In Continuum.

Profound Confusion

I have read a hell lot of books in my lifetime.I mean,to some professor off a campus,or perhaps some sixty year old library who has worked in the same library for thirty years,and the only way to murder that boredom that comes along with the stamping of books at the counter is to read the mountains of books before you,the number of books that i have read is probably a little taller than an average man as to,say,Mt. Everest.I did a little counting of all the books that i have read last week,and it amounted to a little more than 200.That is,of course,including the childhood books that i read,as well as the more recent books that i bought myself,the ones that i keep in my room instead of my ex-room,gathering dust.

So after reading that many books,putting the older stuff aside,from the collection that i have in my room,there are the really brilliant books,there are the books that made me smile and laugh,there are the books that made me curse under my breath,either for it's excellence or boredom,or there are the books that were plain...bad.People say that books are the top reason to the shortening of life expectancy in the boredom of one's life.But that statistic wouldnt hold,if you put the context to a very badly written book.

I cant say that the books that i disliked were the ones condemned by the general public.Some are,sure.But there are the ones so well-written,i didnt like them.Take "Lawrence of Arabia" for example,the movie with Peter O'Toole and the bloody desert.Everybody loves it,and that movie probably appears on seven out of ten top 100 lists all over the internet.But i didnt like it,after watching it in my room,stealing the Dvd from my neighbour's house when they were out for a family vacation,which i carefully replaced to it's original position.I even took special notice of the movie before and after the movie.

Anyway,like the above mentioned movie,it's probably not because the movie was bad,but either because the era is drastically different,or the problem of not being able to understand the context of the book.In the movie,there was a scene with three minutes of the horizon of the desert,and the shadow of a rider just forming at the very end of it.That scene,for a full three minutes.I nearly killed myself watching it,really.

So,let's bring the focus back to books here.There are a couple of books on my shelves that i'd like to warn people about.They left be profoundly confused halfway through,and i have this bad habit of leaving the book unfinished if i find it not to my liking.I know,i hate to think that i have wasted money on a book,and furthermore pushing that guilt by not finishing it at all.But then again,i guess this all depends on the reading habits of everybody.For me,i guess,if i cannot tolerate this book i shouldnt go on reading it.It sort of cheapens the book,if you just drag yourself through the rest of the book without actually knowing what the author is trying to convey?That is especially true,to me,when the book is well-written,just not my cup of tea.You know,like the wrote weather or the wrong bag of tea leaf,whatever.Just the wrong flavour altogether,i guess.

Besides those,of course,there are the really atrocious ones,the ones that were just...bad.I still want my bloody money back Mr. Gao Xing Jian.I dont give a shit if you won the Nobel Prize for Literature or not.I still want my money back for your trash that i bought.

1)The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

I liked the short stories written by Annie Proulx.For those of you who might not know her all that well,she is the author behind Brokeback Mountain,which i liked by the way.I decided to pick up this other book by her a couple of months ago,hearing that it won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

So i started reading,and it is about this guy from the US,with two kids and a dead wife who was terrible to him when she was alive.He decided to move back to his homeland: Newfound Land,and then become a news reporter at a local paper.The paper,famous for it's fake car accident stories as well as shipwrecks,became even more famous when he took over and started reporting news related to ships coming in and out of ports.On his journey through the island,aside from taking care of his jids and job,he meets a woman and falls for her and stuff.

The book was good,but it dragged soo much that i wasnt even sure about the existence of a plot.I mean,sure i love books with the meaning of life being the ultimate goal of a quest.But this man's journey through the rocky beaches of Newfoundland pissed me off because it was just so...mundane.I couldnt get through the book,despite being about 3/4 through it.It was just...plain.I guess.Plain,what a word.

2)Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

I'm not going to blame Corinna for this,because the book did look interesting the moment i picked it up.I mean,come on.A girl recieves a note in her mailbox that says,"Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" sounded seamlessly cool.It was like some sort of thriller,the magnitude of Dan Brown's books,with a twist of Socrates and Plato.How brilliant!

But i was horribly wrong,after reading not even 1/4 of the book.It revolves around the letters written by this...strange middle age man and the girl called Sophie.She doesnt know who he is,just this weird old man who keeps writing to her regarding some philosophical questions.They interested her,and she didnt care if she didnt know this man at all.She continued to 'converse' with this man,and found out more about Socrates' and Plato's views on the world back in ancient Greece.

First of all,if i am the parents of Sophie i am going to freak out that she is exchanging letters with this middle aged man.Besides,Sophie is like...fifteen or something in the book.Im sure she can think for herself,and the fact that she was conversing with a man not because he is in any way charming,good looking,but because he asks weird philosophical questions...not realistic at all.This book is not even meant to be,in any way,fantastical in the first place.

The book is a translated book,which means that a lot of it depends on the translator.I think this edition of Sophie's World has the WORST translator ever.The lines by Sophie was just ridiculous.I mean,nobody SAYS things like that.She was very two-dimensional,just regurgitated everything she read in the letters to her mother.Her emotions were like,"This is so exciting!" or "This is so interesting!".The way the text was translated made Sophie sound like some autistic kid trapped in her brain with this middle aged man,speaking off Plato's philosphies,which by the way doesnt make any chicken sense whatsoever.

