SB

Book Club 2011 was yet another successful year of reading. For much of the year the goal was to read 24 total, going at two books per month, but about half-way through we decided that was a little too intense and took the fun out of it by turning it into a chore. Here’s the final tally:

1. My Life in France by Julia Child

2. Shopgirl by Steve Martin

3. I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

4. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

5. I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

6. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

7. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

8. Helicopter Man by Elizabeth Fensham

9. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

10. Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis

11. A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket

12. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

13. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

We first learned of David Sedaris’ awesomeness during the original Book Club of 2010 with Me Talk Pretty One Day at the behest of an old high school friend. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see one of his books make the list every year until we run out of them thanks to the laugh out loud, easy-to-read story collection format. I’ll always associate this with Laura’s first hurricane as we sweated our way through it as the city took it’s sweet time to make sure our street was the very last street in town to have electricity restored during the hottest week of the summer.

14. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help was another one like Water for Elephants where I demanded we see the movie before digging into the book so that my enjoyment of the movie wouldn’t be tainted by the predictable superiority of the original source material. Yet again, it was the right thing to do. I really liked the movie, but the book is superior in every way.

15. Looking for Alaska by John Green

Another recommendation courtesy of my high school friend Lauren Tidmore (and even one supplied by her as an engagement present to Laura and I), this book was absolutely incredible. Fun at times and completely heart-wrenching at others. A book hasn’t done a number on me like this one did since Marley and Me during Book Club 2010. You should read it.

16. Stand-In Groom by Kaye Dacus

My cousin writes Christian romance novels and Laura and I try to read at least one per year. They’re fun and cute, enjoyable reads, but neither Laura or I are the target market. If you don’t mind your characters praying or shooting up little thoughts to God throughout the book, then you should totally read them.

17. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

To my own surprise since I generally hate warship related entertainment, this might actually be my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia that we’ve read so far. This reads more like a children’s version of The Odyssey with chapter by chapter individual little adventures and I can’t wait to read it to our kids someday.

18. Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

As just mentioned, I don’t like naval stuff. Michael Crichton was my favorite author growing up and this had been sitting on the book shelf unread for a couple years during my “I have no time for reading!” phase. It’s okay. As far as Book Club titles go, it’s definitely towards the bottom of the list in terms of favorites. It picks up after about a hundred pages, but in a three hundred page book that’s a little slow. It’s also pretty violent at times which made our strategy where I read out loud while Laura cooks a little unpleasant at times. Based on how much I love Michael Crichton’s other work and the fact that this was released after his death from a file found on his computer, I can’t help but wonder if the reason it was never released was because he wasn’t completely happy with it.

19. The Gift by Cecelia Ahern

UGH. Here’s one that makes me wish I hadn’t stopped blogging Book Club half-way through the year again. Both Laura and I were really enjoying this book for about 270 of the 300+ pages, but during the final chapters the entire thing completely and utterly turns to shit in what might be the most frustrating, speedy ending I’ve ever read. I won’t detail it in case you’d prefer to punish yourself of your own accord, but it turned a pleasant holiday book into one of the stupidest stories I’ve ever heard and I hate it.

My In-Between Books

I have an addictive personality. It’s the reason I’ve never tried any form of drug even though I don’t morally have any problems with any of the lighter stuff. It’s also the reason I don’t drink unless someone else is also drinking and it’s the reason that I felt I needed Laura’s blessing a year ago when I expressed an interest in vinyl records. When I get into something, I get into it pretty hard and it wasn’t long before our two-person Book Club branched out into trying to read as much as I could. Even within this addiction other brief addictions surfaced as it started with an obsession over post-apocalyptic books (primarily zombie related), then morphed into an obsession with the Red Sox (that I trust will return once baseball season returns) and has most recently materialized into working my way through the Harry Potter series since I never have despite loving the movies. In addition, I also read one “classic” on my phone at work. The Android Kindle app and a variety of free books make this an easy way to feed the need… the need to read. But anyway…

1. Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks

2. World War Z by Max Brooks

3. Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

5. Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne

6. 100 Things Red Sox Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die by Nick Cafardo

A very fun, well written book of various subjects from players to plays to places. More focus is put on individual moments in careers than discussing players in their entirety, but it’s easy reading and the list format makes it for a good bathroom companion as most topics max out after two pages.

