Quick Breakdown

I've read six books since I last posted.  So, I figured now was as good a time as any to give a quick comment on each book since my last breakdown (you know, the one where I complained about having chosen a bad batch of books).

I've covered the first 10, so here are my thoughts on the last six:

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner:  This book can be disturbing (profoundly disturbing), but the more I read it I began to laugh.  The Southern drawls, the complete dysfunction and the utter ridiculousness of characters really mark this book.

The book picks up as a family prepares for the death of the matriarch.  She quickly dies as expected and then this mixed-up and developmentally-challenged family sets out on an adventure to bury her as promised in another city.  Although the story starts out very dark, the sheer nuttiness of the characters turns it into a macabre comedy.

By the end, I found myself laughing as they tried to fix a broken leg with cement.  In a related note, the South always votes red.  Never forget this.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson:  A personal memoir through the 1950s, complete with some hilarious personal stories.  What I enjoyed was the author's hindsight about developments in our nation during it's "heyday."

For example, when discussing the invention of television, he stated:  "Then some other innovative genius produced special folding trays that you could eat from while watching television, and that was the last time any child - indeed, any male human being - sat at a dining-room table voluntarily."

Once he called Fig Newtons the "only truly dreadful cookie ever made," I immediately knew I was reading the memoir I would have written had I grown up in the 1950s.

Don't Put Me In Coach, by Mark Titus:  A funny read by a four-year bench warmer for the Ohio State college basketball team.  It's a fun read about pranks, basketball and snark.  It was fun, but I'll never look at Greg Oden the same way again now that he was victimized by Mr. Titus' ruse (I just can't bring myself to describe what Titus got him to do on this blog).  Just a fun read.

The Gambler, by Fyodore Dostoevsky:   I have been meaning to read this for years.  Just a great read.  It's about a person with a gambling problem, but it has some twists that make it so much more complicated than that.  It was everything you would expect by an author who cannot be matched for the creation of deep characters.  Dostoevsky plumbs the depths of the human mind to show not only how a mind functions when victimized by addiction, but also illustrates the rationalization, superstition and the vulnerabilities of each person to temptation.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes:  What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you actually witnessed.  That's the premise of this book.  And it's very, very, very well done.  If you have read one thing I've written, you would have to be daft to not know I love books that dabble with paradigm shifts or, better yet, slow paradigm reveals.  This is one of those books.  Different characters have different takes on memory, but one I liked said "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

There is something just wonderfully human about watching a person's own past change from a simple set of facts in his mind into something completely different with the addition of differently-corroborated impressions and documentation.  The slightest thing changes the entire story. And (SPOILER ALERT), I just love that it was all over something pretty small, really.  It seems like this new paradigm (in the minds of some) should cause the main character to feel guilty, but really it just informs him on a set of coincidences that are merely interesting.  (Think about if for a sec... kinda weird, no?).

The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller.  I'm always interested in reasoning and logic books.  I was told this one tackles the logic behind religion, which has always been of interest for me.  The book is very well done and effectively places "both" sides of the debate into the same logical position.  The book does a better job of showing that neither side can claim logic than it does anything else, but it is very well reasoned and quite convincing. 

Whether you care about the religious debate or not, anyone who is genuinely curious about the even-handed application of logic would probably find this book interesting and well reasoned.

Ok, so someone had to write again this month.  There you go.