Life of Pi

All right, its been awhile since I made a post. I've been caught up doing school stuff. The good thing is that most of my school work involves reading books so I've found a lot of good new literature this semester. Eventually I will get it all up here.
You may have heard of Yann Martel's Life of Pi on Oprah or something like that. But believe me, its still worth reading. I read it for a literary theory class I'm in as a perfect example of post-structuralism in novels. Before reading it, I was not too familiar with theory but this book helped me to understand it.
I really like this book. There is all kinds of stuff going on in it. The story is about a boy named Pi who is raised in a zoo. Not in a cage, mind you, his family owns the zoo.
After telling about his childhood there, his family leaves India to go the America and the boat crashes en route. The rest of the book details Pi's survival story as he is shipwrecked and stuck on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger. This sounds very far-fetched, and its supposed to.
The awesome thing about this book is it presents itself as a true story. Depending on the reader, this can be believed up to certain points. But eventually, nearly all readers, I would say, catch on to the absurdity of it all and see what Martel is doing. He presents Pi's story as true, but at the end of the book, makes the argument, and I agree with him, that even stories told as truth are always mixed with different interpretations and perspectives. In this way, every story that is ever told becomes fiction in the telling.
I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone that hasn't read it and might. Just keep in mind that on another level, this idea is also Martel's philosophy of religion and belief. When you see how things play out in the end, it is an interesting take on how to view faith and belief. Basically, Martel says, there are certain things that have definitely happened. For instance, we humans know we are here on earth. That's the fact. How we explain this differs from person to person. We can explain it through nothing but cold, hard facts, or as Martel calls it, "dry, yeastless factuality." Or, we can choose, say religion, which explains things in a more creative and uplifting way. Martel contends that to choose just the factuality is to deprive life of its wonder.
This is a great book. Its easy to read and has some very interesting ideas.

Go Ask Alice

This was the response I wrote for Go Ask Alice, a book by 'an anonymous teen,' but most likely by the famous sensationalizing author Beatrice Sparks, the women responsible for 'discovering' other 'diaries' of troubled teens.
Several of my friends in high school did drugs and I can tell you that not one of them ended up at all like the girl in Go Ask Alice. That is because this “diary” is fictitious rubbish written with the contradictory motive to ‘keep kids away from drugs’ while telling them all about them and getting them interested.
To me there is lots of evidence that this is not a real diary. The vocabulary used is not typical of a teenager. The way the girl’s life flows also follows too much of a tradition plot line: she likes one boy at the start, a bunch of stuff happens to her and then a nice boy comes along and loves her for who she is. Then, oh no, she dies just when everything was looking up. Instead of being powerful, I found this to be the most clichéd and lazy ending. Speaking of cliché, there is nothing more tired and done than adolescent fiction in the form of a diary or journal.
Another reason this “diary’s” legitimacy questionable is the very fact that it would exist. Are we to believe that this girl who is higher than a kite and living on the streets is still faithfully keeping a diary like a good Mormon girl should? When she was strung out on whatever did she really have the thought to go and find some paper and pen to put down her thoughts? I find that hard to believe.
Okay, so the girl starts doing drugs and by the next month she’s already selling them and devoting her life to them. That's believable.
I was not empathetic with the narrator. From page one I found it hard to even read what she had to say. She was a spoiled, selfish girl who thought the entire world revolved around her. She’s crying about her comfortable life in Suburbia while all over the world kids her age are going to bed starving with no meal coming the next day. I just can’t empathize with her or recommend this book to anyone.

Walk Two Moons

This is the first book I read for my adolescent literature class: Sharon Creech’s Newberry Award winning book, Walk Two Moons, tells the stories of two young girls, Salamanca Hiddle and Phoebe Winterbottom. Salamanca, or, Sal, for short, is the adolescent narrator on a trip to Idaho with her grandparents. She is on her way to see her mother, who left home one day and never came back. Along the way, she tells the story to her grandparents of a girl she knew in Ohio, Phoebe.
As she tells Phoebe’s story, she also reveals details to the reader from her own life and the memories she has of her mother. Though the two girls are vastly different in personality, they are similar in that both their mothers leave home unexpectedly.
This deceptively simple book is well-deserving of the awards and praise it has received. In it, Creech has tackled timeless themes in a way that young people can relate to and understand. The book contains several elements that make it fun to read: suspense, humor, originality and good, solid storytelling.
Another accomplishment of the book is its ability to successfully get the reader to empathize with its characters. By the end, I felt like I knew Sal and I wanted her to see her mom again almost as much as she did. The pacing of the book which led to the ending was masterful.