7. Red Sox Heroes by Jerry Remy

This is a goddamn Red Sox text book. Jerry Remy, long time broadcaster and ex-player for the Red Sox has compiled a list of his favorite players from every era. The early years before he was born read like your standard informative guide, but once we get into his childhood favorites the book really picks up steam as you can feel the true heart behind these writings. As a sport journalist, it’s far from great literature and he repeats himself a lot, but you can see his heart and soul unfold before you. I loved it.

8. The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship by David Halberstam

The story of friendship between four classic Red Sox is a quick, easy read that let’s you into the minds and lives of Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Ted Williams. The stories are excellent but this might be the single most disorganized book I’ve ever read. It jumps all over the place but at it’s core the values and humanization of these baseball legends makes it worth reading.

9. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

This is currently in the running for my favorite book of all time. Charles Dickens turned himself into one of my greatest heroes in all of life in a mere 400 pages. The man is a genius. The way the words flow on the page is like poetry without being so poetic that you can’t follow along. The bevy characters and the way they intertwine all tied in with flickers of a brilliant romance in the midst of war and violence is indescribable without reading it for yourself. I’ve never been more jealous of such talent. With Michael Crichton, David Sedaris or John Green it’s easy to read their books and think, “Yeah, I could probably do that,” but with Dickens it’s simply unfathomable that anyone can be this good. I was tempted to re-read it as soon as I finished but decided it would be better to spread out a little further and have started Les Miserables at my grandmother’s recommendation. Still, I suspect I’ll find myself reading this all over again at least every few years.

10. Macbeth by William Shakespeare

I’m a little embarrassed about this, but I always assumed I didn’t care for Shakespeare’s work because I was only a teenager when I read Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar. I believed that my disinterest was caused by my rebellious hatred of high school or simply being a stupid kid that wasn’t smart enough to understand the unique wording. Now, at 24 I can safely say I still don’t have a very good understanding of what the hell is being said in these plays. It’s not my thing. I got a copy of Hamlet for Christmas and I’m still excited to give it a shot, but my distaste for Macbeth was disappointing to say the least.

11. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Easiest read ever. If anything, I was almost disappointed to realize how closely the movie followed the book because I’m so used to books overshadowing their film counterparts in every way. I still enjoyed it and look forward to sharing it with my kids someday, but right now I’m mostly just excited to get further into the series to when the books become so long that I can’t imagine the 2.5 hour long movies are possibly on the same level.

Yes, Book Club has fallen behind on the goal of 24 before year’s end, but we’re still doing our best to read at least one book per month. While we may not always have time to read out loud to each other as our two person book club’s rules mandate, I’ve still been reading on my own when time arises, whether it’s while waiting on the car any of the dozen times we’ve had to get it repaired over the summer or while sitting on the beach on our weekly visits during the hottest months (Wilmington is awesome for things like that) or maybe while waiting for the grill to warm up.

Somewhere along the way, a zombie obsession occurred. The past five books I’ve read on my own revolved around the end of life as we know it.

It all started in October 2010 when Laura and I read a couple of zombie books for our two-person book club in honor of Halloween – my second favorite holiday season. The first book we read was the New York Times best seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, which got it’s own 60 second video review as part of October 12×12:

Next, we jumped into Brains: A Zombie Memoir by Robin Becker. This was a super easy read, just under 200 pages. The book follows a zombie story from the zombie side of things – a unique twist that I’d never seen done before in any medium – film, TV or literature. The author created a special percentage of zombies that maintained some of their humanity to the extent of being able to reason, plot, and use teamwork – all while still craving brains and flesh. A colorful cast of characters formed as the narrator Zombie guided us through their journey to find the man that caused the breakout. The book is funny, violent, and clever. I loved it and, even moreso than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, hold it responsible for the obsession that would follow come the new year.

