Part 1 of Black Boy - Richard Wright

Wright's autobiography of his childhood-

• At the beginning, he burned his house down accidently. His mother often beat him severly, yet at the end, he has affection for her.
• He writes about how he was always hungry.
• He sneaks into saloons and drinks. He spys on men and women getting it on....
• Basically a bunch of stuff happens, his mom can't take care of himself, he gets into violent fights with his overly religious extended family, he gets a job to be a skilled worker at an optic shop, but is run out, and blah blah blah, it wasn't my favorite book.
• Not too many fond memories.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

• The story was told through three narrators- 9 year old Oskar Schell, and his paternal grandparents. Oskar is very eccentric but intelligent, many think he is autistic. His grandfather is mute and left his grandmother.
• Oskar carries around a heavy secret, that his father called five times before the towers fell, and Oskar listened to the messages and never told his mother.
• He finds a key of his father's in an envelope that is labeled Black. Oskar goes on a quest to find what the key locks.
• Oskar's grandfather Thomas loved Anna, who died in the Dresden firebombing. He stopped speaking, but has Yes and No tattooed on his hand, and communicates through writing. When Anna's sister sees Thomas in New York, she knows she has to marry him. He connects her to Germany and her family. Letters of theirs reveal some of their lives before the bombing in Germany. Thomas leaves her when she is pregnant with their child.
• The grandmother's life has been tragic, and Oskar is her light. She's a survivor.
• Oskar is dealing with his pain in his own way. He is the normal nine year old in some ways; fighting with his mother over her friend who is a boy, wishing for his dad back, not fitting in with his school mates.
• There are oddities in the book. For instance, the grandfather's pages are often blank or only have a few words. Artistic. There is typing that overlaps each other. At the end, Oskar is trying to see if his dad jumped out the building, and zooms in on a picture of the falling man. The last pages are a flip book of the man going back up, reversing time, so that Oskar's life could be complete again.
• The book got some high reviews, and some lower ones, but I found it confusing at times. Two smart people can have completely different interpretations of an event just because they can't quite figure out what is going on.

A New Job for the Blog

People often ask me, "What was the last book you read?", and I know I read a book recently, but I can't remember its title, or who wrote it, or what it was generally about, let alone the individual characters or specific scenes. In an attempt to keep the knowledge in my head longer, I am going to do a post about each book I've read. This is for my own personal gain, and I doubt that anyone would read more than a few sentences, because it will be poorly written, like notes hurredly jotted down in the few minutes before the bell rings. From now on, I will make these notes between three and seven days after I finish it. The notes will consist of plot summaries and anything that stood out to me.