While Reading...

While I was reading Travels in the Scriptorium the pages would fall in a certain way and I would be struck by a severely creeped out feeling. Why do I feel like I'm being watched?

I bought a book based on its cover. I judged it by its cover and judged correctly. Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant was exactly as I assumed; bizarre, witty, clever, wonderful. I would go so far as to say this is one of the best books I've read in years. I don't know if it's a case of every once in a while a book comes along and hits you at the right time in your life, but Tortoise certainly hit me. The way Audrey (Oddly) thinks about things and analyzes situations was so strangely familiar to the way I think and notice things. It is chalk full of plays on words. And the chapters told from Winnifred the tortoise's perspective were delightful and adorable, everything from her perspective on being warm, to her thoughts on Shakespeare's writing style and how he "uses so many exponents". The Tortoise was a complete delight to read and I want to read it again. It definitely gets my recommendation.
The enjoyment I got from reading this book may have heightened my disappointment with Jennifer Weiner's Best Friends Forever. I've read a number of her books and they tend to vary from enjoyable to so-so, but this one was a let down all around. The supporting characters were frustrating and the plot was very predictable. I felt like I had seen this book in cheesy tv show or movie format a million times.
Following BFF, I picked up a book I'd been eyeing up at the bookstore for some time. Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster was finally in the discount bin at $2, which was a bit of a red flag for me, but I decided to risk it anyway; for $2.10 after tax, can't go wrong, right? Wrong. The only merit to this book was that it was only 143 pages long. The story was about a man who wakes up in a room and has no idea who he is, where he is or how he got there, but the people that come to his room throughout the day are angry with him to varying degrees. It's all very mysterious, yet very flat. To start with, I didn't care for the writing style, but I went on with it anyway. The story took many different paths and hinted at many different things, and I began to feel really let down when I realized I had about 6 pages left in the novel and nothing had been revealed or wrapped up in the least. Nothing was explained, nothing wrapped up and there appeared to be no point to any of the subplots. Maybe I'm missing something, and it was actually literary genius...but I suspect the people who would refer to it as such are just trying to sound clever. I have only one word for this book: pass.
I think I'm going to move on to to some Vonnegut. I could use a bit more of the bizarre.

One off my list

I finished a book I've been meaning to read for quite a while now; The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. The story, which was made into a movie that I would also like to see, is about a 15 year old who has a love affair with Hanna, a woman more than twice his age, in Germany in the years following World War II. She disappears suddenly one day and he encounters here again years later when he visits a courtroom as a law student and sees her on trial for hideous crimes of war. The story is sad, but mysterious and seems so real and plausible. I found it interesting how a situation that should be so morally wrong could seem almost acceptable from the perspective of the boy. That being said, I still can't quite wrap my head around how Hanna could allow herself to be romantic with a teenage boy...that was always in the back of my mind while I read. It was well written though, and I definitely think it's worth a read. It makes me want to see the movie and how they interpreted the story.

The book I'm reading now is called "Come, Thou Tortoise". It's bizarre, and I'm very excited to get into it!