I haven't posted much in awhile because school started and I've been busy with that. However, I have been reading some good books in my classes and will post some of the things I write about them for my classes soon.

The Night of the Iguana

Tennessee Williams was a playwright famous for such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie and this one, The Night of the Iguana. I read The Glass Menagerie in high school and seem to remember liking it. I read Streetcar Named Desire earlier this year and really liked it a lot. As such, I thought I would like this one too, but I didn't.
The Night of the Iguana won some awards and earned lots of praise, but I just couldn't get into it. The story is about a disgraced preacher named Shannon who now gives tours after giving up church service. He is tightly wound and always seems on the verge of mental breakdown. I suppose readers are maybe supposed to sympathize or empathize with him, but I just found him kind of irritating.
In the play, he is touring a group of women around Mexico and takes them to stay at a resort run by an acquaintance of his, Maxine Faulk. The women do not like the appearance of the place and spend the majority of the play angry at Shannon and his disinterest in them. They are also upset because he had 'improper' relations with a young girl who is part of the tour.
At the resort, Shannon meets a woman named Hannah with whom he forms and instant and unexpected bond. Maxine, who wants Shannon's attention gets jealous and does not treat Hannah and her grandfather well.
That's pretty much of it. The play focuses on human suffering and the like, topics which can definitely make for good stories. But this play just didn't do it for me. I was unable to sympathize with the characters because I thought it was their own faults that their lives were they way they were. They were bondage in but they were the ones who'd put themselves there.
Despite my opinion of this play, I still consider Tennessee Williams to be a playwright of great talent, I would just recommended his other plays, especially A Streetcar Named Desire, before this one.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway is often considered one of the century's best writers and while reading his work his immense talent is apparent. My experience with Hemingway started with his short stories. I liked the way that he could use such simple language to describe such grand ideas. Often, his stories have much more meaning than appears on the surface.
Such is the case with The Old Man and the Sea, the book for which he won the Nobel Prize. The book tells the story of a poor fisherman, Santiago, and his long battle with a giant marlin. His struggle to bring the fish in represents the struggle of all mankind against the things that bear against it. Likewise, the way in which Santiago faces this immense challenge exhibits Hemingway's idea of the way men should deal with adversity--they should never give up or complain. Instead, like Santiago, mankind should respect adversity and face it with diligence and courage.
If you've ever wanted to read Hemingway but haven't yet, this is a good place to start. If you already have, then, well, good.

Ethan Frome

In the last few months I've been finding some really good deals on used books at the D.I. Not all the books there are in great condition, but I've been able to find some older classics for cheap that are in great shape. Because of this, I've been reading some books lately that I found there. A lot of them are books I'd always heard of but never actually read. Such was the case with Ethan Frome. Ethan Frome was published in 1911 by Edith Wharton. Wharton is most well-known for her books about upper class society like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, neither of which I have read. I read somewhere that Ethan Frome is Wharton's least characteristic book, which is too bad because I think it is one of the best books I've ever read. I was really surprised by how much I liked it.
I wouldn't say its a happy story. In fact, its probably one of the sadder books you could read. I suppose there is some humor, as sad books often contain at least a little. In this case, I would say there is some humor in the ending, although its quite bleak also.
I don't want to reveal too much of the story because it would ruin the surprising, ironic ending. But the basic outline is that a narrator, who remains unnamed, comes to a small New England town. He is struck with a local man named Ethan Frome, who everyone in town seems to know but doesn't really want to talk about. Everyone just makes cryptic remarks about how its 'too bad' what happened to him. The narrator gets curious about this man and eventually is able to go his house. Once he enters Frome's house his whole life story begins to make sense and the narrator begins to understand why he has become such a shell of a man, devoid of any joy or hope.
The first and last chapter are told in first person by the narrator. The middle chapters are all third person and tell the story of a younger Ethan Frome and the events that led him to where he is when the narrator meets him.
Throughout the book, Wharton's use of language is masterful. Her descriptions of winter, isolation, love and disappointment are spot-on. Its hard for me to think of a writer who has done these topics better.
Frome is also a short book and can be read in one or two sittings, if you have a little extra time. I started reading it and couldn't put it down, especially toward the end when the tension builds and builds.
I highly recommend this book and I think its made it onto my top ten list of favorite books.