I'm failing...

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. (I've only read 32.) How do your reading habits stack up?

 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X) 

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X) 

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( ) 

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x) 

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x) 

6 The Bible - ( ) 

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ( ) 

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (x) 

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( ) 

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( ) 

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X ) 

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( ) 

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( ) 

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( ) 

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( ) 

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( X) 

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( ) 

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X) 

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( ) 

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( ) 

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( X) 

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X ) 

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( ) 

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( ) 

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X) 

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( ) 

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( ) 

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( ) 

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X) 

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X ) 

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (X ) 

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( ) 

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X ) 

34 Emma - Jane Austen (X) 

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( ) 

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X ) 

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - ( ) 

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( ) 

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( ) 

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X ) 

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X ) 

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ( ) 

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( ) 

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ( ) 

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( ) 

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ( ) 

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( ) 

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ( ) 

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X ) 

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( ) 

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( ) 

52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( ) 

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( ) 

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ( ) 

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( ) 

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( ) 

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ( ) 

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x) 

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ( )  

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( ) 

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X ) 

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x ) 

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( ) 

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ( ) 

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas ( ) 

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( ) 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( ) 

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x) 

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( ) 

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( ) 

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ( ) 

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( ) 

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X ) 

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( ) 

75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( ) 

76 The Inferno - Dante (x ) 

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( ) 

78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( ) 

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( ) 

80 Possession - AS Byatt ( ) 

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X ) 

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( ) 

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( ) 

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( ) 

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( ) 

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( ) 

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X ) 

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X ) 

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ( ) 

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( ) 

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( ) 

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ( ) 

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( ) 

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (x) 

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( ) 

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( ) 

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( ) 

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X) 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X) 

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyles.  This was also an audio book.  I'm not even going to try to sugar coat this.  Oh, and the contents of this entry may offend some of you, I'm warning you up front.  Read on at your own risk.

Okay, I've already talked about my less-than-choosy method of choosing books at the library.  My method of choosing audio books is even less choosy.  And it bites me often.  What I do is grab the first audio CD I see, quick scan to make sure there's nothing I find horrible on the cover, then into the backpack it goes.  This means I get some great books, and I get some stinkers.  But I don't have a lot of room to be picky- I live in a small town with a small town library, so the selection= not so great.  Anyway, that's how it works.  

I believe I have neglected to mention my slightly sadistic refusal to give up on a book.  Once I start something I have the worst time not finishing it.  Sometimes a book gets way better and it was worth it.  Sometimes it just keeps on sucking.  It's both a blessing and a curse.  With an audio book... well, I just can't help it!  I keep on hoping it gets better!  I can think of three books my entire life that I've given up on.  One I plan on trying to read again in the next month or two, when I'm not as tired as I was the first time I picked it up.  (I think I was too tired to wade through the 16th-century language it was written in.)  Another was a book all about a boy who discovered his sexuality when his parents ran a boarding house at the beach and a "beautiful Italian fraternity boy" came to stay each year.  Uh, no, thanks.  It was, in a word, ridiculous.  The other was similar in ridiculous- a post-apocalyptic world where the only human emotion that survived was the desire for orgasm, orgasm, and more orgasm.  Toss in the obligatory lack-of-moral-character f-bomb every other word, and you can imagine how tedious that was.  So anyway, those are the only ones I ever quit reading.  Many a time I have gotten to the end of the book and wished I had quit reading... but you know, those last two that I quit on were fairly recent.  So I felt guilty quitting on this book that I was listening to.  And I kept going.  To the end.  To the bitter, unsatisfying, shoot-myself-in-the-eye-with-a-bb-gun end.

I picked the book (CD) up because the cover revealed that it was about "Kinsey blah blah blah research blah blah blah Indiana University blah blah."  That's what I saw, anyway.  Fun, says I.  A story set in the Midwest, says I.  

Those of you who have a leg up (no pun intended) are already enjoying yourselves.

