The Suz's Summer Reading Challenge-- Update Four

We're ten days into the summer reading challenge, and, if I'm totally honest, I don't know how many pages I've been reading per day. I still can't quite figure out the conversion from Kindle pages to print pages, and I don't count when I read on my Kindle. I can say I've finished three books so far, though, which is more than I usually accomplish in ten days.

And yeah, I know I'm home on a Friday night reading books and writing about them. The Crazy Cat Lady would like to add, "My time is my own. Suck it."

First up, The Imperfectionists, bu Tom Rachman. Tthe characters in this book are, by and large, sad and often reprehensible. Structurally, it's interesting, though, as it really reads more like a series of interrelated short pieces, and the resolution is ambiguous for most of the arcs, which I kind of prefer. Bottom line: Newspaper work is unstable in the modern world, even on the international scale. This is not going to change. Better to freelance and buy a boat.

Next, we've got Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer. This is a little bit of a cheat, because I've been working my way slowly through this one since somewhere around October. The story of Chris McCandless slowly parting ways with most material possessions and wandering around the American West in search of himself has the same kind of romantic appeal as something like Walden. But here we get to see what might have happened to Thoreau if he hadn't been walking into town every day to let his mom cook his meals and do his laundry.

I can't help wanting to compare this book with Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, which is the story of Tim Treadwell, who lived with bears in Alaska for thirteen years before they ate him. Compared to Treadwell, McCandless seems like a bit of a lightweight in the balls-out, crazy, following-your-bliss department. Bottom line: Perhaps it's better for most of us to see Alaska from the safety of a cruise ship.

Finally, I'm about halfway through Bill Bryson's At Home. Bryson never fails to deliver the goods, and this is why I'm willing to follow him around Europe, around the U.S., down the Appalachian Trail (that's not a euphemism for anything here), into the far reaches of space, or just hang around the house with him. He makes the complex intricacies of our mundane day-to-day accessible, and, more to the point, fascinating.

Most extraordinarily, Bryson may be changing my feelings about bats, and I think we all know how I feel about bats. In the chapter about household pests, he talks about how bats are unfairly vilified. They seldom actually carry rabies or other diseases. They're insectivores, so they don't usually bite people or animals. And because they're insectivores, they're very environmentally beneficial. Sadly, they're also seriously endangered.

Bottom line: I might become a bat activist after completing this book, but rats are every bit as nasty and evil as we suspect them to be.

Maybe Life Would Be Easier If I Was Born Stupid

I took a look at the wedding website for a friend of a friend (whom, once again, I will not NayName). Obviously weddings get their own websites. It doesn't count unless it's been posted, status updated, tweeted, and blogged about. (Yes, savor the irony. Savor it! Tastes a lot like Waffle House hashbrowns, but with more vitamins.)

But today isn't about that. Today is about someone I've never met nor hope to meet sharing details of her honeymoon plans. Care to guess?

Not Cabo.
Not Venice.
Not Hawaii.
Not Myrtle Beach.

The happy couple whom I don't know will be honeymooning in the German Alps. Sounds okay, right? Sweeping vistas. Good beer. Leiderhosen, if you're into that kind of thing. Schnitzel... which is both fun to eat and fun to say.

And, the honeymoon page points out, "nearby attractions include [some trees, a Biergarden, some other kind of nonsense I wasn't paying attention to because of this next part] the former concentration camp at Dachau."

Attraction? No, dear bride I'll never meet. An attraction has a snack bar where they cover fried things in stadium cheese, perhaps a carousel, and maybe people wearing costumes with oversized cartoon heads. Dachau's remains are a memorial to millions of people who died as part of a campaign of supreme evil and will have none of those things, unless Art Speigelman has entered into the most tasteless licensing agreement ever conceived by humans... which is unlikely.

This is a location to visit for historical understanding and reflection on man's inhumanity to man. It's not a location for honeymoon hijinks. It's not even a location to be near for honeymoon hijinks. Unless you weren't planning on having sex with your husband again... ever.

Stick with the Biergarden. I hear it's very nice.