Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Hour I First Believed

Being sick is definitely no fun, but the upside to it is more time to read. I'm somewhere around page 200 of The Hour I First Believed.
The first hundred pages were a little slow going and I wasn't sure if I could get past a general dislike of the main character. I guess he's fairly typical and a fairly average person, there are just a lot of traits that I just don't like and have a hard time relating to.
The book has picked up though and I had a really hard time putting it down last night. It's hard to take too. I know that it shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but it's trying on my nerves and emotions.
Here's a quick look at a paragraph from the write up on Chapters:
"When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. "
I Don't know why I thought it would be anything but hard to take, but so far in the past 50 pages or so I've been in tears a number of times.
Anyway, that's where I'm at with it for now. I expect it to get harder and harder to take.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

A New Year

Last year it was my personal goal to read 52 books. One book each week. I was doing really well for the first few months of the year, but things started to trickle off (as they often do) and life caught up with me, demanding my time and leaving much less for one of my favorite passtimes. I did, however, manage to soak up 26 books, so that's not too bad.
This year I'm going to set a more achievable goal for myself. I want to try to read 30 books if I can. That's where this blog comes in. I will be chronicling the books I read as I go.
To start off 2009: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.