No, I'm not the world's slowest reader...

I literally haven't picked up my book in a week! I know I shouldn't be making excuses but I have been working A LOT this week plus I just started watching Dexter on Netflix and naturally I've made my way through 2 seasons in a matter of days. That show is good! I think I want to become a forensics investigator...

Unfortunately season 3 is not available on Watch Instantly which means I will have to wait until the DVDs come in the mail. On the upside I will have more time to read. Don Quixote is actually super funny so far - the guy really is a total idiot! It should be an entertaining read, as long as I get buckled down.

So I'm going to give myself a deadline. (Mind you this book is a BRICK.) I leave for Idaho with the BF's fam on July 2nd, which would be the perfect time to start my next book. And if I haven't finished it by then, then I'll consider myself no brighter than the Don himself. This gives me about 3 weeks...here's hoping!

Now I know what that infamous Mac ad was really all about!

I finished 1984 and wow, was that intense! Last post I said I was a bit freaked out and that feeling definitely didn't go away throughout the entire book.

For those of you who haven't read it, 1984 was written by George Orwell in 1949 as a sort of warning of what the world could look like in 1984. In a time when the fear of totalitarianism was strong, Orwell envisioned a future world where people are basically stripped of their ability to think and act freely, and society is ruled by the collective-thinking Party and "Big Brother." BB (I call him BB because I'm busy) is an all-knowing leader who is always watching, and come to think of it, reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, because no one ever actually sees him. In fact, no one knows if he actually exists, but the Party certainly believes and will make others believe that he exists. Either way, BB always knows what's up, and any person acting or thinking in a way considered unorthodox, is sure to be punished.

Our hero (would we call him a hero?), Winston Smith, is a party worker with the job of re-writing publications and changing recorded facts wherever the Party sees fit. If there is a news article written about a person receiving an award, and that person becomes a political heretic, the original article is destroyed or re-written to show the person in a negative light. Winston's job, in essence, is to revise the past. In Oceania, the setting of the story, history is changed whenever necessary. However, Winston is obsessed with the true past, the past he remembers. He does not understand how people could accept ideas that are not true so easily and willingly, and tries to keep himself sane by focusing on absolute truths. The party uses the word "doublethink" which is the ability to accept two different truths at one time. For example, one may know that two plus two equals four, but if the party says that two plus two equals five, one must also accept this as true. Winston finds this a difficult, if not impossible concept to grasp, which automatically makes him an outcast. He is completely against the Party and BB and does everything in his power to rebel against it. Unfortunately, in a society that is under constant surveillance, rebellion is not easy. Winston quietly acts out by having a secret apartment, engaging in a love affair with another party member, and eventually joining the Brotherhood, an organization against the Party. Anyway, I could go on forever, and since I don't believe in spoiling stories' endings, I won't give any more plot details.

I definitely enjoyed this book. The convincing world created in the story gave me chills and held my ordinarily wandering mind throughout the entire book. What intrigued me most were the metaphysical themes in the story. One of the antagonists (I won't give away his identity!) talks with Winston about about the meaning of reality and how the only thing that is really real is what we create in our minds. He explains that the past only exists in records, which can be altered or destroyed, and in minds, which can be manipulated. Therefore, the past does not exist, in the literal sense of the word. The only thing that exists is our current reality. The Party, who's motto, among others is "Ignorance is Strength," creates a reality for the citizens of Oceania to believe in, and by creating this reality, exerts absolute power over everything and everyone.

Since I tend to write like I think, spastically and nonsensically (are those actually words?), I should probably spare you any more confusion and shut up. I really enjoyed the book and that's all that matters. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes is next on my list, and judging by the size of it and the amount of footnotes on almost EVERY page, it might be awhile before my next post. Wish me luck!

2 books down, 51 to go!

So my internet has been down and I haven't had a chance to post until now, but I finally finished Alice and Through the Looking Glass. I actually really liked both of them! At first I was a tad overwhelmed with how fast crazy stuff started happening. But I quickly got over it and just accepted the book for what it was. Reading the books felt like being in a dream -- everything seemed to happen in segments, without any part really connecting or leading up to another. Characters would leave as quickly as they came, and Alice would accept this and move on to the next part of the dream. I guess Through the Looking Glass is loosely based on a game of chess but I've never played chess, so apart from acknowledging the knights on horses, the two different colored queens, and the fact that Alice is trying to move the different squares, I didn't really get this. Oh well.