I got home and read the rest of the cover, during which I see that Alfred Kinsey was Indiana University's premiere sex researcher in the middle part of the 20th Century.  He founded the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.  Interesting, says I.  Based on a real person, says I.  Perhaps this is a true story, says I, and I may even learn something I didn't know about my home state and that giant University in Bloomington.  I will have to put my personal preference to avoid all adult materials and forge on in hopes of learning something.  

Well, here's what I learned:  RIDICULOUS.  WHAT did I say when I introduced this blog?  WHAT did I say was my biggest pet peeve?  LEARNING SOMETHING.  And guess what?  I was wrong.  My biggest pet peeve is now LEARNING NOTHING.  I guess I can't say I learnednothing- I did learn what some random fiction writer who is jealous of the bunch of pervs who went around researching sex imagined it would be like.  And then I learned what this guy fantasized it would be like, and then I learned all of the sexploits this guy wished he was a part of.  Oy, disGUSTing.  And yet... and yet... I refused to give up.  I gave up on the last two books simply because I was bored with gratuitous lusty scenes, what if I missed some profundity about IU??  What if I missed the whole point, that this guy realized how pathetic he was and eventually gave us some sort of moral lesson?  I was BEGGING for a moral lesson!!  Anything besides orgy after- yes, I said it- horrible, desperate, disgusting orgy!!

Wait.  I have to say something nice about the book.  Hmm.  Give me a minute.  Well, give me a few minutes.  Okay, I got it.  He never did that nasty romance-novel-in-detail description of the acts that were going on.  There were no pulsing... uh... no heaving... uh... well, no sweaty... at least, I don't think so... jeez, I wasn't listening that close, I just wanted it over.  But it wasn't graphic.  I'll give the author credit for being vague with his descriptions.  

But that's ALL I'll give him.  This book was a waste of time.  Please don't read it.  Please, please, don't read it.  I can't believe I lost 13 hours of my life to this.  (13 discs... I just kept hoping for redemption...) 

Wait, I did learn something.  I learned that it is okay to give up on a book.  Some of them I might not like.  And it's okay if they're not my cup of tea.

Some just suck.

Ella Enchanted

Ella Enchanted is a book that I picked up by accident.  I was running wild in the Newbery Medal section with my gift card (thanks, mom!) and nabbing anything that didn't look really, really boring.  It wasn't until I got home that I realized it was an honor book and not a medal winner at all.  Oh, well, somebody found it interesting enough to make a movie out of it... so I pushed that mental picture of Beloved out of my head and decided to read it anyway.  

What a great surprise!  I had already seen the movie and found it fairly mediocre.  It's the kind of movie you put a ten-year-old girls' slumber party in front of with a bowl of popcorn and jog off to your room, relieved.  Not bad, just not that great.  Ella Enchanted, however, is a classic case of great-book-ruined-by-Hollywood: I cite Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the entire Little House series as evidence of this sad phenomenon.  If you thought those movies/TV were good, well, read the book and you'll see what I mean.  (By the way, Beloved  is NOT in this category- it belongs to the rotten-book-worse-movie category. That was what I was afraid I might have in Ella Enchanted.)

But I digress.  If you've seen the movie, you know what this book is about.  Ella is bestowed at birth from a silly fairy the gift of obedience.  The fairy is trying to help the parents- Ella won't stop crying.  So, wave the magic wand, "Stop crying," to the baby, and voila, you have an obedient child who has an inability to ignore a direct order.  What a great idea... "Clean your room," "Be happy," "Enjoy the taste," "Cut off your own head."  The premise is simple- looks like a great idea but at least is dreary for Ella, who has to actually follow all these orders, and at worst can actually endanger her and everyone around her.  So, Ella dreams of breaking the curse and it looks like that could happen when Prince Char (yes, I know) seems to have fallen in love with her... but of course we have to add evil stepsisters who figure out her secret and order her away from all happiness and generally into slavery to themselves.  You know, sweeping out the fireplace and such.  

