#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.