Category Archives: Reading

Reading

I finally read ‘Cloud Atlas’

1 Comment

The preview for “Cloud Atlas” gave me chills. The movie looks big and grand and sweeping, and Tom Hanks is in it. He is my very favorite Famous Tom. (Sorry Jones, Petty and Cruise.) So after watching the preview I was 99 percent sure I wanted to see the movie and 100 percent sure I wanted to read the book, which was written by David Mitchell and published way back in 2004.

(How is it possible that 2004 was so long ago? Who sped up my years?)

Other people must have felt the same, because there was a rather long wait for it at the library. I eventually was able to check it out, though, and I started reading it almost before I got home. But not actually before I got home, because I was driving and driving and reading “Cloud Atlas” is probably illegal and if it isn’t illegal it should be.

“Cloud Atlas” is a big, sweeping book that takes place over a long, long, long period of time. It’s split into 11 sections that kind of form a Time Sandwich. The first and last sections are set in the 19th century, and the centermost section is set in some undefined distant future. The others are in the ’30s, the ’70s, somewhere around right now and in a not-quite-as-distant future. And they’re all connected. That’s all I’ll say about that, because finding out how they were connected was what I was most looking forward to when I picked up the book and I’d hate to ruin that for you.

I found myself unfavorably and perhaps unfairly comparing “Cloud Atlas” to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” the entire time I was reading it, and not just because they were both written by guys named David. I was expecting “Cloud Atlas” to be both as challenging and as ultimately rewarding as “Infinite Jest,” but in the end I didn’t find it to be either.

(That sounds terribly jerky of me, but it’s true so I’m going to go ahead and leave it. Let’s just accept that sometimes I’m a bit of a jerk and move along.)

Ultimately I thought it was a well-written story with a clever conceit, but it left me feeling depressed. I’m still interested in seeing the movie, though, if for no other reason than to see how they bring the Story Sandwich to the screen.

Reading

I wonder how you make kudzu jelly

I’m taking a break from blogging this month and sharing some words from friends, some posts from the past and other assorted bric-a-brac. This post, written by Rockford, was originally published on July 27, 2008, as “Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.”

"Triumph of the Kudzu" by John Perkins

Where I grew up, kudzu is inescapable.

At this time of year the trees along the highway stop being trees and they become big green shapes, as if someone threw a leafy tarp over all the oaks. Some of them look like other things, like oversized animals with a general shape but no real detail. Like looking at clouds miles and miles away that look like dragons or clowns or something. This is summer in the Southeast, where kudzu is king.

Some people I grew up with actually found uses for kudzu besides “erosion control,” which it was originally brought to the region to help with. Some old ladies at the local flea markets would use the big rubbery vines to make baskets or other such things. Other capitalist ventures included using the blossoms to make kudzu jelly. It tasted a lot like grape jelly to me.
Continue reading I wonder how you make kudzu jelly →

Reading

I’m guessing ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ will do me in

1 Comment

Every now and then I start feeling like my education is lacking, so I launch a reading project. Like that time I decided to read all of the Modern Library’s top 100 books and then only read (I think) 5 of them because they were so depressing.

Well, folks, we’ve entered another of those Every Now and Thens.

This time I’m working off the Great Books list in Susan Wise Bauer’s “The Well-Educated Mind.” They’re all books I probably should have read at some point in high school or college. They’re also all books I’ve never read. It should only take me ten or twenty years to read them all.

Picasso's sketch of Don Quixote, 1955
  • “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes
  • “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” John Bunyan
  • “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift
  • “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen
  • “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickens
  • “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte
  • “The Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • “Madame Bovary,” Gustave Flaubert
  • “Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy
  • “The Return of the Native,” Thomas Hardy
  • “The Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James
  • “Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain

    • I started “Don Quixote” a few weeks ago, and it is making me feel like a big doofus. From what I gather, this is the First Novel Ever and it is Very Funny and also Wonderful. I’m only on Chapter 19, but I’m just not that into it. Don Quixote seems like a big jerk, and there’s enough scatological humor to launch a Johnny Knoxville franchise.

    I’m hoping things will change soon in the next one billion pages. (Seriously. I had no idea how long this book was.)