In February I began reading The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. I had purchased this before Christmas as part of a “Buy 2, Get 3rd Free” deal at our local Barnes and Noble that also found me purchasing World War Z by Max Brooks and My Life in France by Julia Child. The Zombie Survival Guide isn’t exactly a novel in that it’s written as a very straight forward guide for preparing to make it through a zombie apocalypse. It covers every facet of survival from weapons to shelter to battle strategies and reads surprisingly quickly. Every piece of advice is entertaining despite a complete lack of story or plot and the book has become a bit of a Holy Grail for zombie nuts. The best parts come in the final hundred pages as the guide regales a history of zombie attacks with nearly a hundred pages of short descriptions throughout history, from 60,000 B.C. to 2001 A.D. The stories range from generic zombie fun to tying the monsters into actual historic events such as Roanoke Island. It’s a great read.

Since Max Brooks had done such an excellent job with the Survival Guide and I already purchased World War Z, that became the next logical step to feed my hunger for the undead. World War Z is written as a series of interviews of survivors in the years following the zombie apocalypse. The storytellers are from all over the world and the stories themselves give a chronological history of earth’s survival, and the changes for what life has become. Maybe it’s because Brains, Survival Guide and even P&P&J were mostly lighthearted yet violent fun, but World War Z took me by surprise by being the most intense reading experience I’ve ever had. The stories are terrifying and the first-hand accounts only amplify that. The fullness of the history leaves no questions unanswered and is the most complete, well-thought take on zombies I can imagine ever existing. Most zombie movies and books tell only a piece of the story, but Max Brooks managed to tackle every possible angle in what might happen if something like this were to actually occur. The book has jumped up to battle Jurassic Park as my favorite book of all time. Without rereading JP, I’m not ready to give an official crown, but WWZ blew me away.

Next, a friend from college, one of maybe 5 people from before graduation that I keep up with, had learned of my zombie addiction through Facebook and was quick to recommend a book of his own discovery called Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne. Based on the introduction it all started as a fictional blog where a soldier decided to post daily of fake accounts imagining the world after a zombie breakout and how he survived. It’s a more standard zombie tale in line with any of the classic Romero films where a lead characters teams up with secondary characters to try to survive together by constantly searching for somewhere safe to stay. It’s a super easy read and more good old-fashioned zombie fun rather than the horror of World War Z or the mostly-for-laughs attitude of the others. I loved it and ordered the sequel from Amazon immediately after finishing.

Before moving on to DBDA’s sequel, Laura and I had started reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy because we had wanted to have a Pulitzer Prize Winner on our book club list. About 30 pages in it became clear this was a dark, dark book. The novel follows a man and his young son as they try not to starve to death in an empty world where almost no one has survived. It’s a not a zombie book, but it reads very similarly due to the desperation and the will to survive that both genres highlight. To say The Road is bleak is an understatement. Once we got a tenth of the way it became clear this wasn’t going to be a good book for Laura. She’s sensitive which is one of the many things I love about her and the desperation and hopelessness of The Road wasn’t going to do any good in Book Club, which was supposed to be fun.

I, however, have a problem with quitting. I don’t like giving up on things or stopping part-way through, even if I should. I respect Laura for knowing when to stop and don’t blame her at all. The Road ended up depressing the hell out of me. I finished it while we were laying on the beach. It was quite the juxtaposition as I ended up with a pair of tears rolling down my cheeks while the girls sunbathed on a hot summer day. It was rough. Beautifully written, but emotionally rough.

Finally it was time to jump into the DBDA sequel titled Beyond Exile. This one picks up exactly where the last one left off, and for the first half is just as good as the first. Then it dies. The lead character gets lost by himself after a helicopter accident and you essentially relive the first book without the extra characters for the next hundred pages. It got dull fast and by the time it ended I was just glad to be done. I honestly don’t even remember what the final resolution was.