The references to Cinderella are unavoidable, of course, but they are the most minor theme of the book.  At first glance it looks like it's just going to be a retelling of the Cinderella tale, but this book is so much more than that.  You know all along, of course, how it's going to end- break the curse, fall in love, blah, blah, blah, the last words of this book are actually "happily ever after."  (FYI, I refuse to call that a spoiler.  If you have ever heard a fairy tale telling and you don't know before opening the book that the girl is going to get the prince in the end, well... I'm not sure why you're reading at all.)  But the way this story is told is extremely enjoyable.  It's very fast-paced- I actually had a hard time putting it down and many a massage client waited an extra minute or two for me to get into the room this week- and it is written for today's audience.  Of course it's set in medieval times, but the language is neither pretentious or fake- Ella has a lovely sarcastic streak and all the characters are very relatable.  There's even a fairy that throws silent temper tantrums when she's not getting her way.  This is a book that, even though you know the ending, takes you for a really fun ride the entire way there.

Even if you didn't enjoy the movie, I really recommend this book.  It infinitely outweighs Hollywood's version.  Over 50% of the plot of the book was removed from the movie.  There are quests, giants, ogres, woodland creatures, etc, etc- don't worry, nobody sings... well, not woodland creatures, anyway- that make this story really fun.  It's not a caricature of a fairy tale- it's just a great book that reminds you of something you might have heard a long time ago, in a bedtime story, about a land far, far away...

The Shack

The Shack is an interesting book.  I'm not really sure what to say about it.  The author specifically requests that when telling people about this book, please don't give away the plot.  As one who loves to write and loves to experience writing in its "best" form, I tend to agree with him- the less you know about this book going into it, the better.  So I'm not going to tell you what it's about, or what it's like, but I am going to tell you that I found it a very, very good book.  Lots of people will go out and read this and call me an idiot, but, well, this is one of the best reading experiences I've had in a very long time.  I devoured the first 100 or so pages.  It moved so fast I didn't even realize I had been reading for over an hour.  But the rest of the book took me a lot longer to read, not because I couldn't have read it quickly if I wanted to, but because I wanted to take it slow, savor everything I was reading, and really take in the meaning.  I admit that I have read better "written" books- many of them- but it's been a very, very long time since I've so appreciated what was written.  So I say, very good book, I think nearly everyone would benefit from reading this.

The other thing the author suggests is that when talking about this book, rather than give stuff about it away, talk about what it did for us, the reader.  Okay, that is far too touchy-feely for me to acknowledge... but again, I really respect this book so I'm going to go ahead.  So be warned- the rest of this post is about ME, not about the book, unless you really want to learn something (probably more than you want to know) about me, well, stop reading.  I won't care.  I won't even know.  That's the beauty of it... free to choose.  :)  Oh, and it's going to be a long post.  Real long.  If you're foraging into the rest of this mess... get some wine, you're going to need it.

So, the entire time I was reading this book I was reminded of something that happened to me when I was younger.  I was out with a guy who I spent a lot of time with but never really did that official hookup thing.  I had a lot of guy friends when I was a kid- still do- because I am really, really bad at relating to girls.  (That is another book all together.  I believe some psychologist wrote it.)  Looking back, this was probably a huge disservice to those poor guys who may or may not have been looking at me in a way that I may or may not have been looking at them- I just enjoyed my friendships and never really thought about taking them further.  This is completely irrelevant to the book, except I'm trying to set the scene for this particular evening- I was out having a great night, enjoying the company, the conversation, and especially the food- because God bless this wonderful young man, he introduced me to lobster that night- and this poor guy was throwing out everything he could to let me know he was interested.  Um, I was pretty naive.  But come on, I was raised in Middlebury, Indiana.  How was I to know that lobster was the pre-20 code for "I can't afford an engagement ring, but this ruddy crustacean will tell you how I really feel."  So anyway, I missed the boat.  But I was still enjoying myself.  

