I read a book

You read it correctly, I read a book (now where is my gold sticker?). It’s not often that I start a book and finish it, at least not recently. The year leading up to the move to China, I read many books but most of them were about living in China (“The Expert Expat”, “Third Culture Kids”, Living Abroad in China”, etc). Everything was about getting ready to move to China (it’s always about me). Before that I think the last book I had read was “The Candy Bombers” about the Berlin airlift. A very interesting read describing how the Berlin airlift happened and why it worked. So during our time in the US, we stopped by the Barnes and Noble and looked for books to bring back to read since English books are hard to come by in China. Although I did purchase up one book on Chinese history (which I started to read but it’s very slow progress due to many reasons, one of them being that the professor who wrote the book loves to show off his large vocabulary…I think he’s probably compensating for something), I was still looking for something else to read. Tom Clancy novels used to be some of my favorites but he left me hanging with Teeth of the Tiger and I’m waiting for the end of the story (perhaps he is as well). Being from Maine, I think it’s in your DNA to always check out the Stephen King section. I’m not a big fan of horror stories but not all of his novels are like that. Bag of Bones is one of my favorites written by Mr. King and although it has moments of spooky reading, it’s not what I would consider a horror story.

So, as soon as I walk into the section where the King books should be, I see a large new book called Under the Dome (funny thing, Stephen King’s name is about 3 times the size of the title but I guess they want you to know who wrote it). It is a HUGE book, almost 1,100 pages but when you have to take a plane trip halfway around the world, what else have you got to do? The movies I watched on the flight over, Book of Eli and Wolfman, were about all I wanted to see so I wasn’t really interested in seeing another bad movie (although they had Date Night available so I had a chance to forget the just plain bad movies and kick it up a notch to the simply awful movies). Just to be clear, I didn’t like Book of Eli (kinda dumb) or Wolfman (lots of effects, blood and guts but a poorly written script). Anyhow, everybody knows that you can only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet but in the movie the older werewolf (played by Anthony Hopkins…is he in all of these old school horror flicks?) gets decapitated by the younger werewolf, so he’s dead. Am I supposed to forget about the silver bullet thingy? Perhaps I think too much into it, after all, if the werewolf lived without his head, how would he eat?

Sorry, I digress into my inane babbling again (focus Scott-san). Back to “Under the Dome”. I completed the book in a little less than 10 days so that should give you an idea of what I thought of the book. I also was home by myself so I could do what I wanted and could keep the TV off and just keep reading. It’s the kind of book that draws you in once you make it past the first 50-100 pages of background information on people, places and things. Bad books, either take me a long time or I give up on the book. I’m not going to waste my time reading something “just because” I started it. A bad book can drag on for weeks (months, years) and it’s like watching a bad movie. When it’s over you wonder why you wasted the time. Although, a bad movie is perhaps 3 hours of your time, a bad book is a much larger investment.

Anyhow, it was a good book (although I thought it ended rather rapidly) and would be on my “Dudley’s Book Club” list. Reading is something I haven’t done enough of but it’s tough when you can’t find books in a language you can read. The only thing the kids seem interested in reading are the cheat codes for the video games. Different generations I guess (I still remember the RIF – Reading is Fundamental campaign from when I was a kid) but the school is putting more emphasis on reading this year so hopefully they will improve and perhaps it will give Tammy and I more time to indulge ourselves in some of the other books we brought back with us. Once we have read those, we can start to share them with others and pass along the books. We’ve been told that there are places here where you can swap books with others but we haven’t really got a library of books to swap so it has to count (and I’m sure that our Expat books on China probably aren’t on the top of people’s list of books they want to read). As you might have noticed from the photo, we don’t have a lot of other books in our “library” but if we can share with others, our options will expand rapidly.