Break On Through

I got about half way through Special Topics in Calamity Physics before I hit the proverbial brick wall and got that soaring headache that accompanies too close a reading and forcing myself to pay attention. It's not that the book is bad - it really isn't at all! It's actually one of the best books that I've read in quite some time. But, at a soaring 515 pages, it's not one of those books you read all in one sitting, as I originally set out to make it. The parenthetical comments galore, the frequent annotations, and the voracious side notes make the book less of a walk in the park and more of a slog through the swamp of academia. But the charactes and PLOT(!!) keep me reading, page after page, and chapter after chapter. Another interesting aspect of the game is to read each chapter title and try to figure out what each title has to do with the contents of that chapter. I mean, it sounds dull, but sometimes the real relation can be a stretch!

But anyway... I have, possibly unexcusably, taken a small break from the loveable tome that is Special Topics for some lighter reading. I recently picked up a book from the library entitled Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by one Mr. Chuck Klosterman. I'm only about half way through the first chapter, but I already believe this man to be somewhat of a comic genious. Within the first thity pages, he has attacked not only Coldplay, but John Cusak in Say Anything, Woody Allen, Sid and Nancy, and Teen Wolf. It's brilliant, and there are few parenthetical comments or annotations! And though I do feel bad about the fact that I am reading two books at the same time, I just can't put them down now!

How to Breathe Underwater

How could I have forgotten to talk about perhaps one of the best books of short stories I've read in...well, perhaps ever. How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer is a collection of short stories that all seem to focus on so-called "coming of age" or "growing up". And while there are a few stories that I would just skip, such as "Stations of the Cross" or "Pilgrims", both of which strike a nerve in a not-so-good way, most of the stories are beautifully written and inspire the reader to just...think. Perhaps one of my favorite stories in the entire collection would be "Isabel Fish", which is about a young girls quest to become okay with the water - and her brother - after being involved in a car crash that kills her brothers girlfriend. The story is sad and beautiful and introspective and excellent (there goes that lack of critical insight, yet again).

While I'm usually not a huge fan of short stories - I don't really like the whole disjointed nature of compendiums or collections, and the time needed to individually reflect on each story isn't an investment I'm usually willing to make - these stories were all to absorbing not to love. Orringer crafted 9 stories, and perhaps the biggest complaint were that, towards the end, many of the stories began to run together. This may be due to the fact that I stopped taking so much time to reflect on the stories individually, but is more likely due to the fact that plot point and characteristics began to repeat. I also noticed that many of the characters or situations involved Judiasm or Jewish people. This is neither a good nor a bad thing, just something to notice.

Having finished these reflection-inducing books in such a short amount of time, I'm ready to move on to a new list of summer reading. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is currently on the front burner, but what with a fantastic trip to your local neighborhood library, and borrowing more than a few books from Anna, I now have a fairly impressive list of books to be read before August 11th (the day I leave for KU) including the Interpreter of Maladies, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and TWO supposedly-fantastic Johnathon Safron Foer books. I feel myself getting that familiar feeling of book-overwhelming-ness beginning to set in, but I'm pretty sure that as long as I take it one page, one chapter, one book at a time, I'll be more than just fine!