I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

I’m really enjoying Wise Blood so far. I really like the dark humor and O’Connor’s obvious but non-essential symbolism. The jokes are not obvious or funny enough to make me laugh out loud but there is so much weird and somewhat grotesque tension building you sort of just have to laugh at the absurdity of the one-armed, moldy-toothed, and all around dirty caricatures roaming a city filled with debauchery and profanity. I really like the way O’Connor portrays her symbols. She could not make them any more obvious, but at the same time she does not shove it down your throat. She quickly moves away from her symbols allowing you to place as much importance on them as you choose. Its not like in Moby Dick when the seagull is nailed to the mast and Ishmael talks about the intricacies of this symbol for a page and a half.

Jack (Binx) Bolling has a pleasant job. He lives in a pleasant neighborhood and he has pleasant relations with all his acquaintances and relations. But his life has no more depth to it. Binx is a moviegoer. Not just in the sense that he goes out to watch a lot of movies, (which he does) but he also sits on the sidelines and watches his life move on in front of him like a movie. But on the eve of his thirtieth birthday Binx embarks on a search for authenticity and direction that will endanger his fragile cousin, Kate and leave him changed forever. Perplexing and profound, rich in existentialism and romance, The moviegoer is a genuine American classic.

One thing that I have noticed about Binx is how similar he and Kate are. They both struggle with bouts of depression, quickly move through girlfriends/boyfriends, and entertain thoughts of how wonderful it would be to start an entirely new life with nothing, but neither would ever choose to go out and start their lives over. In a lot of ways I think they are both going through the same search. Kate’s extraordinary revelations followed by deep depressions are really similar to how Binx will come to a realization and then get trapped in the everydayness. Aunt Emily seems to think Binx has himself together, even if he has not decided what he will do with his life, but I think that is just because she has a similar relationship with him to what Jules has with Kate. The problems are pretty obvious but they just choose not to see them.

I really like the Question game that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Though I had no idea what they were doing and did not understand the rules until halfway through their game, when I figured it out I though it was really funny. Colin, Kevin, and I even played the game for a little while after class. It was surprisingly hard. I kept getting messed up and trying to answer questions when I knew I was supposed to be asking another question. At one point, I got so messed up that I actually thought I was asking a question when I gave an answer to one of Colin’s questions. I thought the game was really fun, interesting, and a great example of how Stoppard can confuse and intrigue you with a simple word game.

To me, the most striking thing about the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the setting. The play makes special note that that there are no distinguishing characteristics that define the setting. They are in an eerie sort of limbo where the normal rules of probability and logic have been suspended. Rosencrantz seems to be more comfortable their strange world. He accepts without question that he has gotten heads 90+ times in a row, and at one point he stares out at the world around him seemingly aware of his setting’s lack of any defining characteristic. But Guildenstern, clearly the more educated of the two, is having a much harder time accepting this limbo. He is unnerved by the coins insistence to land on heads every single time. He tries to explain the phenomenon with logic, and expects, with every coin flip, the streak of heads to end. Its too early in the play for me to understand the significance of the setting and the difference in the two characters, but I found it really interesting.

I really enjoyed The Road. Any post-apocalyptic world is going to be interesting, but the detail and eerie realness of Cormac McCarthy’s book was really captivating. Though most of the book was tedious descriptions of the man and his son’s day-to-day routines, I could not put it down. What made the book so fascinating not some amazing action sequence or wild twist ending, but just how simple and realistic his bleak, sunless world was. I could see myself in McCarthy’s characters. Wandering the countryside hoping to find a way to survive just one more day, every day.

I feel like Mrs. Dalloway is a book that has to be read slowly to be truly understood and appreciated. Each sentence is so long and so packed it becomes mind numbing trying to race through it at twenty five pages a night. I’ll find myself halfway through a passage and realize I have no idea which character I’m reading about, and that I don’t understand half of what I just read. Instead of rereading the dense, sometimes rambling, passage I carry on and attempt to tackle the next paragraph. When I can actually understand what is going on the book I do enjoy it but the reading is so difficult an there is such little time to make sense of it, half the time I feel like I’m just wondering through the pages looking for one or two key sentences that advance the plot. The rest of what Woolf says just falls through the cracks.

So far it has been really difficult for me to decide whether or not I like this book. I can appreciate that Faulkner wrote a book that has to be read multiple times for a person to really pick up on the full meaning of the book, but at times I feel like I am being kept to much in the dark to understand anything that is going on. This has been quite frustrating. Faulkner walks a fine line between giving us enough information through classic narration to keep us interested and using the modernist stream of thought narration to tell the story the way he wants to. I have no problem with his using several different narrators. I think it is a really clever way to show the different points of view on one event and to show how gossip contorts reality. I really just wish Faulkner gave a little more information to work with to hold my interest a little more.

I thought the chapter about First Corinthian’s life was really interesting. When Morrision talked about how college trains people to think they are to good for 80% of the jobs out there it really struck a chord, because I have not even gone to college yet already all my life I have already been told I don’t want to end up flipping burgers and doing labor intensive, lower paying jobs (we talked some about this in class). And while having a job like this is not ideal, most jobs are like this. So if no one wants to flip burgers, bus dishes, or lay brick who will preform these services? And since there are not unlimited jobs that require more training where will people work? I also thought it was interesting that First Corinthian’s wealthy background and higher education made her a less eligible marriage prospect to successful men. They  wanted a women who would appreciate their wealth and status, not someone was accustomed to it.

Although it was one of the saddest stories I have ever read, I really liked this book. I thought it was awesome how Steinbeck really brought everything that happened in the book to a full circle. From the little things like the water snake that slithers by the fire pit while Lennie and George are sitting in their campsite at both the beginning and end  of the book to main plot points like the mercy shot to back of the head given to both Candy’s dog and Lennie when they have become to much of a burden to be left alive, everything that happens during the rising action has a mirror image in the falling action. Also Steinbeck creates extremely loveable characters. I have never wanted the protagonist of any book to succeed as much as I wanted George to buy the farm, Lennie to tend his rabbits, and Candy to have a place where he could grow old and die in peace, and when they lost that dream I have never been so crushed.