The Sun! It's so simple...

I can't say that I've ever noticed how the short days of the winter months affect my mood as much as this year.  At least three days a week I take the train(s) to work, which means that I leave the house at 6:30 am and get home close to 6:00 pm.  In the winter, this means I leave when it's dark and I get home when it's dark.  The shortest days of the year this winter seemed to last forever, and this week was especially dragging, what with the four or five days of consistent gray overcast that blocked out the sun and the fact that I spend most of my days at work in windowless rooms.  I will admit, I hadn't felt like I really got over that virus I had after the new year fully until I walked out of the house this morning and saw that the sky was not it's usual, Chicago street light orange color, but the light blue of the first light of dawn.  Very poetic, sorry for the nausea I just caused you...  Anyway, I feel like a million bucks and I can't help but thinking that it's that morning sun.  It could be that it's Friday and we have Buick practice tomorrow, and the kids have been pretty well behaved this week, etc. as well, but that sun this morning really energized me.  Enough to post about it anyway!

R-E-A-D-A-B-O-O-K

I'd like to make it clear that I have no intention of critiquing any works of literature on this blog, as I am woefully unqualified to do so, but I figured I'd write about a book I just read.  It's a rather rare occurrence that I finish a book so I suppose it's worth marking the occasion with a few words.

I've been lucky enough to stumble upon a couple of really good reads in a bookstore in Oak Park called The Book Table while buying Ayn Rand books as gifts for people (and myself).  Anyway, the first of the pair I stumbled upon was Miracle In The Andes by Nando Parrado who was one of the survivors of the plane crash in the 1970s that left a group of Uruguayan rugby players marooned high in the Andes for 72 days.  The story is incredible to say the least.  It was made into a movie starring Ethan Hawke that was based on the book Alive.  I have not read that particular version of the story, and I'm sure that there are some discrepancies between that account and the one I read by Parrado.  Either way, it is an extremely personal, moving, and intense account of what happens at the extremes of human experience.  It certainly filled the void in my need for adventure left by finishing Chasing Che, another incredible book that has inspired in me an interest in Latin America, both geographically and socially.  I digress.  I recall feeling the full range of human emotion reading Miracle in the Andes, something I can't say I expected from any story.    Reading a story like this makes me think if I have what it takes to survive something like these men did and make it clear that I hope to never have to find out.

After plowing through Miracle in the Andes, I went back to the Book Table one day mainly out of boredom, and to replace my copy of The Fountainhead, which I gave away.  I walked around and felt lost.  I felt like what I expect a lot of people feel coming into a wine store for the first time: completely lost.  I didn't know what I wanted to read, I wasn't sure which section to look in.  I didn't want to just pick a pretty cover.  So I wandered around aimlessly looking for something to strike my eye.  After grazing around the fiction section, I came across Cormac McCarthy's area in the fiction section.  I'm not sure where I heard his name before, other than my cousin Jonny's middle name, but I picked up The Road and read the teaser on the back.  It sounded good, adventure, danger, very personal, fiction.

The book is written in a very strange perspective, sort of a little third/first/first or something.  Hard to explain, but it took a little getting used to.  It's a post apocalyptic world where a father and son are traveling, more or less aimlessly, and just trying to survive.  They scavenge and run, fight and evade.  It reminded me of a zombie story except no real zombies, just cannibals.  It was a fast read once I got used to McCarthy's writing style, but what really struck me was that, in spite of the very stripped down language (lots of abstract description and dialogue without explicit cues to who is speaking - "he said") I felt like I got to know the characters very well by the end of the book based only on their actions and words.  I think it actually felt more real that way, like I was experiencing them for myself.  I think that, if someone else were to read this book they might have a very different opinion of who the characters are.

Well, there you have it, some books I've read recently, yay I read stuff!