3)The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

I think i quoted from this book somewhere in this blog,and i think the common misconception would by that if i quote from a book,it has got to be good.Not really,actually.The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is the kind of book which i classify under the "Exquisite High Tea" category.However expensive this tea is,however royal it's gonna be,im always going to prefer a cup of coffee with a couple of friends in a lazy Sunday afternoon.Because really,this book was written in some of the most beautiful,brilliant way a book could ever possibly be written.

But,there is a problem.The book was self-centered.It revolves around,of course,an English Patient,recused from the wreckage of a burning plane at the end of the second World War,and placed in an emptied hospital in Florence,Italy,taken care by a nurse who falls in love with him despite his disfigured face and stuff through the book he brought along with him,and the stories he told of the burning desert and his adventures.

Sounds interesting,sure.The cover of the book was intriguing in a very melancholic way by itself.It had a picture of a naked woman,leaning against the sink just pondering over something,like the main female character as she looked into the mirror for the first time after years,finding a dead corpse before her.

Anyway,i didnt know just WHERE the book was heading.I found out about the woman behind the patient,some of his adventures,the 'guests' that visited the hospital.But the book just kept building around the same plot,telling the same stories over and over again,only from different perspective.Im making the book sound really interesting here,and i am not giving justice to just how...drastically different the taste of the readers who loved the book is from my own.Because in truth,i dont think the book is in my league.Not yet,anyway.For now the book remains an impenetratable book,though with beautifully written poems and songs.It's like a well-decorated iron wall,actually.You can never break through no matter how hard you try.Just admire,but dont try become part of it.

4)The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

One of the most atrocious books i have in my collection.I am ASHAMED that i bought this in the first place,because it sucked so very much.And i actually got further for this book than Sophie's World,can you believe it.I guess it was the boredom in camp at that time that drove me on in this long march of absolute dread.I dont know how i got through the pages,but i apparently did and i am still alive and kicking after all the trying.This book sort of,left this everlasting emotional scar because it represented the absolute horror,of what words can do to you.Utter disgust.

You'd think that what's written at the back of a book would be the basis of what the book would be all about.Say,if it tells you that a man is killed because he found out the secret about a book,you would think that this happens early in the book and that the plot is going to start building on from there.This is typical of a thriller,and the greatest of a thriller really depends on how unexpected the ending of the book is,how it differs so much from what the back of the book,the synopsis,actually tells you.

However,that is not the case for The Rule of Four.This atrocious book tells you the exact scenario i told you above,70% through the book!The person mentioned at the back,who is supposed to get killed for the secret,gets killed after 70% of the pages were flipped.Im not too sure if the writers were taking their time to kill of this character,but if i was there when they were typing the story out probably on their laptops,i wouldve smashed the computer to prevent any copies of that book ever flowing out to the general public.Hell,i might even encourage the public to read Hitler's Mein Kampf.

The book kept revolving around another book.This mysterious book that got people killed over the centuries because of...well,something.Some people praised that it has the shadow of The Da Vinci Code going on for it,but i must say that those people mustve been high on drugs when they typed those reviews.Because let's face it,this book was bad.Plain bad.I wouldnt even use it to start a fire in the middle of Antartica.I dont want any part of it to benefit me,not after it took about seventeen dollars out of my wallet.

5)Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xing Jian

This book is right up there with The Rule of Four.The only difference,is that this book is the compilation of various short stories written by Gao Xing Jian,and the fact that i got through about...1/4 of the book and stopped reading it entirely.

The short stories didnt make any fishing sense.Dickens wouldve been as confused as a chicken reading it,because it made no sense whatsoever.I tried to draw lessons,meanings,morales from some of the stories,but couldnt.Here's a little summary of what happened in one of the stories,and i am not even exaggerating on just how vague,how mundane that story was.

1.Guy takes a swim in the sea.
2.Guy has cram,and couldnt swim anymore.
3.Guy floats.
4.Guy floats back to shore,happy to be alive.
5.Guy sees two guys and a girl pushing their bicycles,down the beach.
6.Boys decided to take a swim,girl stops them.
7.They didnt care,jumped in anyway.
8.Girl revealed to have a bandaged leg.
9.The end.

I guess,that is enough said about how BAD the book was for me.

6)Possession by A.S. Byatt

This book,single-handedly,changed my opinion about following the Times Top 100 Novels of All-Time as my reading list.I guess,there are just some books that are not going to be easy to stomach,and this is it.I am probably not going to follow the list of books on that list very closely from now onwards,and just judge according to my instincts.

The premise of this book is rather interesting,with twio professors from two Universities,finding letters written between two poets who were having an affair.Sounds rather interesting,but the meaning of the story was lost amongst the proses and the poems,the songs and the...well,some of the stories the poets wrote for each other,about each other.Sure,i knew that they were madly in love with each other,but the letters they wrote to each other showed it in,perhaps the most subtle way ever.They talked about their recent works,their fascination with each others' work,the weather,and how they saw meanings in some...poem.

Now,im not entirely bad with poems.The funny thing about the poems in this book was the fact that they were made up with easy words,sure.But they didnt make any sense,at all.Besides those,the book is littered with big words,almost used on purpose to confuse poor readers like me,over-shadowing the emotions in the characters,making them almost flat like paper,Two-Dimensional and boring.I didnt care about the characters,not even the two love birds.I found myself skipping poems and songs,just getting through the pages until finally,i decided to give it up for The Catcher in the Rye.

Good call,on my part.I must say.