Found Not Lost

All I can say is, Whew! My daughter Asi finally passed the Breaking Dawn book to me last Friday night. I started reading it right away, but I was just too tired and sleepy so after a couple of chapters I reluctanly put it away and went to sleep.

 The following day, I told my family I’m going AWOL. They knew the drill. I put a roast in the oven and found my quiet place. I took small breaks to go to the bathroom, get more coffee, cook some rice, put on some greens then I’m running back to my happy place again. By midnight on Saturday, I had finished the book. **sigh** I wish I was still reading. I loved Saturday! I loved Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn!

If I’ve totally lost you, Breaking Dawn is the fourth and final (I think) installment in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyers. It’s about a human girl falling in love with a vampire. Interesting premise, right?

So before I put down my thoughts about Breaking Dawn, have a look at the previous books:
Twilight
New Moon
Eclipse

Just remember, this whole saga started with:

“When Life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end”

The movie version of the World According to Garp came out when I was in high school and I just couldn’t relate to the movie. I don’t think I even finished watching the whole movie. I got bored with it half way through.

Forward twenty something years later and I finally got around to reading the novel after my interest in John Irving was roused by Cider House Rules, another novel made into a movie. The World According to Garp was on the top of my summer reading list and was I glad it was on top. What an adventure it was! It was fascinating. I want to re-read it; I want to see the movie anew.

The World According to Garp is about Garp who is a writer. He is a brilliant story teller whose life revolves around his writing and vice versa. He was raised by a single mother, a nurse named Jennie Fields who, though not by design, overshadows his writing career when she publishes her memoir which becomes an instant success especially among feminists. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

The novel spans Garps life from conception to death in such great descriptive detail that the book was hard to put down. Every page, every chapter was a new story and there were stories within stories and novels within the novel. You’d think it would be hard to keep up with all the side plots and subplots, but it really wasn’t. It all eventually comes together no matter how convoluted it seems.

Garp wrote a story, and it is there in it’s entirety, “The Pension Grillparzer”, which includes a unicycle riding bear among its cast of quirky characters. Garp’s short story is like a peephole into the bigger world according to Garp. The novel too is full of quirky and memorable characters starting with Garp’s mother, Jennie, who wore her nurse’s uniform long after she stopped practicing as a nurse; Roberta, a transexual ex-football player who becomes best friend to Jennie and Garp; Ellen James and the Ellen Jamesians - Ellen James was a young girl who was raped and left for dead had her tongue cut out so she wouldn’t tell who her attacker was. The Ellen Jamesians are the feminists who cut their tongues off in protest and in support of victims like Ellen James. Then there’s Poo (you’ll have to read the book to find out why the moniker) and the whole twisted Percy clan who Garp grew up with. Then there is Garp himself, the quirkiest character of them all, stands in the middle of of everything like the eye of a storm, seemingly calm but couldn’t move one inch either way without causing a commotion.

If you haven’t read the book yet, I strongly recommend it. It makes you want to keep turning the page not in the same manner as a mystery or suspense novel, but in a strangely voyeuristic manner, almost in the same way you would crane to look at a car accident. You are appalled and yet you can’t turn away.

I thought I had mentioned it before, but I guess I hadn’t! So here goes. Prompted by Toni’s post on Austenland, a Jane Austen Book Club has been formed and I’m in! My girls and I love Jane Austen; them the movies, me the books. I’m slowly encouraging them to read the books too even if they’ve seen the movie versions. I must admit though that the books are a little hard to read especially for young readers. Heck, I read a lot slower when I’m reading a Jane Austen. Some passages I need to read over in order to understand.

I’m excited about this Austen online club. This month, our book of choice is Persuasion. I’m a couple of chapters short of finishing the book and of course, in true Jane Austen fashion, it is truly hard to put down; full of lost loves, mixed and crossed signals, romance and prudence.

If you’d like to join, it’s not too late. It’s a short book so you have time to catch up. Visit Wits and Nuts’ introduction to the book club to learn more about how you can join. Some of the rules are below:

* We’ll be reading the same title each month
* We’ll write about the novel of the month in our own sites and specifically mention about our favorite chapter, scene, quote or anything that struck us most
* Link back the first Jane Austen-related novel post to this announcement and submit the link to your entry through the comment section
* All the posts/links will be summarized monthly and we can have our sort of Q & A for that
* Anyone may participate in the monthly virtual meet up
* I’m dedicating a page for the book club to include the schedule of novels to be read + the screenshot of the primary website (header) of the members. It will be updated accordingly, i.e. when there’s a new joiner, etc. Click here to see the page.
* Contests will be held after we’re done with the 4th and 8th (final) novels.

If you’ve ever wanted to see your words in print but can’t wait to be discovered by a publisher, the thing to do nowadays is to get it published yourself. Self-publishing. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you, get it done yourself, and now.

 I know a few people who have used lulu.com to publish their work and have been very happy with the results. If you have a manuscript, all you have to do to get it out there is publish it yourself. You can publish one for yourself and a few for your family; and if you really want to invest in yourself, publish enough to sell and start selling!

Another self-publishing place is blurb.com. You can print your book for as little as $12.95 and if you aren’t too comfortable about laying out your book, they also have a software program that can help you with your graphics, artwork and text to get that truly professional look.

So don’t let fate hold you back, if you have the next great American novel sitting on your desk, get it into bookform yourself!

This is the memoir of Elie Wiesel, as a young boy of 15 who suffered though the horrors of the holocaust. These are his memories, in harrowing and vivid detail that sometimes you wish you could turn away from but can’t. It’s a slim volume, seemingly too small a tome to document such a horrendous and seemingly never ending event, but I suppose it is almost merciful that it doesn’t go longer than it does.

Here the unthinkable is given voice. The inhumanity of labor camps, the degradation, the hunger and desperation is palpable throughout this book. The cruelty that we are capable of, the resilience we didn’t know we had, it’s all there. When fathers and sons turn against each other, is this the end of civility or morality or is it just mere survival? What makes one life more valuable than another? What value do we put on just living? These are the questions that one is forced to ponder when reading this book. It is a small book but big ideas and questions are awakened. You will be left thinking about the words in this book long after you’ve closed the last page.