Booked for the Holidays

The Christmas holiday means more than the birth of Jesus, cookies, and snow; the holidays promise extra leisure time to curl up with a good book. Previously, this was always done with the knowledge that time was short and the next semester of school would recommence and banish any time for the written word not found in textbooks or handouts. Oh what joy and rapture that I am no longer required to bury my nose in over sized tomes such as Media Ethics, Golden Age Spanish Poetry, and Cognition: Study of Philosophy. These days I have time to read whatever strikes my fancy which includes the following:

Currently inhaling The Book of Lost Things, now I haven't finished it yet but I'm nutso-crazy-o about this story! I highly recommend if you enjoy any form of fairy tales retold. I'm also trying to get into Broken for You, it's fine, a little chick lit for me, but fine. Won't judge it until I finish it. I also started Everything Is Illuminated which promises to be as rewarding as the first book I read by Jonathon Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

I went on a sexcapade through some classic racy novels including Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, and Lady Chatterley's Lover which make a sophisticated yet sexy little set, if I may say so.

I finally got around to Reading Lolita in the Tehran, which was much more enjoyable than I thought it would be and I now deeply regret missing Azar Nafisi's visit to the UNL campus during my time there.

To make my mother happy, I read The Hound of Baskerville a mere five and a half years after she assigned it to me in senior English class. It reminded me how little I enjoy the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't conundrum of detective fiction. If you figure out the mystery, then it wasn't a very good mystery after all because you were able to solve it; but, if you are unable to solve the mystery in time and are forced to rely wholly on the voice of the narrator to explain its inner workings, then there's great dissatisfaction to be had in yourself for not being clever enough to solve the puzzle. What a ridiculous genre of literature.

I thought A Room with a View was very romantic and I'm pleased to have read my first E.M. Forester novel which was extremely well written.

Other recent reads include: Christ the Lord by Anne Rice (I rate it **/*****), The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (****/*****), Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut (**/*****), read the play Death of a Salesman (***/*****)and The Crucible by Arthur Miller.