Books I've Read in the Past Two Weeks

When I was a child we used to be able to get these sheets from the library with numbers and a blank space after the number, where you would fill out the books you read over the summer. My mom would bribe us to read by giving me and my siblings a cent per page we read, and rounding to the nearest twenty five cents. So, if I read a 25 page book, I got a quarter. At the end of the summer when we would go to the state fair to eat cheese curds, ride the ferris wheel and go buy crappy plastic toys she would total up the amount and usually give us about 10 dollars to spend. Which we would inevitably vomit 5 dollars worth of cotton candy after riding the spinning octopus ride five times.

I recently found one of these sheets in a box of old papers when I moved and I laughed at the thought of "reading" 1,000 pages when I generally picked books where most of the page was the illustration. Hence, I am going to be an illustrator.

But it worked mom, your evil scheme of teaching us the habit of reading prevailed and so in the last two weeks I have read a ton. Here are the books I've read:

Charles BukowskiFactotum:Hank Chinaski goes from job to job, drinks, gambles, gets fired, has intimate encounters with large women. Pretty standard Bukowski.

Chuck PalahniukSnuff: Woman plans to die in recordbreaking gangbang in order to leave the videofunds to her next of kin. Pretty funny, but not his best. Littered with trivia as is typical of Palahniuk.

Haunted: Writers trapped in a mansion telling each other horror stories of their lives. Which basically seems like Palahniuk tried to come up with the best ways to make someone gag while reading, and then succeeded. The last story about Adam and Eve is really good.

David Sedaris
Me Talk Pretty One Day: Collection of essays written in the funny and biting wit of Sedaris. He's kind of a dick, and it comes off hilarious most of the time, other times it completely missed the mark for me.
Holidays on Ice: Funny collection of holiday themed stories. The one about working as a Macy's elf tops the list for me.

Deepak Choppra
The Third Jesus: I grabbed this one because it seemed interesting, and it turned out to drag and be really pretty boring. The author is very good at repeating the same thing with slightly different wording for a span of 15 pages at a time. (It was about the real Jesus... ooooh).

Aldus Huxley
Brave New World: Read this one in high school, reading it again. I like it a lot, although the writing isn't as great as I remember, Huxley sets the scene really well. Also one of my favorite last paragraphs in a book ever.

Tom Davis
39 Years of Short Term Memory Loss: It was billed as "The early years of SNL from someone who was there." It was in fact, a terrible memoir, which was written really poorly and just gave me a glimpse into the party life of Tom Davis, which was, to be honest, not very interesting. Struggled to finish it.

Dagoberto GilbGritos: A collection of stories and essays by Dagoberto Gilb, it was given to me by my friend Lizzy, so I didn't really know what it was about. It was good, it made me think, and I didn't fall in love with the author either. I both like and hated him at times, which I believe makes for a very good read. Recommended.

I feel as though I'm missing a few books. I read two cookbooks, I read an encylcopedia of vegetables, and also a book titled "20 things you don't know about everything". But these I don't really consider to be accomplishments more than just fodder for trivia.

Currently I am reading Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," and also his Border trilogy. I was recommended his "Blood Meridian" by my friend Jessica, but I haven't been able to find it at either of the Providence libraries. If any body has any good recommendations lay them on me, because I've got a lot of reading time (obviously).

Anyway, in the words of RUN-DMC on Reading Rainbow: "Reading is a very fresh way to learn!"