Last week’s book was The Catcher in the Rye which I finished this weekend during my trip through Iowa and Nebraska to cache in Des Moines and Omaha.

I mentioned before that while I could see how The Catcher in the Rye was a book that ended up on so many “banned books lists”, I couldn’t really understand why it was popular I read through the entire book thinking that it was nothing more than an attempt at vulgarity and had little worth outside of the historical perspective that it was so different than anything that was published at the time. The prominent parts at the end that repeated “fuck you” seemed there solely to say “fuck you” rather than some sort of emphasis or important statement. To me, the entire book is quite pointless and shouldn’t be read by anyone in this day and age.

I dug through the books we have looking for something to do for this week so that I could take it on the trip with me. I knew we’d be doing quite a bit of driving w/o interruption on the way home so I figured I’d be at least able to put a good dent in the book during the front end of the week. I wanted something that was easy to read and moved along quickly. Going through the books that Kim picked up at the used bookstore fairly recently, I came up with Interview with the Vampire. I, like many others, have already seen the movie (actually, I saw it in a packed theater on opening night and the only reason I remember that was because it was the first movie I was carded for and some random woman claimed she was our chaperone due to her disdain for the “stupidity” of carding people for an R-rated movie) and figured that I’d be able to move along with that knowledge without too much of a problem.

The book moves along just fine and the writing is quite visual for me which makes it an easier read. The only problem I have with it is the lack of chapter breaks or any real break in the text at all. The first “chapter” is on page 35 and the next is on page 95. That’s a lot of reading to do for me as I don’t like to break mid-page. When I do break mid-page and restart later, I find myself having to read back a page or so in order to restart my frame of thought. Oh well.

Thanks to Andy, and the Century College Common Book Project, I’ve already received next week’s book selection which happens to be one of the books that was under consideration for next year’s “Common Book”, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah which describes his journey from child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war to the years following his rescue by UNICEF. While the back cover quotes Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll as saying that it’s a, “beautifully written book,” from what I understand it’s one that some English professors refuse to use during their lessons because of the Beah’s obvious limited English writing skill.

We’ll see how A Long Way Gone works out after I finish up Interview with the Vampire.

Related posts:

1. The Wheels on the Bus
2. Goal for 2008: Read a Book a Week (average)
3. Now Reading: State of Fear While Running with Scissors
4. I See Me - Children’s Books
5. Movies and Books