Books I'm Reading

I'm coming to the end of the three books I'm reading at almost the exact same time. All three have been great reads although for totally different reasons.

First thing's first: I HEART Don Delillo. White Noise is simply the best thing I've read since Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace), and for the people who know how I feel about that book, well, it's high praise indeed.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen has also been a great read. It's wacky, heartfelt and insanely real in a lot of ways that are both disturbing and comical. There's a particularly fecal scene on a cruise ship that is both wildly over the top, heartbreaking and somehow realistic all at the same time. If you've read the book, then you know what I'm talking about.

The third book (actually an audiobook) is What is the What by Dave Eggers. This is the autobiography of real-life Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng written as a novel. I'm not even sure where to begin with this one. Let's just say that some people have been through more in their life by the age of ten than the rest of us will have to endure if we live to be a thousand. What's worse is, it's all true, documented and it just makes you angry what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings because they believe in another god and have a slightly different tint to the color of their skin. Or the fact that children can flee a war, walking across a country the size of Texas, end up in another country (Ethiopia) only to have that country have a civil war itself, at which time the refugees are forced back into their own country (Sudan) where they will be hunted, or be shot. And there isn't much time to make that decision because the bad guys from the new regime (in Ethiopia) are standing at your doorway with guns themselves.


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