Reaching Mecca

That's right, folks, I did it! I finally finished Special Topics, all 517 pages of it, including the final exam! And I have to say, I ended up having mixed feelings about it. Feel free to stop reading HERE if you want to avoid any type of spoilers:

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that whole "the main characters dad is actually a member of a mythical freedom-fighting cult" thing. And I also didn't really see how a lot of the things ended up piecing together, and felt that there were more than a few moments that seemed a bit of a stretch (i.e; a well placed phone call that just so happened to spell out the secrets of the mystery with two and a half chapters left to go). The book probably could have been cut down about a hundred pages without really loosing anything, and a few of the characters just kind of disappeared (after Milton called Blue a bad kisser in front of the whole group, the whole group just kind of disappears until graduation, where only their names are mentioned. And, along that note, I'm still not sure how to feel about the whole Milton/Blue relationship thing - I haven't decided if it was supposed to be a genuine hookup or just another Blueblood scheme to embarrass Blue, though I tend to lead toward the second option) END SPOILERS. But, even with all of that, there were still some pure moments of beautiful, heart-wrenching prose:

"Never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, although you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, depth of content, the universal themes. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliche and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up a Greek tragedy, those born in to misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last."

"You'd be surprised - Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, Totalitarianism - whatever '-ism' it happens to be doesn't matter all that much; there will always be the tricky balance between the human extremes. And so we live our lives, making informed choices about what we believe in, stand by them. That is all."

And, after all is said and done, I read the last page and just kind of sighed. It was one of those heavy sighs, the kind you utter after completing something of importance - that melancholy kind of sigh that means "now its over, and I'm not sure how to feel". For a first summer book, I will say that the entire thing was rather fantastic, although I'm ready to move on. And speaking of which, the next book, which I've already started, has proven to be even higher on the list than Special Topics. I'm about 50 pages in to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Johnathan Safran Foer (who, in case you were curious, also wrote Everything is Illuminated, which is a fantastic book!) I won't write about it quite yet, because I'm only a little bit in to it and want to give it some time to grow, but I will say that I have a feeling that, based on the first to books of the summer, it's going to be a great summer for reading!

PS: For those of you keeping score on the personal end of things, my brother and sister have both left, which makes the house a spooky kind of empty (and I really do miss them like crazy. It sucks having that whole "heavy heart" thing). Drew leaves a week from Monday, which scares me and already makes me panicky and sad, so I try not to think about it. Other than that, I don't work this week, so I'm sure I'll return shortly!