By the time I survived Beyond Exile, I wasn’t exactly in the mood to jump right into the next zombie book again, but fortunately Laura and I had just gotten back from our trip to Boston. While we were there I attended my first game at Fenway and after 24 years as a self-proclaimed hater of baseball that park changed me by giving me one of the best experiences of my life. Now, I’ve decided to allow the Red Sox to join the Baltimore Ravens on my list of teams to study, learn and follow religiously. The problem with this is that unlike Baltimore who has only been around 15 years, the Sox have a 100+ year legacy. I’ve got my work cut out for me, but I’ve already purchased two basic Red Sox history books and am ready to jump in head-first despite the fact that the past couple months I’ve been watching them they seem to have spiraled downwards to the point we might not even make the play-offs this year.

But no quitting! Go Sox! STUDY STUDY STUDY!

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

(Published 1951; 214 pages)

Alright, so we’re getting pretty far behind on Book Club now, mainly due to two books: Into the Wild and Catcher in the Rye. The first I despised almost in its entirety but this latest one has me a bit more befuddled as to how I feel about. I wanted to read it for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s a classic that I’ve heard about my entire life but never bothered to read. The second is that it’s only 214 pages which, in theory, made it seem super easy to finish in a short time.

The second theory proved true in the sense that after stretching the first 80 pages out for a month and a half we finally decided enough was enough and barreled through the last 150 pages in one day. Of course, the fact that it took a month and a half to read the first 80 pages is where the problem lies. For those unfamiliar with the book, it follows about four days in the life of 17 year old Holden Caulfield in the 1940s, just after he’s been expelled from his most recent attempt at high school and just before he’s going to have to face the incurring wrath of his parents for flunking out of another school. While the book takes place over such a short amount of time, the bad side of this is that you get hear every single second of those four days as narrated by a 17 year old. I greatly, greatly enjoyed the final 50 pages, but the question is whether or not the first 3/4ths of the book make those final 50 pages worth it. Once you finish, it’s much more easy to see what the purpose of the majority of the book was: to let you into the mind of a rebellious 17 year old. This would be great if the mind of a rebellious 17 year old weren’t such a shitty place to spend hours and hours of time (reminder: I’m a super slow reader).

Laura had started reading the book before at the behest of a high school English teacher, but when nothing had happened after 80 pages she decided it was a waste of time and quit. When we finally got to the 80 page mark, it was easy to see why: Nothing seemed to be happening at all. I hate, hate, hate quitting things that I’ve started though so we persevered and spent most of our time on Sunday finishing what we had begun. At the end of the day, I’m glad we did, but it sure makes it hard to heartily recommend this to anyone because of how long it drags.

The teacher that had originally recommended the book to Laura had said she needed to read it when she turned seventeen because it would change her life. After completing the book, I’d be a lot more inclined to believe that if I believed a 17 year old had the hindsight of even a 20 year old. When I was a kid, I wasn’t too far off from Holden. I thought I was awesome and I didn’t particularly apply myself in school. I still managed all A’s with one or two B’s without studying but I spent way more time hating school than I did appreciating it and I honestly don’t believe anything could have changed my mind at that age. At 24, it’s easy to read Holden’s 4-day long inner monologue and see how stupid he is and what a dick he is and how he really doesn’t know anything. It’s plain to me now how wise his teachers and even his younger sister are by comparison, but would I have seen that if I had read it at 17? Probably not.

After all, when it’s said and done the book ends on the lines “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” After 214 pages of whining and thinking he’s better than EVERYONE, he doesn’t seem to learn anything. He mentions he talked to his parents and that he’s going back to school the following fall so it still gets to end on the positive note that he was being super melodramatic the whole time. This I DO believe that a 17 year old could pick up on. That they could see how Holden’s plans to run away to Colorado and acting like it was the of the world were foolish and that life WILL go on no matter how life-ending things seem at the time. But it’s all the nuances of the full spectrum of his foolishness I don’t trust a 17 year old would comprehend because I sure as hell wouldn’t have at that age and even the protagonist himself still ends his story missing more than half the point.

