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But reading about her success left me wondering about my own. So I hopped over to my own blog and was horrified!!!
This blog was created for me by my friend Kate on April 13, 2010. Which means that as of next week, I will have had my own blog for exactly 6 months. SIX MONTHS!!! And do you know how many posts I’ve made in that time? DO YOU???
SIX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you don’t count this posting, and you don’t count the first one (don’t ask my why, but for the sake of argument just agree we are not counting the first post) you are left with only SIX posts!
And that is not all, do you want to know what is even more horrifying then only having written SIX posts in SIX months?
The fact that this blog is supposed to be a book blog and out of those SIX posts only ONE of them was actually about a book!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is just pathetic!
(however that one post, Abducted by Rapp posted Sept. 13 is one I am really proud of)
In order to remedy this monstrosity I have decided to issue myself a challenge.
I here by challenge myself to reach 50 posts by the time I reach my own year mark. But more then that, out of those 50 posts, 25 of them must be about books.
43 posts; 27 weeks; 25 books- that is the challenge.
So, to start things off let me write briefly about a book I just finished this past week.
Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
I was actually really excited about finishing this one. I used to be in an online book club with my friends Kate and Amanda. Amanda selected this book for our September read back in 2009. Even though it is only 275 pages long, it took me a year to finish. But, hey, bottom line is I finished.
It may seem surprising when I say that I actually liked this book. I know what you might be asking yourself; if you liked it so much why did it take you a year to finish?
Well, although I really enjoyed Robbins’ style of writing and in the end I did enjoy the ultimate story. He didn’t really make me care for the characters. I did not feel invested in them. It is hard to really become engulfed in a book when you can take or leave the people the story is about.
At times I found Robbins’ choices to be in poor taste. It felt to me like he had challenged himself to see how many different ways he could describe a woman’s…well… you know. So he continuously put his characters in positions were he would be given the chance to write about it using as many colorful descriptions as he could to describe every detail.
And yet, in the very next paragraph he would write these declarations about love and society and loyalty that were so poetic and poignant that I would be moved to underline and memorize them.
“CHOICE. A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature and society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.”
The story in Woodpecker is basically boiled down to two people in search for a simple answer to a complicated question.
How do you make love stay?
These two people contemplated life on other planets, symbolism in every day objects and a mysterious power that all red-heads seem to have, and came up with theories, that frankly went over my head.
But the thing I liked best about this book, is that in the end, Robbins himself answers the question. Through the novel’s main story, Robbins, our narrator, interrupts his story to go on rants of his own. Mostly about the typewriter he is using to write the novel. And at the end of the novel, in his own hand writing, Robbins delivers the over all thesis for his work.
“When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests that it isn’t love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last.”
So, then, how do you make the mystery last?
Well, the answer to that, I guess, would be in a different book.
Or maybe we have to answer it for ourselves.
Frankly I would be annoyed if every author finished their novels by delivering a closing argument. But, in Robbins’s case, it just seemed to work. And it was just different enough to make me appreciate it.
So there you have it! Now for the sake of not confusing ourselves I am going to go ahead and count my first post as a post for my challenge. Which means we are now at
42 posts; 27 weeks; 22 books- to go.
2 comments:
I remember you talking about that book. Loving someone is a choice. And it does need to have mystery in it, the always knowing you will never know everything about someone. But at the same time it needs to have acceptance and the sense that your partner knows you better than anyone else, maybe even better than you know yourself.
It's not the amount of reviews, it's the quality of the review, which you excel at. But I look forward to the next 22 reviews.
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