Week 2: Maybe it was good being sick

Waking up on Monday with a 102 fever didn't seem like it had any bright side. After feeling a little better, and exhausting everything on my Tivo, I figured I might as well read. I finally got a book done in a reasonable time. So far I've enjoyed most of the books I read this year. Five people you meet in heaven, Extremely loud and Incredibly close, and the Da Vinci Code. Of these, five people you meet in heaven was probably the most thought provoking. This book really got you thinking, especially while reading the inferno. It's very interesting to consider Albom's theory that Heaven is a reflection point, and people can look back on their lives. It's also interesting to see how much the main character, Eddie, grew in his (although never defined) relatively short time in heaven. He managed to forgive his Dad for mistakes made over a 30+ year period, re- fall in love with his wife, validate his thinking from while he was at war, and learn what happened to him in the Philippines causing his permanent leg injury. This book is a must-read classic, one that I feel I will not soon forget!

Quarter 2: New Goals, New Books. Week 1: Heaven V Hell

In retrospect, last quarter I messed up in the beginning, and made it too hard to come back in the end. This quarter I'm trying not to do that. In doing so I've made great headway in the Mitch Albom Book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I thought reading this was interestingly timed considering we are also reading The Inferno, in which Dante recounts the details of a trip through Hell. So far in the 115 pages I've read, I learned a lot about the life of the repairman at an amusement park who dies in an unfortunate accident, saving a little girl from a falling ride. Once reaching heaven, the reader learns that rather than being everything soft and perfect (as heaven had been described to me -- bear in mind I'm not religious at all), heaven is a stage in which one can reflect on his or her life. Interestingly enough, this is very different from what we read in The Inferno, in which people are pettily punished for their sins, in heaven people are not (according to Albom) rewarded in the same sense. Additionally, Albom seems far more forgiving the Dante. In Dante's world, someone who takes the life of another is deemed at minimum violent against thy neighbor and condemmed to a life soaked in a pool of blood. In Albom's world, a former militant can apparently still make it to heaven.

Week 6: A busy week of reading

As the end of the quarter was approaching even more rapidly, I knew I had a lot of work to do to get anywhere in independent reading. Last week (Sunday, so maybe that counts as this week) I finished the Da Vinci Code. It was a great book, other than the ending which had a little too much about religion for my liking. That was the end of 1.5 books. Great only 1.5 more (since this is online you can't tell, but I mean this very sarcastically). To try to get one book in I asked my parents to get me, from the library, Five People You Meet in Heaven (a book that I'd assumed was rather short). When it came in, I took a look at it and realized that it wasn't as short as I'd assumed (actually 200 pages). So... I chose a book that I'd actually contemplated reading over the summer, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. The lucky placement of Tuesday's day off gave me the chance to get a great deal of the way through it, and by Wednesday I had finished. It was a pretty good read, but not as exciting as the Da Vinci Code. The story was told through the eyes of an autistic boy, framed for a crime he didn't commit. The story has some surprises (like the fact that instead of dying, his mom just divorced his dad), but definitely none comparable to that of the identity of the teacher in the Da Vinci Code. Although I only got 2.5 books done, I'm satisfied with the reading I got in (being more than I've done in a while), and I will work to get the full three in next quarter.