4 posts tagged “byopl”

Book 1 of 50/365

Author: Tom Robbins

Book: Skinny Legs And All

I read this book awhile back and from what I remember I really enjoyed it. I also read Still Life With Woodpecker. I had thought that I had only read one of the two but when I browse through them, they both seem familiar, as if I have read them both. At any rate, this will be a good place to start my 50 in 365 challenge.
Interestingly enough, I first discovered Tom Robbins, when I noticed that Drew Barrymore's character in 50 First Dates was reading Still Life With Woodpecker. My curiosity was picqued and I decided to see what Tom Robbins was all about. How's that for product placement? It works.

This is a book that I was SUPPOSED to read way back in 10th grade English class. (1988)  But not being much of a reader at that time, I kind of just.. well... I didn't read it. I just listened in class and managed to pass the test somehow. We were asked to go around the room and say whether or not we liked the book and why or why not. I said that I did NOT like the book and the reason I didn't is because it wasn't American. That probably gave it away  that I didn't read more than a few pages, for John Knowles was an American novelist of the 20th century. I was pretty smart in school and was in all advanced classes but I obviously was not very cultured and probably even a little xenophobic to top it all off.
In my adult years, I figured I should probably revisit some of those old novels that I was supposed to have read in school but never did. I obtained this one through paperbackswap.com, a fantastic resource for used books, which I will discuss in a later post. I couldn't have been more happy that I decided to read this fantastic book.
I won't go into much of a review here, I'm not much of a review writer. I'll leave that to Amazon and wikipedia. A Separate Peace -- Wikipedia
Suffice it to say here that this is a wonderful coming of age story, set in an exclusive New England Prep school before and during WWII. It is a short novel and can be read very quickly.
I loved this novel and highly recommend it to anyone who may or may not have read it in high school.

I absolutely fell in love with Mark Twain and his autobiography. It is even more interesting when you realize that Mark Twain never actually wrote an autobiography. What he did write were a grab bag assortment of small books and personal anecdotes, with the intention of someone else compiling it after his death into an autobiography. That is why each version will be slightly different. This is not the version that I read, but Amazon did not have a photo of it, so I chose this one. From his early boyhood, to the many tragedies in his life, all the way up to the end when he lost his daughter and his wife, this book was incredibly poignant. You couldn't help loving this man even more and being sad that we have no equivalent of Mark Twain today. He died himself the following year after his daughter Jean died and the world has been the worse off ever since.