If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

...because I am lazy. I'll come back and write more later.

1. Reading Lolita in Tehran
2. Memoirs of a Geisha
3. Jurassic Park
4. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
5. Petrostate
6. Welcome to the Monkey House
7. Palm Sunday
8. Hocus Pocus
9. The Stranger
10. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
11. Failed States
12. Girl With a Pearl Earring
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day
14. When You Are Engulfed in Flames
15. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
16. A Man Without a Country
17. Bluebeard
18. Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives
19. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
20. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
21. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
22. Diplomacy
23. Fall
24. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
25. The Post-American World
26. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
27. Life of Pi
28. Longitudes and Attitudes
29. Mister Skylight

Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton

Reading: 6

This is one of those cases where everyone's seen the movie but few people have taken the time to read the source material.  At one point I'd been a huge Crichton fanatic, and so I decided to see if that fascination still held.

To some extent, it does.  Crichton does something few other science fiction writers accomplish successfully: he blends current scientific thought effortlessly with imagination, which by the last page rarely seems so imaginative.  Above all other things, Crichton is a fortune teller; he takes the information presented to him and predicts where it could take us in ten years.  Sometimes, his views are extreme.  More often than not, they contain a startling amount of truth.

Everyone knows the plotline of Jurassic Park (and if you don't, you can IMDB it and verb nouns like me), so I won't waste time explaining it here.  I will say that in his analysis of what's on science's plate these days, he remains spot on.  His visions may be scary, but perhaps that's why he writes.  However, added experience with truly great works of fiction which I didn't possess when I began reading Crichton years ago enlightened me to the fact that, though Crichton would make a good lecturer, he would make a poor poet.  At times, the book's language is juvenile almost to the point of making me bang my head against the wall.  The characters, while at times completely believable, are often lacking key developmental characteristics.  (And yes, that is what she said.) 

Overall, Jurassic Park is an enjoyable ride and a nice insight into biogenetic research, but it's certainly not Shakespeare.  Theories may be elegant ,but only insofar as the words in which they are explained retain a nice ring.

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden

Rating: 8

Small print intimidates me.  This is silly, and I know it.  The size of the text has nothing to do with the worth of the book.  Still, when I started reading Memoirs of a Geisha, I didn't expect to still be reading it three hours later, small print and all.  A book which can make me overcome my ridiculous conventions is a lovely read indeed. 

Memoirs of a Geisha takes traditional Western views of geisha and destroys them, instead illustrating an age-old Japanese tradition that is both beautiful and tragic, admirable and despicable.  Told through the eyes of the geisha Sayuri, the story transports us into a time not so far from our own yet still somehow remarkably foreign.  The pun is completely intended.

The language of the story is flowing, like the brush of watercolors across a smooth canvas, and it carries you on a thrilling ride.  I love books that simultaneously destroy my preconceived, usually uninformed notions and leave me placid and content.  There is a sense of calm to be gained from understanding, and this book did it for me. 

Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi

Rating: 7

I got this book from a friend who insisted that I read it immediately because it would completely change my worldview.  Always up for a good read and having heard complimentary things from other reliable sources (namely, The New York Times Book Review), I decided to give it a shot.

It is also worth mentioning at this point that I am an extremely impatient person.  It took me about two weeks to get through the first 70 pages, which is riduculously slow for me.  Over the years, I have learned that many excellent books have sluggish beginnings (A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind), so I plowed onward.  That didn't mean I enjoyed the first 70 pages, though. 

Reading Lolita in Tehran is the story of Azar Nafisi, an English literature professor teaching in Iran during the time of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.  The narrative is centered around four primary authors: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Austen.  While you don't actually need to read anything by those authors in order to understand what Nafisi is talking about, it is greatly helpful in catching references.  For example, I am well-read in Fitzgerald and Austen but not at all in Nabokov and James, and so I found the former parts much more enjoyable.

Once Nafisi finishes outlining the premise of the book, the story picks up with the historical context that I love.  The best part about this book is how it's illustrative of historical events through a very colorful, sometimes bordering on fictional, eye.  Not that facts are ever falsified, but the book at times reads like the novels it discusses so fervently.

The point of book is, as the review on the front cover states, to illustrate "the transformative power of fiction".  This is accomplished obliquely, and much is left to infer.  I liked this especially.  Through Nafisi's eyes, we see the need for a retreat into a not-quite-parallel world; fiction, after all, is not meant to explain reality but to provide insight.  And, interestingly enough, the book does the same thing: we experience the Revolution not as an observer but someone caught in the crossfire, like Nafisi and her students.  Thus the book's true worth lies in its capacity as a painting rather than a brief.  Those who attempt to read it as the latter will find themselves sorely disappointed; those who open themselves up to the beauty of Nafisi's imagery in the midst of conflict and turmoil will find a refreshing look at the human experience.

I stole this idea from Sam. 

Lately, I've found that I haven't found taken the time to read.  Yes, I read the news, and yes, I read my physics textbook, but I've let my old love of concrete books sort of fall behind the priorities other tasks like scholarships and studying and perusing FMLs. 

Thus, I resolve to read 100 books between March 29th, 2009 (today) and March 29th, 2010.  Rules:
1. In order for it to count, I have to actually finish the book.  Reading the first half and the last page is distinctly cheating at this exercise.
2. Children's books do not count.
3. Plays do.
4. So do volumes of poetry, provided I read every poem.
4. Through the Looking Glass is not a children's book.
5. Graphic novels only count if I read the entire series (or as much of the series as has been written by March 29th). 

Ideas so far:
-Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
-Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
-The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
-Drood by Dan Simmons
-All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
-Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen by J.K. Rowling (German translation, obviously)
-The Complete Works of Johnathon Swift
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
-every book by Michael Crichton that I have yet to read (17 at last count)
-every book/short story compilation by Kurt Vonnegut that I have yet to read (that's about 10, I think)
-Burning Shadows by Chris Evans (as soon as it comes out this summer)
-The Stranger by Albert Camus
-Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
-Eating Fire by Margaret Atwood
-Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

Suggestions?  I'll take 'em.