Soundtrack to this post is Stomp. As in the one with trash cans and broomsticks. The version I have on now is Stomp Out Loud, on DVD. Listening to it has no effect whatsoever on the way this post is read, but it might be fun :)
Because I was reminded a few days ago that this was initially a book blog, I'll go ahead and list all the books I've read since last bloggage post.
Because the awfulness of it still saddens me and has yet to leave my mind, we'll start with the recently released fourth book in the bestselling Twilight series, Breaking Dawn.
The first thing that comes to mind, as I reminisce the last book in the Bella's an Annoying Brat/Edward Should Just Eat Her/Jacob Deserves to Like Someone Better Saga, is that I wasted my time reading a seven hundred and fifty page book that was even WORSE than the books before it. I mean, woahhh. And I thought Eclipse (book three) was horrible! I really didn't think it was even possible for Stephenie Meyer to write the final book in the series and have it WORSE than Eclipse. The storyline I'm not going to even bother writing about, because...
A) No one that reads this stupid blog cares a butt about Twilight, and
B) None of it is worth remembering. Just that it shouldn't be read.
Plus, some awful brainwashed Twilight fan is going to go and name their baby girl Renesmee now, I just know it.
Moving on to a few books that I actually enjoyed.
A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey.
A Million Little Pieces is about a twenty-three year old man and his strange and vomit filled path to being free of his alcohol and drug addiction. He's wanted in a number of states and ran away from each one without bail. The book begins as he wakes up on an airplane. He doesn't know why he's on it, where he's going, or how he got there. What he does know is that he's covered in blood, vomit, spit, snot, and lots of other icky substances that no one really wants to be covered in. His face is mangled and he's missing four front teeth. And no, he doesn't know how any of that happened, either.
As he lands and leaves the plane, he finds his parents waiting for him. (Uh oh.) Shortly after, he's checked into a famous Minnesota drug treatment center where the doctors tell him with one more drink or drug usage, he'll be dead in just a few days.
This is his memoir of the whole thing. It wasn't a bad book, I finished it quick enough, and I didn't regret my time doing so once finished [coughBREAKINGDAWNcough]. Parts of it do get redundant, and I admit to skimming over a few of the one million vomiting scenes. Big events in the book take forever to go over, so I kinda skimmed those too. To fix those four missing front teeth he lost, he gets a root canal surgery without the assistance of painkillers or anesthesia. The fact that it hurt (a lot) gets through our midns quite clearly, as he spends ten pages describing the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack. [After this point is when the spoiler alert alarm goes off in warning. Be awares!]
Another thing I didn't especially like, is that even though he spends half the book vomiting and craving and being angry; he actually makes the whole "getting better" process seem...easy. Easy, she says?! That's insane! Well, he did. He's at the most famous get-better-center, where even then the success rate was lower than twenty percent (I think it was fourteen...or seven...only thing I remember for sure is that it was under twenty), he won't listen to a single thing anyone tells him to do, and what? He gets better! He won't follow the program, he won't always take his pills, bla bla bla. In the end, he gets better because he "wanted to." Which, doesn't make sense. To me, at least. He had WANTED to get better multiple times before that, and obviously, he hadn't. Loads of peoples have WANTED to get better, but did they? Nosireee. So why, this one time, for this one man, does simply WANTING something make it happen? Oh well.
Oh, and heard about the whole faking the whole story controversy? Click me!
It's a six page long article, though. I personally skimmed most of it :P (You'll realize I do a lot of skimming.)
If the whole book is a lie or not, I don't really care. He lied, which I kinda care about, but we all lie. The book probably would have sold even if it was published as fiction (Although Oprah helped a lot in the book sales for it, hahaha). In the end, I had a not half book to read, fiction or not.
And now, another book! :O
The Memory of Running, by Ron McLarty.
A book that sat, dusty and lonely, as it waited on my bookshelf for me to pick up and read. I finally did. Begining was slow, but a fourth of the way though I got into it.
Our hero is Smity Ide; forty-three year old, two hundred seventy-nine pound, smoking and drinking, self proclaimed "loser."
The book flips from past to present. While narrating the past, we learn about Smithy's sister, Bethany. Beautiful, throws off her clothes at random, hold impossible poses for long periods of time as if she were a statue, runs away frequenly to who knows where, and responds to the command of a voice in her head, be it to make a salad or murder a dog.
Back in the present, Bethany had ran away for the umpteenth time, and this time couldn't be found, and never came home. By the time she's fifty one, the Ide family gets a letter that she's now in the LA Morgue West.
On a half drunken whim, Smithy hops onto his old Raleigh bycicle and rides, eventually, accross America, all the way to Bethany. Along the road he meets a number of people of all sorts and see's the world and the people in it in a way he never had before.
I don't have much to say about this book, because I didn't exactly love it, but I don't have much to complain or rant about either.
The only thing that bugged me was that I wanted to know exactly what was up with Bethany that made her do the things she did...as in a classified name for it? They never tell us, and it seems as if they don't know, either. She'd see a doctor frequently, but they never told me the reader what exactly was going on. I'm probably the only one that bothered to overthink that part, but whatever.
I'm pretty sure I've read more books than that, but I don't really feel like writing about them. So I won't :D
Currently I'm readind About a Boy by Nick Hornby. I'll tell about it once finished. Just by hearing the storlines of the books he writes, I wouldn't usually be interested. But I really like Nick Hornby as an author, so he makes them worth it.
In other news that has nothing to do with the books I read, I got new glasses. They are huge and purple. See below. I lowered the picture size so my face wouldn't kill your computer moniter. Hopefully.
In more news that has nothing to do with books, I went to another concert this month. Wooooo. And, I didn't even have to get to Sacramento or somewhere further than I'd like to go. It was in FAIRFIELD! I saw the flyer, and was like, WOAH! Three awesomtastic bands that I love and in most cases would have to travel at least an hour to see, are playing together in FAIRFIELD! Ahhhh!
Bands being, Hazel and Vine, Daphne Loves Derby, and BIDWELL :D Two other bands were there, too...Fight Fair and Hannah something or other, but yeah. Took lotsa picturesss.
I found it awkward/weird/really cool that the guys in Bidwell still remembered me, when they saw me after the concert. I mean of course it was fun, they're really awesome and nice guys; but at the same time I wasn't sure how I should behave or whatever, seeing as I met them through getting in their show for free with You-Know-Who. But it went totally fine, and they gave me a t-shirt because I went ahead and bought their CD once they told me they needed gas money,. and had to push their van a bit of the way there (it's happened before, so I believed it, haha).
In one more thing that has nothing to do with books, we went to a Frida Kahlo art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. It was crowded with annoying people that made really stupid comments, but it wasn't too bad. We took the BART because my mommy hates driving and trying to park in San Francisco. Parts of our day shown below -
(We became fast friends with the smiling dudes. It was hard not to when they were so happy to see us.)
And we also found these little guys.
The End.
