robert's book club

every now and then i stumble across a book, a work of fiction usually, that changes the way i look at the world. while i'm reading it, after i'm done reading it, i realize that my slant on things has changed a little bit. it's as if i tilt my head just to the left and things are elongated. these books have little bits of truth about life, things that i'd never really thought about or been able to put into words before, right there on paper. one of these books is tuesdays with morrie.

totally. kidding.

it's michael cunningham's the hours. now, to those of you who have only seen the movie and will therefore tell me that

1. it wasn't about anything
2. it was boring
3. you didn't get why these women were so depressed all the time, or
   
4. you didn't see what all the fuss was about

i say read the book. if for no other reason, read the book for clarissa's scene in which, remembering her life's favorite moment, when a man she was in love with came up behind her on a back porch on a cold morning at the end of summer and put his arms around her, she says "i thought that was the beginning of happiness. what i didn't realize is that it was happiness."

do i have to spell out the lesson here? yeah. life-changing.

another must-read is the book i've just finished, one that i've talked about here before: middlesex. for some reason i saw this book laying around my apartment for a while and thought that it was some boring 19th-century romance novel. i couldn't know that so much of it would wake up my brain in so many different ways. that the author could fill it with bits of the human experience that we're often too embarrassed of to admit even to ourselves. that, less than a month after i'd been thinking to myself about the finality of life and the soul and the brain, the author would articulate the same thing: that the brain is just an organ like any other, the soul a manifestation of it, and when the brain fails...

but enough. in the hunt for my next great read, i picked up the heart is a lonely hunter. i'm afraid that, even though i'm trying to apply all of my high school AP english reading methods (ah, yes. symbolism. what do these overalls on this dusty road really mean?) i'm just not into it. i'm halfway through and at this point i don't really care if i finish it. noah had the same reaction. at least it's not just me.