At one point, he excused himself from the table for a moment.  I took the opportunity to do what I always did- and still do- the second I'm alone at the table.  Grab the mirror, check the teeth, check the nose, check the shine, put it away before there's a chance they come back.  Chapstick, always update the chapstick.  And then depending on how much time is left, one of many games will come out: catch-the-ice-with-the-straw (especially awesome if the ice is that cool cylindrical kind with the hole in the middle), make-the-sugar-packets-pretty, coffee-creamer-tower, doodle-napkin, origami-napkin, leftover-sculpture, how-bright-can-the-candle-flame-get, or there's-got-to-be-something-interesting-in-my-purse.  As this particular establishment was semi-classy- meaning condiments had to be requested, cloth napkins were provided, and the table light was oil rather than candle, lending itself to some serious burns if I got too tricky, I was reduced to the basest of all games: stare-blank-eyed-whilst-quietly-singing-favorite-tune.  This is dangerous- it usually means that I completely lose track of time and get caught doing it, which is exactly what happened.  I started to realize that I had been alone for far longer than was proper for anyone to be in a public restroom, so I suddenly looked around and realized my "date" had been watching me for quite a while from across the room, leaning against the wall with an amused... and even I couldn't fail to miss this... sparkly-eyed, charmed look on his face. 

Uh-oh.  

He came back and sat down and the real conversation began.  I always liked talking to this guy and considered him a close friend, so we were pretty honest with each other.  (About ourselves, but apparently not about our feelings.)  Anyway, he asked me what I wanted to do with my life.  

I had an answer ready, because this was something that I already knew 100%.  See, by this time I was around 19 or 20 years old, and if you know me at all, you know I'd already had some pretty significant events in my life to that point.  So at that young age, I didn't have all the answers- still don't, who does?- but I did have perspective.  Without hesitation, I said, "I don't know."  

"You don't know?  How can you not know what you want?"

"I just don't know where my life is going yet.  Wherever God wants to take me."

It's as though I spoke Klingon.  Wait, this guy probably knew Klingon.  It's as though I had pulled some obscure Tahitian dialect of Mongo-sela-kok out of my hat and thrown it at him.  He stared at me for a minute- still amused, but not so charmed-  and finally he decided what to say.  He must have thought I misunderstood him, because he clarified for me.  "No, I know you want to do what God wants you to and all.  Everybody knows that about you, you always do the right thing.  But what I'm asking is, what do you want to do?"

I contemplated this.  Never before had I differentiated the two ideas.  I gave it a few seconds, then answered- honestly- "But what I want to do is what God wants me to do."

He was beginning to get frustrated with this stubborn female.  "I know, I know.  But just for a minute, take God out of the equation.  If you could do anything at all you wanted, what would you do, and forget about what you think God wants."

I was completely flummoxed.  How could anyone take God out of the equation?  I was too young and too lobster-happy to realize that I was pushing my limits.  Besides, I still thought we were just having what I actually considered a normal conversation.  I really didn't understand why he didn't understand me- this was a person who shared (I was pretty sure) my religious beliefs.  Sure, he lived a different lifestyle, but who cared about that when we were all headed for the same goal, right?  I pressed on.  "No, you don't understand.  I can't "take God out" of it.  See, what I want to do is what God wants me to do.  It doesn't matter what it is, because what He wants is what I want."

"Then what do you want?"

"I don't know."

"Then what does God want?"

"I don't know."

"Then how do you know what to do?"

"I do what God wants me to do."

"And what is that?"

"I don't know."

This went on for, as you can imagine, quite some time.  It was a very circular conversation, with him growing more and more flustered and me growing more and more calm and confident in my answers, which, admittedly, were telling him nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  He knew of my loves for music, for writing, for animals, for travel, for nature, for BIG BIG WONDER, he really knew a lot about the inner workings and dreams of my mind.  I'm sure he was looking for exactly which one I was going to run headlong after so he could decide if he was going to run along with me.  But what I couldn't make him understand was that none of those things- and all of those things- mattered.  They of themselves were mere byproducts of God's love for me- He had given me all those things to love, and made me enjoy each and every one of them thoroughly.  He put the desire for them in my heart and gave me wonderful gifts to enjoy them.  How could I not follow this same path that had served me so well so far?  And how could he not understand that God was my music, was my writing, embodied creation, and consumed my wonder?  How could these things possibly be separated?  God was, is, and always would be, and there was no need to quantify or qualify that.  There just was, I AM THAT I AM.  