The book gets huge points for beautifully showing how little teen melodrama has changed over the past 60 years. It reminded me of The Perks of Being a Wallflower in several ways, only the main character is less innocent and more of an asshole. The emotions are still there though. The uncertainty, the perspective – it’s all survived in spite of a half-century time difference.

If the first 150 pages weren’t boring as can be with seemingly no purpose until it all comes together in the final 50 pages, it would be a lot easier for me to recommend this. On the one hand, I do think it’s a great read because of all the potential discussions it could lead to afterward. In fact, I wish it weren’t banned from high schools because I think with a little adult guidance I’d be interested to see in a mass group setting how the book CAN impact 17 year olds, but that also involves the hurdle of getting them to read 150 pages of seeming nothingness to get to the payoff at the end.

I don’t know that I’ve been so torn on a book as I was torn on Catcher in the Rye. Someone talk about it with me. Laura and I talked about it for half an hour when we finished and had a lot of the same thoughts as we do on just about everything. I’m curious to hear some outside opinions.

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***I ended the last book club post saying “Now let’s read a Pulitzer Prize winner.” I understand Catcher in the Rye is not a Pulitzer Prize winner. The book I was referring to was The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I ended up reading by myself and will cover at a later time.

It didn’t take long into January for us to start breaking into our paid time time off. We got to see snow for the second time in as many months and since I genuinely don’t feel safe driving with slush on the road if I can at all avoid it, we called out from work. Laura whipped up some homemade cinnamon rolls and we took the dogs on a nice, long, snowy walk. Snow is awesome a couple days a year and I love it when it happens.

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A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning
by Lemony Snicket
(Published 1999; 163 pages)

Alright, I admit it: the abuse of children’s books to meet our monthly quota has officially spiked out of control. This latest one isn’t even 200 pages long and the pages that DO exist are so small with such big print that only a couple paragraphs fit onto each. I acknowledge fully that we have gone too far and hereby promise to read at least two full-blown adult books (but not those kind of adult books) for the month of July. You have my word!

With that in mind, we started A Series of Unfortunate Events at the behest of my brother’s girlfriend Sara, who thought it would fit nicely into our book club (likely because we’ve been abusing children’s books as catch-up literature for months now). The book is a super easy read and has an easy to follow narrative as Mr. Lemony Snicket burdens the reader with the telling of the terrible tale of the Baudelaire children in a way that very nicely suits our read-out-loud-to-each-other Book Club.

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are the remarkably intelligent children of two wealthy socialites. When their parents die in a fire that destroys their home, the children are then taken from relative to relative in hopes of finding a suitable home. Unfortunately all of their relatives are a little bit crazy. A Bad Beginning starts with the children being left in the hands of Count Olaf, a wannabe stage actor/alcoholic. He makes the children share a room with only one small bed and forces them to do chores far beyond that of which a 14 year old, a 12 year old, and a baby should be trusted with. After he strikes the boy it becomes especially clear that this is not going to be a reasonable lifestyle, but the Count is determined to get at the children’s fortune and since he’s an adult and no one listens to kids, as is the plot of most kids movies and books, they’re in for a bit of a rough ride.

The book is funny, but in an incredibly dark way. My first introduction to the series was the Jim Carrey movie that came out several years back. I loved the movie and thought it was hilarious and unique, but before Sara recommended the book series it had never really occurred to me to give them a shot. The book is far, far darker than the movie was from what I remember, but we still greatly enjoyed it. The plot of the first book is… well, the only truly accurate phrase I can think of is “f*cked up” which is a bizarre thing to have to admit about a kid’s book. Count Olaf’s first plan to steal the Baudelaire fortune involves forcing Violet, who is only 14, to marry him. There’s not any actual pedophilia or anything obviously as they try to play it off that Olaf ONLY wants the money for the most part, but the guy is such a despicable villain you still have plenty of reason to be bothered by this method.

It’s a very good book and I’m looking forward to eventually reading the rest of the series gradually over the next few years. Now let’s read a Pulitzer Prize winner.

For Part 2, Go Here.

For Part 1, Go Here.

