Everything Is Illuminated

Finished my second book of the year, Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you've been reading my blog (which is surprising for me), you would have read that this book was mentioned a few times in the previous posts. A quick check in this blog let me know that I got the book in April and I finished it in May, so that's pretty fast for my standard, all thanks to the waiting that I had to do during the trip. It's an interesting and sad book. I guess any story that explores the holocaust is never not sad. It's interesting because of the structure of the book and the stories being presented. There are 2 stories which grew from one central story of an American writer who went to Ukraine to find a lady in a photograph pictured with his grandfather. Interestingly, nothing much is known about the background story of this writer and his life. One of the stories were about this trip to Ukraine being told in chapters written in not so good English by the Ukrainian guide. Another story was a fiction written by the writer about the history of the village his grandfather was form and the first known history of his ancestor up to his grandfather. There were also chapters consisting letters from the Ukrainian guide about his thoughts of the writer's story and about his life. I find it really interesting that we know more about this guide rather than the writer who actually kick started the whole event in the story. All around, the stories didn't end well and it's all so sad, though perhaps it's slightly more hopeful for the guide. I just feel rather sad with how it all ends :( Apparently there's a movie made based on this book. Elijah Wood is in it. I wonder how it goes, hopefully I find my way to watch it.

Reading this book made me realize how I don't know a lot of things about Judaism. So I often cannot picture the scenes from the story well because I don't know the things which were described and I have to say it made me rather sad that I'm so not knowledgeable about this. I often feel rather good that coming from a Buddhist family, grew up in a Christian school, and coming from a country where the majority of the population is Muslim, I know quite a fair bit about these 3 religions. However, it's always the things that are lacking that quickly make you feel bad, at least for me. Judaism seems very interesting since it seems that there are a lot of things that Jewish people needs to observe. Unfortunately Judaism is not visible in my side of the world.

So anyway, decided to go with the classic for the next book, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. It's already close to the middle of the year and I am only starting my 3rd book, I need to hustle? Watch less things? Happened to meet an acquaintance at Kinokuniya yesterday who lent me his membership card which allows for a 20% discount, so since I couldn't quite decide and think the 20% discount is pretty good, I also got number9dream by David Mitchell, who also wrote Cloud Atlas. I wasn't that keen on getting a book from an author whose other works I had read. I think since I did that multiple times with Paulo Coelho, I just felt that there's so many great authors and stories out there to explore, but in the end the cover and the story seems interesting, but yeah for now I am starting first with the classic.

On movie news, I watched Bad Neighbours. I have to say Zac Efron is handsome, didn't realize that in High School Musical. I love Dave Franco more though, I think I start to love him more than James Franco :P While the movie is funny, I got turned off with all the boobs and penis jokes. I also watched Godzilla. Glad that they made Godzilla the hero and sad that Bryan Cranston's character died too soon in the movie. What I didn't watch is the latest Spider-man movie, I didn't watch the first one as well. Also didn't watch Captain America because I also didn't watch the first one. Also didn't watch the latest X-Men movie, though I did watch X-Men: First Class through pirated DVD. I guess I'm just so not interested in all these superheroes movies, though I may watch the latest Transformers since Mark Wahlberg is in it and we love Mark Wahlberg, don't we? :D Okay, nothing else is interesting in my life peeps. Hope all is going well for you. Ciao!

:) eKa @ 8:23:00 PM •

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