Reading Vacation

Book #7 – A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean

Coming up with my Top 50 Movie List made me nostalgic, and when I want to feel nostalgic, I watch A River Runs Through It. So I figured it was time to read the book. The movie is a pretty faithful adaptation, with one noticeable exception. If you've seen the movie, you probably remember Norm as a pussy. A soft, writerly wimp whose younger brother clearly got all the cojones in the family. The real Norman Maclean seems to have been much gruffer and saltier than Craig Scheffer's version. In the other two stories contained in the book, he works a few summers in a logging camp, and then a few summers fighting fires in the mountains. These are not jobs for Whitman-spouting dreamers. Maclean's writing style sometimes gets a little damp, but he can also knock out a beautiful description of an entire vista in a few words.

Book #8 – You Shall Know Our Velocity, by Dave Eggers

Here's a synopsis: following the death of their best friend, two guys embark on a journey they hope will take them around the world. Doesn't that sound uplifting? It is in a way, but most of the novel is spent in the thoughts of the narrator, who can barely suppress his grief at what happened to his friend and himself, or his horror at the world around him, or his continuous disappointment in humanity and God. Fun stuff. Anyway, YSKOV was a very engaging read, though not as good as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which was not quite).

I also started and finished this book in a day or two, which always leaves me somewhat discombobulated. Did the character have drinks on the deck of the ship, or did I? Did he almost run over a rabbit, or was that me? Does that happen to anyone else? Maya, when you watch the X-Files for hours at a time, do you ever start to feel like the characters exist in your world? (If this is a sign of insanity, please don't tell me.)