When December rolled around it was time to cut back on our spending a little to save up for Christmas presents. Still, we kept a couple of festive tricks up our sleeves and made plans to see Relient K’s holiday tour “Twas the Tour Before Christmas”.

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Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
(Published 1951; 222 pages)

Is it totally cheating  that I’ve been selecting an inordinate amount of children’s books for Book Club in order to make up for time spent on bigger books so that we can still reach our 24 book quota by the end of the year? Yes. Do I feel bad about it? Not for this one.

The Chronicles of Narnia books - as I covered with The Magician’s Nephew review - are great, classic stories and I’m excited to be able to say soon that we’ve read all of them together. They’re books I want to read to our eventual children and I’d like to have a general familiarity with them long before we get to that point. I’m not going to go into great detail on this one so much as get a quick blog up to memorialize the completion of another Book Club title.

The Narnia books all have a very similar feel to them and Prince Caspian is no different. This time the story revolves around the Pevensie children who have returned to Narnia once again as called by Prince Caspian (oddly referred to as “King Caspian” for nearly the entire book). In Narnia time, thousands of years have passed since The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe even though the kids have only aged a year in Earth time. In the missing millenia the magical kingdom has become considerably less magical as a race of men called the Telmarines have taken over and all but wiped out the old world of talking animals, dwarves, and tree spirits. Prince Caspian thinks the old way is better so he calls upon the old Kings and Queens, i.e. the Pevensies, for assistance in taking Narnia back for the Narnians.

All the components that made me love LWW and The Magician’s Nephew are all still here and I enjoyed it just as much as the first two. If anything this one gets bonus point for not being blatantly, smack-you-in-the-face Biblical allegory. The biggest difference is that where the other two stand on their own feet, I wouldn’t suggest reading this without reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first.

Three down, four to go.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
(Published 2006; 335 pages)

When I talk about books that have been turned into movies, it’s almost guaranteed that I’m going to end up referencing the movie for comparison (See: Jaws, Fight Club, Into the Wild…we read a lot of books that have been turned into movies). I recently had someone explain they felt this was unfair in a discussion about hating Into the Wild as a book despite mostly enjoying the film, so now that I’m about to make the exact same film-to-book comparison as I always do, I thought I’d defend why I break it down this way to begin with.

Obviously, books take considerably longer to read. Generally speaking, even the longest movie isn’t going to take half as long to watch as the book might take to read. I love movies and I love books, but when discussing opinions I find the easiest way to break something down like that is to tell people if the book is somehow far worse or far better than the movie so that they can easily skip the inferior version. For instance, The Blind Side movie is an entertaining family film while The Blind Side book is essentially a text book on the history of the Left Tackle position. Into the Wild and Jaws make some of their lead characters completely despicable while the films make them much more likable. Jurassic Park is so ridiculously good it might make you dislike an equally amazing film. Fight Club is equally awesome in both formats. It’s just an easy way to break things down, and your opinion of one medium is going to be effected by the other if you saw/read the other first, even if you don’t want it to.

That said, Laura saw the Water for Elephants movie with her old roommate and was surprised when she ended up really enjoying it to the point that she wanted to add the novel to our Book Club. I was completely behind this idea under one condition: I had to go see the movie first. Not to determine if I actually had any interest in the book, but because the Twilight film series infuriates me and I was worried if we read the book first that I would have NO chance of liking a Robert Pattinson movie if it was anything short of JUST as good as the source material.

So we went to the movie and to my own shock, I really, really enjoyed it. The story of a fledgling circus and a Vet school drop-out made for an interesting plot. Pattinson, in the role of Jacob the Vet school drop-out, still isn’t a great actor, but when you at least surround him with two Academy Award winners (Christoff Waltz; Reese Witherspoon) and it’s a lot harder to notice. The movie has a really classic feel to it and makes great use of the 1930’s circus setting as a backdrop for a unique story about a circus and a slightly less unique love story all tied together by one of the better villains I’ve seen on the big screen. I dug it.

