East of Eden took me a little while to read, but it was well worth it. Amazing book. I love John Steinbeck, so I knew I was going to like this one. I would highly recommend this one.
Then I started reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It was ok at the beginning, but I got lost in the details and had to put it down. It was just too much. What I did like were that there were several quotes about Denver, and Rock Island (interviewed for a job there about a year and 1/2 ago), and a tiny little town that Tony and I stayed in about 7 years ago, Ogallala, Nebraska. I didn't think anyone else had ever heard of the place (there's a good reason why, if you blink you miss it), but there it was in the book! Here's a couple of the quotes that I liked:
"then I took over the wheel and, though I'm not much of a driver, drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes up".
This quote below touched me because in some way, I had felt this when we moved from the West to the East Coast
"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who i was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon".
"And he sat on the boards, crosslegged, looking out across the fields without saying anything for hundreds of miles and finally at one point he turned to me and said, "Where you headed?" I said Denver". - YES I AM!!!!! :)
"And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I took a deep breath. I had to get to Denver at once".
I'm sure there were some more great quotes, but I had couldn't go on reading it. I was too bored.
Now I'm reading Cold Mountain. I loved the movie, so I figured I would like the book even more. And so far I am. It's really descriptive and beautiful. Given how much I love learning about the Civil War, it is set in the perfect time period for me to enjoy.
Now I'm off to do more cleaning, going through stuff, throwing stuff away. Yuck. Moving is such a stress. The move date has been set for May 5th, but I'm not sure if we are going to be ready by then, so it might be pushed back to the 12th. There is just so much to do!! We are giving away one of chest of drawers today, and then we have to take our spare bed to the Salvation Army (I'm still upset with Good Will), along with some other clothes. We have a stack of magazines and some books to take to
The Book Thing and while I'm there TRY not to take any books home. We are trying to clean out of freezer as well. I'm exhausted just thinking about doing all of this. Why am I such a pack rat? I can totally admit this, yet even now I have sentimental value attached to all these material objects that I know I have to throw away because I don't want to move all the way to CO with them. But I still have trouble giving or throwing the stuff away!