The thing I liked most about these books is how everything in Wonderland and the Looking Glass is the way a child thinks things should be. Let me explain. Alice comes across peculiar things and they are explained in a way a child might imagine. For example, Alice is surprised when she meets flowers that can talk because she's never known flowers that talked. The Looking Glass flowers tell her that the flowers she knew in her world had very soft flower beds so they slept all the time, but their beds were more firm.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle teach Alice the Lobster-Quadrille and they sing a song about fish. The Mock Turtle then tells Alice no wise fish would ever go anywhere without a porpoise. Alice asks if he means "purpose" and he replies, "I mean what I say." Growing up as a child who actually probably wouldn't want to go anywhere without a porpoise (I love dolphins!), I found this particularly amusing. Overall, both books were surprisingly funny - I found myself quietly LOL'ing while reading on the plane back from Austin. The lady sitting next to me probably thought I was a big freak. Although she was kind of a nutcase herself. Whatever.

I watched the Disney cartoon after finishing the books (I hadn't seen it in a long time) and noticed that a lot of the parts were taken exactly from the books, but completely out of order. It didn't really matter, because like I said the book is segmented into a bunch of nonsense without any real rhyme or reason. The movie is silly and cute but I found Alice a little bit whiny. Book Alice is much more mature, easy-going and generally likeable. I definitely prefer the book. (This may be partly because I fell asleep drunk to the movie and woke up 7 hours later confused by the annoying DVD screen.)

The next book on my list is 1984 by George Orwell. I'm a few chapters in and, to be honest, a little freaked out. This book is a little dark for my taste, but I'm intrigued. More to come!

THE LIST

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

2. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

4. Emma, Jane Austen

5. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

6. Walden, Henry David Thoreau

7. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

8. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

10. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

12. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

13. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

14. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

15. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

16. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

17. Tess of the d’Urvervilles, Thomas Hardy

18. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

19. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

20. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

21. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

22. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

23. The Stranger, Albert Camus

24. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

25. Hamlet, William Shakespeare

26. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

27. The Federalist, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay

28. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

29. The Republic, Plato

30. The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer

31. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

32. The Divine Comedy, Dante Aligheri

33. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

34. Das Kapital, Karl Marx

35. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

36. Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather

37. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

38. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

39. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

40. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

41. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

42. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

43. Call of the Wild, Jack London

44. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

45. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

46. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

47. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

48. Rights of Man, Thomas Paine

49. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

50. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

51. Jurassic Park, Michael Chrichton

It's Official!

I have my list of 50 books to read! Well, technically I'm reading 53 books. My mom didn't consider Alice or Through the Looking Glass classics so those didn't make the list, but I'm still reading them! Also, my boyfriend insisted I add Michael Chrichton's Jurassic Park to my list. I guess we all have our own opinion on what should be deemed a classic.

So now I really have to get reading. I haven't made any more headway on Alice but I better get on it because my BFF Sarah (who is also reading it) and I have agreed to have both books finished by Wednesday so they can be discussed on our trip to Austin. This task will be especially hard because I just received free copies of both Vogue and Teen Vogue in today's mail and I still haven't finished the May issue of SELF! I guess it's time to set my priorities straight!

Caitlin in Wonderland

Recently, after patiently listening to me talking about drama with my friends and celebrity gossip, my boyfriend told me I never have anything intelligent to say anymore. The worst part is, I knew he was right. I graduated college last year and it's like since I've been out of school I've gotten a little stupider every day. A little less smart and a little more blonde. My sweet, caring, albeit harsh BBF (best boyfriend) suggested I get a hobby.

Until recently my list of hobbies included shopping, reading fashion magazines and lounging around watching TV while eating chips and salsa. Those who know me can vouch for this. But over the past few months I've been setting goals for myself. For example, I want to run a marathon in a few years. Right now I can only run about 2 miles straight but this is a vast improvement from the quarter mile I used to jog and then proceed to pass out in a panting, sweaty mess. So you can see I'm making progress. And when my boyfriend made me feel like a blithering idiot I decided I needed to make over not only my body, but also my mind.

So this is my new hobby. It's more of a challenge really. I am far from being well-read so I'm having my literary-buff mom compile a list of 50 classics that I should read. You know, those books that everyone is supposed to have read. As part of my assignment, I will blog about each novel, a nod back to all the book reports I wrote in high school. (Except this time around, I will actually read the books, not just the back covers.) I may not understand every book I read, and I'm sure it will take me years to get through the list, but I'm going to make it make it my business to complete this difficult task.

Number one on my lengthy list is Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I just saw the Tim Burton movie and since you can't walk through Barnes and Noble without running into a gazillion versions of the book, I thought it was a good one to start with. Well, I also thought it was an easy one to start with. I wish I had a better reason for choosing this novel to begin my challenge. I've been trying to think of an insightful way to compare my coping with post-grad syndrome to Alice being confused and lost in Wonderland but I couldn't - sorry!

My copy of the Alice also includes Through the Looking-Glass so it looks like I'll be knocking out two books pretty quickly. Hopefully, after doing some reading, I'll have something smarter to say in my next post. I'm currently on page 55 of the book and not really loving it...more to come!