Wednesday, June 16, 2010

#65 Read 10 Books by Authors I Have Never Read Before (8/10)

For my eighth book, I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I was inspired to read this book simply because I heard that it was being made into a movie and I am always interested in reading a book that is becoming a movie. In fact, if I find out that a movie that is already was a book I will not see the movie until I have read the book. For this reason there are many movies out there that I want to see but haven't!
Anyway, this was the second book I read on my Nook and this was more fun than the last one because I was able to use the "Look Up Word" feature often. I LOVE this feature! I can usually infer the meaning of a word so I won't go grab the dictionary normally but with the ability right at my finger tips, I looked up every word I did not definitely know. So this book is about an American circus that travels the country by train during the Great Depression and, more narrowly, the story of a guy who joins the circus pretty much by accident. The story was just alright for me. There was a lot about the circus itself and that didn't really do it for me. There was a love story within the book but it was not very detailed and not the main focus of the book (and I have a feeling that the movie will focus more on this aspect of the story). There are points in the book where you are reading the perspective of a 90 year-old man in a nursing home and let me just say, I have very rarely read a more depressing theme. He was sad that he was losing some of his basic human functions and that his family had their own lives and that he was just a duty to them that I could have cried almost every time the book went to that perspective! I did NOT like that. In summation, I would recommend this book slightly hesitantly due to what I mentioned above but nevertheless, I would recommend it. It is an interesting fictional story based around a lot of real American circus history and it should make a decent movie.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a great read! I may have to add it to my shelf of books I still haven't read.

    It seems like this book might be some kind of commentary on the freak shows that used to travel with the circus, what with the old man outcast. Interesting! I like fiction that integrates history.

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