b-ruce

Giovanni's Room

I've been fascinated with James Baldwin every since I read some short piece of his in my Sophomore year English textbook and saw his picture. It looked so ridiculous, he seemed so strung out, complete with cigarette in hand. I had never seen anything like it in a textbook. I assume the editors thought the picture would serve as a warning, send the right message to the kids about which lifestyles and choices were the morally correct ones. However, having always associated myself with those sorts textbook editors disapproved of, I immediately recognized how cool James Baldwin was. He was Black, Gay and on H. An outsider looking for ways to get further outside. So, held this high in my esteem, it surprised me to reflect that I had never read any of this novels, an epiphany that came to me when confronted by a copy of "Giovanni's Room' while scouring the DePaul bookstore for my own textbooks. So I bought the book, read it, and now in my tradition, report back to you, my sweet readers.

Giovanni's Room was entertaining, devilish, introspective and instantly accessible. It surprised me how many pages I was able to get through in the much maligned 30 minute lunch break, where I have found a nice bit of time to finally get back to reading, my long commutes now ended. I wonder though, if there was a larger point which I was missing. Still what I was able to gleam was a moving meditation on the confines that society puts us in and our problems if we're not willing to face and recreate them.

Gatsby

I finished The Great Gatsby recently. It has a strange quality to it that I can't readily describe but I will say that I did enjoy it. Not a bad way to spend 5 hours at all.

Harry Potter

Can't wait for the next book. Very glad to see it has a release date!

Because I always do this when I do this

Yup, you guessed it: I done finished another book. Another Haruki Murakami book, titled Kafka on the Shore.

I heartily endorse this book to any an all hipsters out there, unforgettable characters and narrative.

I once had a girl

or should I say, I read a book called Norwegian Wood. Extremely erotic and more than a little brilliant, Norwegian Wood is the tale of a man looking back at his college years in the late Sixties (thus the Beatles song title). And while the subject matter sounds rather ordinary the story is anything but. I picked up this book after being impressed by several of the author, Haruki Murakami’s short stories (the compilation is titled The Elephant Vanishes, good stuff, although I haven’t read all of the stories yet.) Norwegian Wood contains very little of the bizarre, almost Kafka-like twists and turns in Murakami’s short stories so if you were assigned The Elephant Vanishes as I was and didn’t care for the strange absurdities therein, I still think you should give Norwegian Wood a shot so long as your sensibilities wouldn’t be offended by a large bit of graphic sex that never seems gratuitous.

That's a whole lotta solitude

3rd book in 11 months: One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's really really good. It was recommended to me by no less than 3 people who had never actually finished it. But they all praised it nontheless, and now I'm recommending it to you. Even if you don't finish the whole book you should give it a look, the style is memserising and the content brilliant.

Boy, 2 in less than 12 months, I'm like some sort of reading machine!

I have just finished readed Hesse's "Siddhartha" and much to the joy of the friends of the Glenview library ("friends of the library, Marge?") I will be finally returning it sometime this weekend.

I just thought I'd share this with you as my reading a whole entire book is a rare occurance. And also I must recommend the book to you. The prose is wonderfully hipnotic and I couldn't help but be moved by Sidd's quest for enlightenment/inner peace as I'm sure you'll agree, that is something that most of us strive for, at least in some small degree, every day.

I also went out for my first motorcycle ride of the year yesterday. The weather was so nice out here in the Chi that I almost had to. I have an 8 year old picture of the bike here. The bike still looks the exactly the same, unfortunately the same cannot be said of me. The first ride of the year is always one of the best. The winter months spent traversing the roads in cars can make you forget of the wonderful sensation that riding a steel horse among a maze of metal rhinoceroses provides. It's a great way to enjoy a warm day.