The Nose

Read Nikolai Gogol's The Nose yesterday on some stolen time.  It read very much like The Third Policeman and I just envisioned my old Scottish co-worker friend chuckling to himself as he read this.  It's kind of just a nonsensical three-part short story.  Literally, a nose leaves its owner's face, turns up in a bread roll, then is somehow human-size and is wearing fancy attire as it trots away in a carriage.  After all that, it miraculously appears back on its homestead face.  I'm not even sure that there is any point at all.  I looked it up thinking that perhaps it was a satirical commentary about society or the upper class but it doesn't really seem to be the case.  There was something about masculinity and shallowness/materialism that seemed probable but in the end it might just be that Gogol was just being silly and getting paid to do it.

Outside of that, I have been trying to read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union for the past few weeks but quite frankly, it's boring.  BY GOD, it's so boring.  I even looked it up on Wikipedia to see if I'm missing something and the only thing that I found helpful is that supposedly the Coen brothers were going to make a movie based on this book but then scrapped the script they had initially written.  EVEN THE COEN BROTHERS CAN'T MAKE THIS BOOK WORTH WATCHING.  If such talented gods can't even save it, it's hopeless I say!  I'll probably just keep trucking at it out of sheer stubbornness until I die of boredom.  Then I will rue this day.

Watchmen

Up to 95/1001 now!  Wooooooo.

So...I guess I like this? I really don't know what to say.  For some reason I like Rorschach the most and I feel like that makes me fucked up. 

For the pace that it started off with, the ending seemed abrupt to me.  I was kind of left thinking "...oh, is that the end?".  For the majority of the book, it was at a really nice tempo with layered plots and character development, but once Veidt's plan was uncovered it seemed like it was kind of like "and he killed everyone and now the story is over and there is nothing else to explain or talk about, and everyone is just going to go their separate ways with little explanation".  It kind of felt like a letdown.

There's a lot of violence, but it wasn't all that disturbing to me.  The images were often gruesome and all but it somehow fit the grittiness so that you were never really shocked, which I kind of think is nice.  There was also a lot of silhouettes of couples making out or having sex but I feel like with that part I was missing something.  Maybe he just wanted NYC to be a city full of vices?  Still, that seems too simple. Also, the smiley face.  Was I just not paying attention, or was that never explained?  Maybe I didn't have enough patience for all of these details...maybe I should go back and re-read.  I'd kind of rather someone just tell me.

So anyway, I assume those movies/comics like Kick-Ass and Super and other lives-of-superheroes as real people type stories are all probably somewhat influenced by this.  It's an interesting concept, and if Alan Moore was the first to think of it, that's pretty cool.  I know that comic people love him and think he's a genius so I wouldn't put it past giving him that credit.

On an unrelated topic I went to Barnes and Noble to try to find some books and that store is SO FREAKING USELESS.  I had about 10 titles to try to find, expecting that I wouldn't be able to find the majority of them but I could literally only find ONE.  What the heck!?  I guess I'm just going the Amazon route from now on.

A Fine Balance

What a miserable place India was in the '70s.  Even before reading this book I never had a desire to go to said country, but now I'm sure that if I ever did happen to be there I would constantly be getting depressed thinking about this book.  Maybe though, it would give me a sense of how much progress the country has made when before this read, I would have just been disgusted with the lack of sanitation and poverty.

I suppose this story is about friendship and love through hardship, but what's coming in loud and clear is that life is hopeless so you should just give up.  This is hard to grasp as an entitled asian girl in America who's family always had money and therefore had the means to keep working at getting what she wants with certainty that someday it could be attained, but as a poor person in 1975 India, I'd say that motto of "just stop trying" is pretty accurate and that basically dying was a better alternative to trying to climb the social ladder, or even to keep on living.  This was supported by insane amounts of violence between religious groups and poor people, government officials and poor people, and then some weird tensions between student activists and some entity I didn't quite understand (potentially more government assholes).

If there is a movie of this book, I never want to see it because I would have nightmares forever.

Also, there is a person who is basically a pimp for beggars who's name is Beggarmaster.  He keeps all of the money he collects in a suitcase that is chained to his wrist.  This is not a joke and no one seems to find this strangely hilarious.  He also happens to be one of the nicest characters in this book so seriously, what I'm getting at here, is India was pretty fucked up.

This was the last book I had left from Colleen's generous gift.  This means I need new books.  My birthday happens to be two weeks away.  Wink wink.