Greening Austin Daily

Bonus of Riding the Bus: Summer Reading

8th September, 2010 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

This past month I’ve been riding the express bus, and one of the main benefits of riding, aside from the green aspect, has been all of the reading I’ve gotten to do in the last month.*  In case you are on the fence about trying out the bus, I thought I would share some of the books I’ve gotten to read in the past month so you can be jealous of my bus-riding experience:

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd – got this one at the Austin Library Recycled Reads book store for $1 after hearing a lot about it. I thought it was not worth the hype. I know a lot of people whove said they’ve loved it, but I thought it was ok.  I didn’t think it was written extremely well and it had a  lot of cliches in it, and it was predictable. It would probably be good for a teenager or pre-teen to read though.

Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, which I read about in this NPR review of under the radar reads, was one of the best books I’ve read in years. I reserved it at the library and didn’t know much about the book before I started reading it other that it dealt with the Vietnam War. I’ve never read a war book, and I thought I wouldn’t enjoy it so much once I read the book cover and actually realized that it was purely a war book, but it was so good that at times, I couldn’t put it down. There were a lot of characters in this book, and they were all guys, so it was hard to keep track of them, and there was a lot of marine lingo (although there was a vocabulary reference at the back of the book, which I discovered halfway though), but I stuck with it and learned a lot about the war, and also the book really helped me to empathize with the men who fought in that war in a deeper way than I had before. The book is written by a marine who served in Vietnam and he did a phenomenal job capturing what it was like there, down to the nitty gritty of dealing with leaches and the humidity.

All that Follows by Jim Crace, which a friend recommended to me.  I had a hard time getting into this book because I couldn’t relate to the main character at all, but as I kept reading I started to understand him better, and even though we don’t have a lot in common, the author did such a good job developing the main character’s personality that I could empathize with him by the end of the book. Plus part of the book takes place in Austin so that’s interesting. It took me about half way through the book to get into it, but once I did, I really enjoyed it.

The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson. It seems like everyone is reading these books now so I read the first one just to be in the loop, and now I’ve checked out the 2nd book from the library. I think they are interesting, quick reads, but not great literature and I didn’t take much away from the first one, and I doubt I will with the 2nd one.  But they aren’t very complicated and are entertaining. Technically I only read 1/3 of this one before my month of riding the bus ended.

So there you have it – I was able to read 3 132 books in 1 month that I otherwise would have taken ~10 months to read. Hurray for the bus!

*not to sound like a cranky old person, but green/reading benefits or not, if Cap Metro raises the price over $63 a month for an express pass, I’m not sure I’ll ride it any more.