Archive for December, 2008

A Peek At My Book Problem

So, I’ve started to accept that I have a book problem. What better place to document this than my own book log? I thought that I’d begin to explain this with some pictures. I recently have decided to move ALL of my books into one place instead of having them scattered between my mom and my dad’s (and sometimes my friends…) A good 5 to 10 percent of the books I own I brought with me to college, so they’re not here right now. I have about a quarter of all the books I own in my room right now. I have a metric fucktonne still in the basement which are going to have to be moved up here eventually. First, I’d like to somehow magically come across enough money to buy more bookcases, because after these photos, you’ll see I clearly do not have enough room even marginally for all the books I own. Even 25 percent of them resemble something of a safety hazard.

So, on with the pictures?

The first layer. Here is the top of the bookcase and the first shelf.

Still the first layer, the second and bottom shelves of the bookcase.

Here is an overview with the first quarter of my books piled onto one little bookcase.

Here is the top.

Here is the first and second shelves.

Here is the second and third.

What in the world am I going to do?

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky

ISBN: 0671027344
224 pages
published in 1999.
You can buy this book at this link.

I apologize for how incoherent this might sound. It’s 4:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep. The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is about a freshman in highschool and his experiences growing up, basically. It’s been compared to The Catcher in the Rye (although I don’t think it deserves that). Although it is a coming-of-age novel. Charlie, the main character, basically just meets a lot of people, falls in love, etc. All of this is articulated in letters he writes to an ‘unknown person’. He eventually comes to grips with some forgotten about experiences that have made his relationships with people difficult his entire life.

I’m really sorry about this, but I just wasn’t as impressed as I apparently was supposed to be. I worry that people will think that I’m saying that to sound unique or something, but I really mean it. First of all, the way Charlie wrote, although he was supposed to be fifteen/sixteen, came across as more of eleven or twelve. He just seemed too ignorant, too basic, and the thing that bothered me most of all – he was supposed to be enrolled in advanced english courses and his vocabulary and inexact manner of speaking was way, way too basic to ever be adequate in a rigorous english course. The author tried really hard to make him seem really complicated and deep, but he just came across as really dense. I liked some of the other characters in the book, and they seemed a lot more three-dimensional than Charlie did, and that is the reason for the rating that I DID give the book. Other than that, though, nothing special here.

Diane Goode’s Book of Scary Stories & Songs

ISBN: 0140564322
64 pages
published in 1994.
You can buy this book at this link.

Another nostalgia read while digging around through my stacks. My sister picked this book up for me at a supermarket the year that she went away to live in Arizona for a while. It was kind of a ‘going away’ present. She didn’t wind up staying in Arizona long, but I’ve had this book forever. I was just crazy about it.

Diane Goode’s Book of Scary Stories & Songs has a fairly wide array of simply told scary story essentials written for young children. The illustrations are very good and the stories, while at times gruesome, are told light-heartedly and with humor. The result is a scary story without being too scary, considering the suggested age group for this book is ages 4 to 8.

It’s not as good as I remember it being (when are they ever?) but I loved the inclusion of scary poetry and songs (complete with the sheet music included!). I would love to read these stories to my little niece at some point. She’s right around the perfect age for it now. It’s definitely a book I am going to keep around for any little kids that may enter my life at one point. It’s a keeper.

Night of the Pet Zombies by A.G. Cascone

ISBN: 0816743975
128 pages
published in 1997.
You can buy this book at this link.

I know this seems kind of odd to put up, but I was organizing some of my books tonight and came across a lot of old books from my childhood. I remember my mom letting me take this book home from a book sale when I was in elementary school. I was just in love with scary things back then (I still am, to be fair) and I was CRAZY about this title. It’s number #16 in the series “Deadtime Stories” but each book stands alone and are completely unrelated.

In Night of the Pet Zombies two young boys are faced with the dilemma of failing science class after they let their experiment, growing three healthy plants, fail. After seeing a commercial on TV advertising a product that makes dead plants come back to life, they run down to a creepy old store and purchase the product from an even creepier old man. As you can guess from the title, Miracle Grow brings more than plants back to life.

It’s very clever. There are a lot of eye-roll moments and the characters are just as one-dimensional as you would expect them to be, but there are a lot of great moments and references in the book (the one boy’s sister had a pet bird named ‘Hitch’ after Alfred Hitchcock – so cute). I’m probably also just influenced from loving this book as a kid, so my opinion of it isn’t really fair. It’s great for kids that love a good scare, though, and there are certainly some gross out moments. At one point, one of the boys mentions how the Miracle Grow looks exactly like chopped up body parts. Eech!

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

ISBN: 0375842209
576 pages
published in 2005.
You can buy this book at this link.

This was the most devastatingly beautiful book I have ever read. I mean it. I’ve certainly read better books, maybe, but not one so horrifically sad and gorgeous at the same time. The Book Thief is a story about a little girl who is taken in by foster parents in Germany during World War II. The story itself is narrated by a personification of Death. The little girl, Liesel, begins her love affair with books after finding one in a cemetery after her brother, who has died, is buried. Later on, her foster father teaches her to read and from then on she steals books whenever she can. She eventually uses words to find out how much she has in common with a Jew her foster parents keep hidden in their basement.

The writing is unique and engaging. It’s a long book but it’s one of those books that are impossible to put down, to use a cliche. Death spares no one’s feelings in his descriptions, yet you come to develop a relationship and understanding of the narrator in the same way that you begin to love and care for the characters he describes. On each page is a sentence or a word or a description that you second guess and wonder at. How many meanings are there? What message is being hidden? It’s so interesting to discover.

The book itself was utterly perfect. I couldn’t imagine any improvement on it. How good must a writer be in order to make you forget that what you are holding in your hands is not actually written by Death? This is a story that is literally impossible to forget. Furthermore, you’ll never wish to. It’s worth reading and even then still worth owning to come back to later on in life and share with people that you love. Honestly, buy it, read it.

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