Bookish Thoughts

Cold Mountain is another book I skipped by in high school and always vaguely meant to come back to. When I saw it at a used book sale last summer I picked it up without really thinking about it. My friends all read it in AP English our senior year, while I slept my way through Hamlet . It might not have made much mark on my memory at all except that the movie also came out that year. Specifically, the movie was in theaters when I was in Mexico for Spring Break, and I went to see it with my host family. At the time I was mostly eager to be able to sit for two hours without having to think and speak in Spanish. The movie was dubbed, rather than subbed, and would therefore be easy for me to understand. I left the theater with a million thoughts buzzing through my brain, but the only one I was able to express to my host mother was "that was sad", and she didn't seem eager to discuss it beyond that. Over time, those thoughts faded until I was left with nothing more than the...

I've been struggling through The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara for the past few weeks. A colleague at work loaned it to me. The social obligation this creates is probably the only reason I'm still attempting to finish this book. The Killer Angels is about the Battle of Gettysburg. Three hundred and forty five pages of white men shooting rifles at each other. This isn't really my cup of tea. I generally like historical fiction, but military history bores me. If I'm going to read about a battle I prefer there to be some magical element to it. Dragons or giants or showers of sparks flying back and forth. If you take that away and just show men killing each other with ordinary metal, it gets to be a bit too real. It makes me uncomfortable. Knowing that all of this actually happened doesn't help matters. The thing I find most challenging about this book, though, is that it makes all of the characters real and sympathetic. Lee, Longst...