In the end, I must have chosen the one goal that guy couldn't hitch his star to.  We eventually changed the subject after much head shaking tsking.  I know he thought I was such a waste, a naive little girl who would one day find out that God meant us to BE SOMETHING, not just to be.  It was years before I heard from him again- he needed a favor, which I happily obliged, after which me met and married a wonderful girl and now lives happily ever after pursuing his dream.  I am very glad he's living the life he has always wanted, and I mean that.  But this isn't a story about him, it's about me (and really I just threw those little tidbits in there because I know at least half of you won't really rest until you figure out who he is, and the answer is I'm not telling).  But anyway, that night taught me something- that I was weird.  I thought I was perfectly normal and had, well, not all of the answers, but enough to make me content.  I stopped telling people how I felt about my life and about God.  I started second guessing my feelings.  I started using human logic instead of Divine Love for both big and little decisions.  And while I never lost that contentment, I lost my focus a little and I made some bad decisions.  I left my Leader and took a rock-bottom crash to come back to it.

I did eventually come back, and I did figure it out.  I still have the same contentment that I had before, but even more so now.  If you know me you know that it doesn't take much to get me riled up, but it takes something major- unidentifiable, really- to truly upset me.  I live in reassurance that there are no big things because there is only One Thing.  Oh, sure, I'm still a jerk.  I have major flaws- jealousy, selfishness, laziness, pettiness, to name a few- but those are a gift so that I can be even more grateful for what I know.  

I could go on and on about this, but I'm pretty much done.  The reason this rather uninteresting jozi-revelation is stuck here in this book blog is because this book is about many things, but one of the things that I was shocked to realize it was about was me.  Things I have been trying to put into words for years are so clearly spelled out by an author much more eloquent than I. If you want to know me, if you want to know how I look at life and how I look at God, then read this book.  But that is a really, really stupid reason to read this book.  Who cares about me?  You shouldn't.  But you should read this book to find out about yourself.  I really do not believe that anyone can read this book and not find at least one good reason to have done so.  

So there's my plug, my promo, my Shack Story.  I should probably edit or cut this down a bit... but I'm not going to.  Right now you're wondering why you read all the way to the end of this post- so am I, to be honest- but hey!  You can get something out of it!  Go read the book- you'll enjoy it a lot more than you did this.  :)

Peeled

Peeled is by Joan Bauer, who I tend to think of as the Judy Blume of the current library age.  Way less controversial- so far- but she writes books that pretty much appeal to the masses, entertain well enough, and you don't really feel sorry after you read them.  Her books are stories that move you from one event to the next pretty quickly, and you find yourself wondering what is going to happen... not "what should I be learning from this?"  So I enjoy reading her books.  This one, however, I was listening to instead of physically reading, so it was slightly different, but still entertaining.

So in Peeled, we have a teenage reporter who, because of the legacy her deceased father has left in her small town, wants to be the best reporter she can be.  This means always printing the truth, no matter how hard... and she and her classmates have ambitions of turning their typo-filled announcement purposed school paper into the beacon of light that all eyes in the community turn to for truth, justice, and the American way.  Cue the music.  Of course, a story comes up that they need to weed through the muck to get to the bottom of.  I can't really say too much more than that without giving away some plot points, so I won't, because although this story isn't a "mystery" per se, part of the fun of reading is watching the events unfold.  It's not really suspenseful, so when you read it, don't try to figure it out.  Or you will.  And then it's boring.  But just for the fun of reading, this is a pretty good choice.  That's all I got.

The Story of Mankind

Wow!  It really took me that long to read this one!  This was a very long book.  

