Akron, or really any sort of working class mid-western city I'd totally recommend it. If you're not, I'd love to hear how you'd review it.

So can you believe that it took me 31 years of living before I finally got around to reading Lolita? How does that even happen? I'm not sure. And now that I've been privvy to the inner workings of a certain Mr. Humbert Humbert's brain, I'm more disturbed than ever. I can see why this book is such a classic, but I'm not sure it's ever going to be one of my favorites. It's sort of like Schindler's List, you do it because you have to and you should and of course you appreciate it for it's brilliance, but is it something you really enjoy? Ehh, probably not.

Now this book sort of happened by complete accident. Josh started listening to it on longish car ride we were taking and then I was hooked. As you may (or may not) know Penn Jillette is one of the most outspoken modern day aethiests and this book is all about that. It's a quick read (or listen as may be the case) and it's funny and out there and just very entertaining. He looses me a bit when he gets into some of his Libertarian rhetoric and sometimes he goes way, waaaaaay off topic, but overall this book was a fun one. Don't read it if you're offended by strong language, lude subject matter or aethism in general. You gotta go into this one with an open mind and also not take it too seriously. If you can do that, I think you'll enjoy it.

And this one, I just loved. I could not put it down. It's about the life of a depression era teen girl in the midst of family turmoil who's sent away to boarding school against her will. It's nothing earth shattering but it's sexy and suspenseful and just a totally engrossing book. I've been wanting to stumble upon a page turner like that for awhile now and it was just a really satisfying read.  Two thumbs up and I'd definitely recommend it.

And that's all I've got for now! What are you guys reading these days? I just started this one and so far I'm just lukewarm on it, but I've heard it's great so we'll see where it goes. And after that (like everyone else on the proverbial bandwagon) I've got Yes, Please next on deck.

If you have any other recommendations, as always please share in the comments!