Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

I think I'd been putting off writing about this book only because I love it so much and was afraid I wouldn't be able to adequately describe it. Ray Bradbury might be taking over as my favorite author; I also read his The Illuminated Man and fell in love. Dandelion Wine creates this soft image in my head of a warm, cozy summer in a rural town. I can feel the hot pavement and then can smell my grandmother's kitchen, even though the kitchen I'm picturing looks nothing like my grandmother's. It just feels like a home inside my head that never actually existed. It's so weird. The book itself plays out like a series of loosely connected short stories. There's one in particular that I won't give away, but stands out to me because it was both devastatingly sad and happy, even though not a whole lot actually happens in it. Read this book!

Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag

This book is absolutely adorable, and it recently entered the public domain so you can read it online for free!

Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This is another one of those books that came to me probably just when I needed it. My brother had passed away earlier that year. I went to visit my aunt in another, warmer state for a long weekend, needing to get away and to feel love from a family member. The place she was staying had a little library where everyone just kind of gave and took books whenever. There was no expectation that the book would be returned. I found the shabbiest book I possibly could; the front cover was almost completely torn off and the pages were all yellow and fuzzy on the edges. I had never heard of the title or the author but really just wanted something to sit and read in a chair outside. My aunt mentioned that she loved it but I thought maybe she was just being polite. I wasn't expecting it to be life-changing or anything but it really was. I was hooked pretty much as soon as I started reading it. I still have my shabby old copy sitting on the bookshelf that my dad made in school when he was ten.

It's wonderful to me when a book can make me experience nostalgia for a place I've never been. This semi-autobiographical story by Betty Smith captures all the important feelings of childhood, family, growing up, etc. It's just a perfect book and I hope to read it again someday.

Maus by Art Spiegelman

I haven't read this one yet. Getting there!

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I've enjoyed several Steinbeck books in the past: Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, and Tortilla Flat. All very sad commentaries on life as a human being. I'd been putting off East of Eden for a while because I knew it was long and based on previous experience, expected that it would be incredibly sad. While it is sad in many parts, it's also a beautiful reflection on human resiliency and in that way, is a very happy story as well. It's a mix of stories, really; there are a lot of characters winding their way through, appearing in and out as the narrative moves along. Two characters in particular stand out as my favorites. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was impressed once again at Steinbeck's ability to use incredibly simple language while building a very complex message.

Sidenote: This book reminded me of someting I'd read about the movie Roma (2018). Roma is a really beautiful movie and apparently at least one critic noted that part of the depth of this movie comes from its small focus, yet wide scope. I might be not be using the exact terminology that I read, but this is what makes sense to me. Basically the movie focuses on a family and in that sense has a narrow focus, but the story of this family speaks volumes about a wide range of issues in the world. I think East of Eden has a similar effect; using a handful of characters and focusing on their lives in small ways, but utimately telling a much grander story about humanity in general. That's my piece. Thanks for reading!

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Read this one several years ago and will need some time to think about it. But I keep a nice crusty copy of it on my bookshelf at all times.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Wow, it took me almost a full year and a half to read this book but I did it. I borrowed it from a good buddy who raved about it, and War and Peace is not exactly something you usually hear raved about. So I trudged through it, sometimes taking breaks to read other things, and you know what? After all that time, and sometimes struggling to get through the long, history-dense passages filled with similar Russian names, when I got to the end I found myself not wanting it to be the end. Something about that book was comforting. There was love, sadness, joy, actual war, family drama, pretty much everything. Everything was in that book. Perhaps that's not surprising given its length, but overall it was worth the effort.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

I love pretty much anything by Kurt Vonnegut but this was my first foray into his work. I was not disappointed. This one is a book of short stories. One of my favorite bits about Vonnegut's short stories is that a lot of them have surprisingly happy endings, but they are not in any way cheesey like you might expect from a happy ending. There seems to be this mentality in literature world that a story must be tragic in order for it to be powerful, and I think this is especially true in short stories. Reading Welcome to the Monkey House, I found myself clenching and waiting for the horrifically tragic ending for each story, but I was often pleasantly surprised by how just plain happy the endings were, and yet also beautiful and simple. Vonnegut's writing is so incredibly simple and concise and yet ridiculously moving and powerful. He can make me think and cry and laugh all together with just one little sentence. I would later experience more of this when I eventually read Slaughterhouse Five--which I think is the greatest book of all time--and then continued to read many more Vonneguts.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I know there are problems surrounding David Foster Wallace, but his work came to me during a pivotal point in my life. It's cliche as hell to say this but whatever. I had just gotten my first full-time permanent job with like real earning and future potential and it was in a city that I'd wanted to move to for a long time. I was commuting roughly 1 hour 45 minutes each way to and from this job every day, so do the math that's more than 3 hours of commute time per day, and I was getting up at like 5:45 AM to make a 6:37 AM bus every morning that I would ride for about an hour, then get on a train for 20 minutes or so after that and then walk for another 15 minutes or so after that just to get to my job. I was planning to move to the city so I'd be closer to my job but I hadn't yet found an apartment. So it was rough, but oddly I look back fondly at this time because like I said it was a big, important change for me and the beginning of my future, so to speak. And I rediscovered reading as a result of the long-ass commutes.

Jason Segel is one of my favorite actors and at the time he was planning to star in what was largely considered his first serious role. He was slated to play David Foster Wallace in a movie called The End of the Tour. I was really pumped for this movie and wanted to prepare for it by reading Infinite Jest, Wallace's most famous work. I went to the local library and they did not have Infinite Jest, but they did have The Pale King, so I borrowed that instead. It was like nothing I'd read in my LIFE. It was wild and the writing style was just out of control and even weirder it actually kind of had a specific connection with me at the time. My job I had just started was in a boring accounting office and much of The Pale King deals with the topic of boredom in adult life, and one of the main characters works for the IRS and does like accounting stuff and finds very odd ways of transcending the daily tedium of his life. It's seriously a wild book that honestly I probably should have made a separate section for it to write all this here. But after reading that book I read Infinite Jest and then continued to devour almost everything David Foster Wallace has published.

To get into Infinite Jest specifically: To me the most powerful parts of the book are those that deal with addiction. I've seen addiction in two of my very close family members. One of them died young. The other is still an addict. Addiction is a horrible, horribly misunderstood thing, but Infinite Jest can get you about as close as you can get to understanding what it feels like without becoming an addict yourself. The parts that describe withdrawel make me cry. Don Gately is my favorite character and he was once an addict, then goes on to work as a counselor of some sort in a halfway house.

The rest of the book is just an insanely fun, zaney story that takes place somewhere in the near future. If you've read anything else about this book then you know that it's incredibly long and sometimes difficult to read but well worth the effort. David Foster Wallace is I think what literary critics would call a 'maximalist' in that he writes weirdly long sentences and will take pages and pages and PAGES just to get one point across, or to make one joke, but like I said the payoff is worth the effort. I'm currently in the process of reading the book a second time and it's wonderful to be reminded of all the little details I forgot, while simultaneously going through my favorite parts and remembering why I put myself through this monstrous book to begin with. I'm an incredibly slow reader so this book took me about six to nine months to finish the first time around. Now I just keep it on the table next to me on the couch and pick it up whenever I feel like it, so who knows how long it will take me to finish this time. I'm reading other books at the same time so it's kind of on my backburner now. Anyway, I highly recommend this book and anything else written by Wallace.