Since I have a book-buying problem, I decided to start collecting certain kinds of books in order to avoid overbuying.  Since I love kids' books so much, I figured I should start with all the Newbery Medal winners.  (The Newbery Medal is given to the book with the "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" by the American Library Association.)  They've been giving this award since 1921, so I thought that would keep my book allowance occupied for 80-90 books... seems safe, right?  So far, it's working, because this book is the very first ever Newbery Medal winner, and it was HUGE.  So, some background.  

The Story of Mankind  was written in 1921 by some professor who wanted to make the entire history of the world available for kids to read.  So he wrote it.  That's a pretty large undertaking, but admirable.  The author literally starts with the primordial ooze and works his way up through the time of publication.  That's where it starts to get weird, but we'll go into that later.  He does present an evolutionist perspective on "where it all came from", but he doesn't completely ignore major events described in the Bible like every other historian does.  On the contrary, his approach to picking and choosing events was to describe those events that had a direct impact on our current "western" civilisation.  So there's a lot of Greece, Rome, Europe stuff in there, but not a lot of Japan.  He mentions Moses leading the Jews in the Exodus, the birth of Jesus, and the "birth" of Mohammed because these events later lead to many of the conflicts of the world.  (I was skeptical about this guy's viewpoint- primordial ooze?- until I saw that he has also written The Story of the Bible, which I will likely check out someday.)  But all in all, it's a pretty thorough summary- if 600 pages is a summary- of Western Civilisation.  It's written in very easy language for kids to understand, and occasionally he threw in a semi-editorial comment that I found funny to read- especially considering it came from a 1921 perspective.  For example, "Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Constantine the Great..."  I find that funny.  Towards the end of the original book, he did make a note that he was brought up to be somewhat of a snob, and that affected his view on the world- why he spoke about Bach fugues and not about "midwestern prairie hymns."  Well, well.  :)

Here's where the book runs into a problem.  This guy had about 5,000 years of recorded history to write, so he did it.  It was pretty great.  But he felt the need to record events that happened leading right up to his death, which meant there was a pretty editorial and fairly detailed description of World War I in there... of course, describing the hope that it was the war to end all wars, etc etc.  Consequently, we have something like the Hundred Years War that gets about, oh, a paragraph of coverage.  Then WWI comes along with a couple chapters describing events leading to it, his opinion on the leaders, a major battle here and there, etc etc... sort of skewed.  And it gets worse- people thought this was such a great book that a few years after its publication they "updated" it to describe more events of "our time."  These updates happened in 1954 and 1972.  More long and detailed descriptions of the depression, WWII, the "modern communication era", Woodstock (?!), with some "meanwhile, over in Europe"... and the worst update is the last one- some goon thought an update from 1972 to 1999 would be pertinent.  This is a very, very dreary listing of a summary of the events of every newsmaking country over the past 20 years.  Here's South Africa, here's what happened in Iran, France did this, Vietnam, Korea, and my goodness, let's mention all the American Presidents and what we thought of their contribution.  Yikes.  I barely made it through the last hundred pages or so.  

But really, all in all, it's a good book.  I mean, where are you going to find Moses, Metternich, Michelangelo, and Mussolini in the same book? Well... right here.  I do wish the original author had stopped at about 1900, and there were no updates.  But it's really interesting to see the history of the world in such a tiny little volume, because it really helps to make clear some of those events and dates that in the past were just an event or date in my mind.  (Oh, and I get a lot more questions on Jeopardy! right now.)  But I still call it a very good book, and worth reading.  At one point the author says, "Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?"  That's an excellent bit of literary snobbery there, but in this case, I'll give it to him.  This is a very interesting book.

My favorite part, FYI, is this paragraph, describing the fall of the Roman Empire.  I'll let you figure out why it was my favorite part:

"The text-books of ancient history give the date 476 as the year in which Rome fell, because in that year last emperor was driven off his throne.  But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time falling.  The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not realise how their old world was coming to an end.  They complained about the unrest of the time- they grumbled about the high prices of food and about the low wages of the workmen- they cursed the profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin.  Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor.  But the majority of the people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their purse allowed them to by) and hated or loved (according to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish."

AWESOME.