This is a short and arguably meaningless post, but I feel compelled to contribute something today. The dearth of recent postings from yours truly can be blamed on my inability to find a book that I feel like finishing. I did manage to finish one, but ended up bailing on three others that I started. So I figured I’d go ahead and post about all of them.

The one I finished recently is The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. This book was recommended to me by my wife, and has also received some positive press on this here blog. I won’t get into detail on it, but suffice it to say that it’s written with a stylistic twist that I found fascinating — namely, it’s narrated by Death. The book tells the story, from Death’s perspective, of Liesel Meminger, a young girl taken in by foster parents in Nazi Germany. Many characters pass through her life, including Death on several occasions. A very well-written book, and an engaging story, but — SPOILER ALERT — it’s not a particularly happy tale. Because it was recommended to me by my wife, I assumed it would be a happy book. I don’t know why I thought that, but it set my expectations in the wrong place and couldn’t help but feel like happy stuff was awaiting me on the next page. It really wasn’t. So govern yourself accordingly.

Now on to the three strikes that I’ve experienced of late. First up is Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. I’m not bashing this book by any stretch, and with all due respect to Isaacson (a very accomplished and lauded biographer), you’ve got to be properly prepared for this book and you’ve got to want to get into it the way it’s presented here — in excruciating detail. My understanding is that this is the first biography published of Einstein following the release of a bunch of letters and other documentation that had previously been held in private. And Isaacson goes over every possible nugget, detail, and fragment of Einstein’s life with a fine-toothed comb, and my short attention span sadly couldn’t handle it. But if that’s what you’re into, go for it.

Strike two was Belle and Sebastian: Just a Modern Rock Story, by Paul Whitelaw. I can safely say that I was a very early adopter of Belle and Sebastian, way before they were cool. In fact, just a few weeks before my son was born in November of 1998, I drove from Atlanta to Athens to see them play one of their first live performances in the U.S. at the 40 Watt Club; I went by myself because I couldn’t convince anyone else that the band and the show would be something special (it was). Anyway, when I saw that this book had been published, I had to pick it up and delve into some of the lore surrounding the creation and rise of the band. I managed to get through about 80 pages or so before I had to Put the Book Back On the Shelf [note: that's the title of a Belle and Sebastian song]. I was convinced that if I kept reading, I would hold the band accountable for the absolutely precious nature of Whitelaw’s writing, and I didn’t want that to happen. Again, govern yourself accordingly.

Last but not least, and with all apologies to our blogmaster (from whom I received this one), I just bailed on The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. My understanding was that this book was written to answer the hypothetical question of what would happen if humans disappeared from the earth; what would happen to everything that we’ve built, what would happen to the flora and fauna, etc. And that’s pretty much how it started — with a discussion of what would happen to buildings, roads, subways, etc., and how and why they would begin to decay and crumble. That was pretty cool. But then, and I can’t even remember how the book segued, it started looking to the past to determine what would happen in that humanless future. And again, I just wasn’t that interested or engaged by it. I had read Guns, Germs and Steel (all ten million pages), and so I wasn’t interested in hearing about fossils and artifacts, and when man first appeared in the Americas, blah, blah, blah. I wanted to hear about this (hopefully) fictional future. I don’t know — maybe Weisman was going to tie the past to the future and make it worthwhile to slog through that stuff, but I wasn’t going to risk it.