Time spent reading:
6/29: 12:50pm-1:00pm; 1:40pm-2:00pm
6/30: 8:15am-8:40am; 10:00am-11:45am
Total time: 2hrs 40min
233 pages
Aladdin Books
Published in 1971
Lindi, my wife, picked up this book from a used book store a while back, which made me think, "Oh no. It's that book!" See, when I was younger, I had a terrible fear of the Rats from The Secret of NIMH; the movie was dark, scary, and had giant, yellow-eyed rats in it! Do you wonder why I was put off by the film as a six year old? What I remembered from the movie was the evil cat, the magical amulet, a back-stabbing rat, and the scary elder rat named Nicodemus; sadly, most of those things were not in the book. Yes there is a back-stabbing rat, an evil cat, and a rat named Nicodemus, but there's no magic involved! The rats are simply intelligent! I find that alone to be far more exciting than the movie itself.
Occasionally, when I haphazardly choose a book I am going to read, I stray away from the "winners". Typically, I could care less whether it was on Oprah's Book List. (Hello? Anna Karenina? I bet Tolstoy hated that...) Nor will I pick up books that everyone is reading. (I am sorry James Patterson.) So when a Newberry Award Winner from NIMH fell into my hands, I thought about it for a bit, then opted to dive in. How pleasantly surprised I was. It is not often that I find myself almost literally racing to finish the book so I can find out what happens! Yes yes yes, I saw the movie as a child, and I know Mrs. Frisby and her family find shelter, but the book led up to the culminating moment with a bit more intensity than the movie. There were no sing-song playing children; they were all subdued characters as opposed to frolicking, singing mice voiced by Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: TNG fame.
The enduring tale slowly builds mystery over the course of the entire book, not just 50 pages like many modern writers try to do. It also demonstrates the differing hierarchy of the animal world, and how they interact. Mice are on a different intelli-social stratus as rats, while crows bring completely different, but exceptionally useful, traits to the table, and owls are on an entirely different level. And what happens? They ALL work together for the benefit of their own society. Why don't we do this now? Ugh!
Some side notes of distinguishing interest about the film and the book:
-Mrs. Frisby's name had to be changed to Brisby due to the makes of Frisbee, Wham-O, getting all upset. Lame.
-NIMH is an actual place. It's the National Institute of Mental Health.
-In the book, the Rats were attempting to attain a self-autonomous farming society. They wanted to change the perspective towards rats.
-Hints of Charles Darwin appear in the book, stating that at one point rats were higher on the evolutionary scale.
For a book that I loved so much, I really don't have much more to say about it. Awkward. Regardless, while the movie The Secret of NIMH is a longtime classic, which I still love, put away the movie and go read the book. Like always, the book just tends to be better.
Blow Up & other stories by Julio Cortázar
Time spent reading:
7/1: 9:15am-9:55am
7/4 9:30am-10:10am
Total time: 1hr 20min
277 pages
Pantheon Modern Writers Books
Published in 1963; translated in 1985
I'm not one to put a book down partway through and give up. But I did on this one. I tell you this now so that by the end you don't get all upset at me. It's like people who went and saw Titanic and cried at the end because it was sad. Duh! The ship sank; obviously this wasn't going to be a happy ending. Regardless, I tried real hard to focus on these stories; I thought I could get through them all since they were simply stories, but Cortázar is a unique guy with a unique writing style.
I love Cortázar. The first time I read anything by him was in college, and it was in Spanish. Even better! He is quirky and exceptionally unique; he was an incredible writer, prolific and mind-twisting. He was one of the instigators of Magical Realism. I'm not going to go through some diatribe about it, so just look it up in Wikipedia; you will find names like Cortázar and Márquez. Cortázar uses Magical Realism almost like a crutch; almost every story has some bizarre everyday twist to it that most people hardly even notice.
How about I just list why I love Cortázar? I made a list earlier with the NIMH entry; might as well follow suit:
1) Magical Realism. The man writes a story about vomiting rabbits, and how there is a loose tiger in the house! Marvelous.
2) Cortázar takes the mundanity of everyday life and changes it oh so well.
3) Multiple narrators are a constant. Cortázar flows between 3rd person to 1st and constantly makes himself part of the story as an outside writer or as Cortázar himself.
4) The deliberate details placed in the stories are amazing. In this collection of short stories, Cortázar takes small hints of a gigantic past and phrases them in a sentence or two.
5) He is never constant; who cares about the past tense vs. present tense? Most writers would look at this with disdain, but not Cortázar! He galavants through it with high speed.
So why could I not finish the book? There were three things: 1) I think I expected too much. 2) This was a moderately poor collection of works. 3) I cannot stand translated literature. There were several short stories that I believed were excellent examples of Cortázar's work, and others not so much. And obviously I'm a snob. Not just a music or everything else snob, but also a translation snob. Some of the phrases are now outdated, while others seem to be direct translations from the text. As you should know, a direct translation hardly ever works. Don't believe me? Go copy some random Spanish text and go to freetranslation.com and see if it works. Hardly. Numerous times you need to translate the feel of the text rather than the wordage. I had read a couple of these before in Spanish, so when I reached a story like The Night Face Up, I automatically think La Noche Boca Arriba, and then hear the story in Spanish instead of English. While the English translation is good, it will never fully capture the amazingness of the Spanish. I will step down from my soapbox.
Here are the shining moments of the book (in list form!):
House Taken Over - A brother and sister couple discover there is more to their inherited house than themselves.
Continuity of Parks - This is so short, I dare not summarize. Google it.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris - Doesn't everyone vomit rabbits occasionally?
Bestiary - Which room is the tiger in today?
The Night Face Up - Don't ride motorcycles; you might get sacrificed.
Happy reading!
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