The book, however, was absolutely fantastic. The main characters are more fleshed out with the minor characters getting much bigger roles when runtime isn’t a factor. The story in the book is even more epic than the movie managed to pull off, which is impressive when you consider that the movie really did an excellent job with that aspect to begin with. Where the film begins with an old man telling a story and ends with an old man telling the story, the novel constantly cycles back and forth between the young Jacob’s perspective as he struggles to make a life in the circus and the old Jacob’s perspective as he struggles with aging in a nursing home.

This one difference is the sole reason I don’t think I would’ve felt anything but disappointment with the film if I hadn’t seen it first. All of the other details of The Most Spectacular Show on Earth are perfectly truncated to avoid a 4-hour movie without losing anything terribly important from that side of the story. The problem is that the flash-forwards to Old Man Jacob were my favorite parts of the book. Maybe this is all because these chapters played out like cleverly written deleted scenes and I wouldn’t have cared as much if the movie had prepared me for them, but regardless, it was a sad casualty to realize was missing from the film version. Fortunately since I’ve seen the film first and know I enjoyed it without these, I’ll be able to enjoy again during future viewings without focusing so much on what could have been.

If you consider seeing the film or reading the book, do both. But start with the movie. If you start with the book, it may ruin an otherwise perfectly good time just because the only way the movie would’ve had a chance of truly comparing is if it was at least 3 hours long and I don’t think the Twilight audience would’ve appreciated that. (Just kidding, Twihards. We all know you’ve already sat through and loved over 6 hours of complete shit and are excited about 4 more hours of it, so time probably wouldn’t have been an issue)

Good movie, amazing book.

Helicopter Man by Elizabeth Fensham
(Published 2005, 144 pages)

On one of our lazy days, Laura and I wandered into downtown Wilmington to check out some of the small local shops, one of which was this little used bookstore tucked in near the Cotton Exchange.  It’s a nice little place that smells like a library. Two women run a coffee shop in the middle of the thin-yet-deep storespace while a younger guy runs the front of the store.

Anytime we go to these kinds of places, I get a slight guilty feeling if I don’t buy SOMETHING, so we picked up an unabridged copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since I had wanted one for our collection ever since I heard about an edited version being released. Of course, since this is a small business we realized they had a minimum credit card charge of $10 and since this is 2011, I almost never have cash. We decided to go back and pick out enough material to add up to the $10 minimum, which, as it turns out, is extremely difficult in a used bookstore. Most of the books are only a dollar or two so we end up with a bizarre assortment that included a French/English Dictionary, a copy of Gulliver’s Travel with Ted Danson on the cover, a random issue of National Geographic, and lastly a book Helicopter Pilot that we only bought because they literally had at least 50 copies.

We fell behind in Book Club because our mutual hate for Into the Wild’s lead character resulted in us taking forever to actually finish that book, so as our follow up we tried to play catch-up by reading Helicopter Man since it’s hardly 150 pages long in large font intended for 6th graders. The story follows a ten year old boy and his father who are on the run from something. If you think there’s any chance you’ll ever actually read this book (that even Amazon.com only sells Used), then skip the rest of this review as I’m just going to give away the entire plot since I don’t think anyone will ever locate a copy of their own accord.

The something that they’re running from is in fact nothing. The father is schizophrenic, which you don’t actually have verified until about halfway through the book, but at times it’s kind of crazy, insanely depressing – all of it amplified by the fact that the book is written as a ten year old’s daily journal. You spend the majority of the book thinking the kid’s mother abandoned them because the father is out of his mind which makes the boy’s memories of her all the more painful. It’s really, really dark for a children’s book.

By the time the book wrapped up, both of us were satisfied with the ending. It was a bit of a relief as we spent at LEAST 85% of it believing this was all going to end horribly and stand one of the saddest stories since Of Mice and Men. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. We enjoyed it when all was said and done, but good luck finding a copy (unless you go to that bookstore in Wilmington, as they seem to have most of the existing copies).

For Part 1, Go Here.

Shortly after returning from Atlanta, we got a visit from two of Laura’s old high school friends from up north in late August.

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