Books read in 2008

A Widow for One Year--John Irving
The Fountainhead--Ayn Rand
The Delivery Man--Joe McGinniss
Factotum--Charles Bukowski
Divisadero--Michael Ondaatje
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Saving Fish from Drowning--Amy Tan
A Planet Called Treason--Orson Scott Card
The Rum Dairy--Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--Hunter S. Thompson
Beautiful Losers--Leonard Cohen
Mayflower--Nathaniel Philbrook
Screamfree Parenting--Hal Runkel
Hypnobirthing--Marie Mongan
Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn--Nancy Simkin
The Colony--John Tayman
Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling--Richard Bushman
The Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess

Books read in 2007

In no particular order, these are the books I completed in the year 2007.

Master and Margarita--Mikhail Bulgakov
An Unfinished Life--Mark Spragg
The Mission Song--John Le Carre
The Last of Her Kind--Sigrid Nunez
Doctor Zhivago--Boris Pasternak
Little Children--Tom Perrotta
Lolita--Vladimir Nabokov
The Road--Cormac McCarthy
Corelli's Mandolin--Louis De Bernieres
Voyage to Arcturus--David Lindsay
Snakes and Earrings--Hitomi Kanehara
Jacob's Room--Virgnia Woolf
the Hours--Michael Cunningham
Salome--Oscar Wilde
Ender's Game--Orson Scott Card
Garden of Eden--Ernest Hemingway
Atonement--Ian McEwan
Flashforward--Robert James Sawyer
The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God--Etgar Keret
Tropic of Cancer--Henry Miller
Black Sun--Edward Abbey
men are from mars, women are from venus--John Gray
Miracle of the Andes--Nando Parrado w/ Vince Rause
Devil in the White City--Erik Larson
The Girls Who Went Away--Ann Fessler
You're a stepparent…now what?--Joseph Cerquone
Collapse--Jared Diamond
Lone Survivor--Marcus Luttrell
Between a Rock and a Hard Place--Aron Ralston
Rasputin, the saint who sinned--Brian Moynahan
Bad Childhood, Good Life--Dr. Laura Schlessinger

"Follow me, reader!"

I just finished reading "The Master and Margarita." A Russian novel by Bulgakov, written during Stalin's rule in the 1930's--when anti-religious propaganda was everywhere. I love a lot of classic Russian literature because the character development is amazing and I also like the religious elements and themes that are often present in the novels. I have to share the idea of this book because I think it's incredible, though I won't reveal too many details lest anyone reading this may ever want to check it out.

Bulgakov's story is about a stranger who comes to Moscow. He poses as a magician at first, but it quickly becomes clear that he is the devil. His role however, is to prove the existence of God. Just before the stranger's arrival, a writer had submitted his novel about Pontius Pilate for publication, only to have it rejected everywhere because the country was primarily atheist at the time and the subject was too controversial. [We get to read the story of Pontius Pilate as its written in his novel.] Following its rejection, the writer becomes very disturbed and committs himself into a mental institute. The writer's lover worships his work and when he burns it she saves a piece from the fire. This scrap becomes instrumental to the story. She doesn't know where he's gone and ends up making a bargain with the devil (unknowingly) to be reunited with her lover, the writer. Then, the story goes back to that of Pontius Pilate. The fate of the writer and his lover is intertwined with that of Pontius Pilate. The writer is only able to finish his novel once it is decided.

I was really blown away by the book. I wish I understood better how much the politics of the times affected the events and perspectives of the characters. Regardless, it's a novel I could reread and never quite grasp, yet enjoy every moment and discuss for countless nights.

paperbacks and peaks

the HB prefers hardcover books because they last longer and still look nice. He would love to have shelves full of collections of hardback books someday. I prefer paperback books because you can bend them. And when you're done reading them they look used, but they also look loved. I like that things break down and decay. I like it when things get overgrown by other things. I like that species become extinct--not when sped by human action, but when it naturally occurs--and when new species or existing ones' population grows to fill the gap, thus altering the ecosystem again to create other extinctions and flourishes (I just finished reading “Cod” and the fictional “children of men”—both great stories of population growth and decline).

What's cool is that the HB and I both love old buildings. He's into history and I think the decay is plain romantic. This weekend we backpacked up to Emerald Lake with April and Bill and then summitted Mount Timpanogos. There’s an old shelter by the lake that’s been vandalized. I don’t think it gets used much now but I wish I could see it when it was thriving. When Tyler and I went to San Francisco in July we got to explore the ruins of an old bath house by the coast and then compare it to the poster picture of what it must have looked like. That was awesome.

Tyler is the shiz. He hiked up by himself to meet us at the lake Saturday night after his football team’s scrimmage. It was dark by then and a long hard hike with a pack, especially on a trail he’d never been on before. I was so worried about him and probably drove him crazy by continuously calling him on his way up. Then I hiked down a ways to meet him and show him our campsite. Bill built some chairs out of rocks and our site looked really awesome. In the morning I couldn’t wait to show Tyler the area and to get up to the top with him. It was cool to hike to the peak together and then all the way back down even though I thought the last mile or two was going to kill me. When we got down we both grabbed a 32-ouncer at the gas station, for me, a vanilla Diet Coke, woohoo!

Moby Dick

A few years ago I had a friend who started to read Moby Dick while he was staying or living by the beach. When he came back to Utah, he could never bring himself to read it again despite trying. I thought that was cool because for him it was being by the water that made reading the book meaningful. It wasn't about finishing the book.

I was sort of envious of his ability to really live in the moment. I like to think that I live that way too, but in the case of reading I'm the type of person that when only assigned certain chapters of a textbook for class feels so guilty for skipping the others that I usually try to read them too.

Then the other day I was telling the HB about the book Elizabeth. About how Queen Elizabeth's cousin Mary kept trying to kill her and Elizabeth would put her in prison and then eventually let her out and Mary kept trying to kill her. He asked if Elizabeth ever ended up deciding to kill her cousin or not and I couldn't even remember! The book was great, but isn't it weird that I couldn't even remember the resolution to the predominant conflict of the book? I felt proud of myself for not needing to remember how it all worked out in the end, but just that it did.