Winter Break Reading

I have one more final to go. It's not til next Tuesday.  It's so far away.  That's the only thing that stands in the way from officially starting my 6-week long winter break. (Yeah I know, boo-hoo-hoo.)

Since I haven't gotten a job yet (and I am trying. I sent a dozen resumes and applications over the past week and no one has replied back.), I decided to catch up on some non-required reading.  I went to pick up a couple of books I had on hold from the school library and Chicago Public Library.

1) 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

This collection of letters between the writer, who was based in New York, and Frank Noel, a bookseller who lived and worked in London, is humorous and poignant.  Hanff wants second-hand and cheap editions of works by mostly obscure English writers and begins to order her books at a bookstore located on Charing Cross Road.  Frank Doel, along with the store's staff and Miss Hanff write to each other for two decades while both of became a part of each other's lives despite the fact that they have never met.
Reading the book and watching the brilliant movie adaptation, starring Anne Bancroft as Helene Hanff and Anthony Hopkins as Frank Doel, portrays how the world communicated with one another before the arrival of email, Facebook, and other impersonal devices and methods replaced the beautiful and lost art of letter writing.  Imagine, people waited for days on end at their mailbox, waiting to hear from a loved one or a friend.  You open the mailbox, tear open the envelop and read the handwritten inked words that transported you to another world, the lives of others from either across town or across the sea.  Today many buy and sell handwritten letters from yesteryear or have heavy historical weight for thousands of dollars.  The worth of the letters between Hanff and Doel cannot be measured in monetary amounts.


2) My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin

In 2007, AV Club head writer Nathan Rabin had a strange idea.  He wanted to watch some of cinema's greatest failures to see how and why these movies had failed.  He wrote his reviews on the movies and posted them on avclub.com.  The project was supposed to have lasted a year; by the end of '07 he had a devoted following (including yours truly) that he couldn't stop working on this project, which had become bigger than anyone anticipated.  The book is mostly a collection of some from the site though there are new additions, illustrations, and several interviews from those directly involved with the movies chronicled.  This is a highly recommended read for all movie lovers.
I bought this at Book Cellar.  It was autographed and I couldn't resist.  The inscription reads:

Thank you for looking at this book.  It's super-god.  I recommend it highly.   -Nathan Rabin (signature)

3) The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

I discovered this book at the bookstore in the basement at Macy's on State Street.  I began reading it in a corner so no one would bother me.  I didn't buy it at the time and regretted it soon after.  A couple of weeks later, I began searching for it everything.  Amazon didn't have it at the time and no bookstore had any new or used copies.  The copy I have is from the public library, which I had to place on hold.  I waited a few weeks for them to find it and to arrive.
It turns that no used copies of The Post-Office Girl exist in English.  This novel is written by Stefan Zweig, one of the most acclaimed writers in of the 1920s and 1930s.  His work has been sadly ignored in the States since his suicide in 1942.  The Post-Office Girl and several works went unpublished until 1982 in German and 2008 in English.
The Post-Office Girl tells the story about a young woman, Christine, who is bored with her life in a small town.  She is invited to a fantasy world provided by a distant aunt where she indulges in some much-needed excitement, only temporarily though.  After her high on the good life, she is back but she meets Ferdinand, a young war veteran (this story places in the 1920s) who are drawn together but it seems that they might not make it.  It doesn't matter, there is more to this than meets the eye.

4) Road Trip by Patrick Carthay

This is not a published work...yet.  This is a novella my friend Pat recently finished and email me.  I haven't had much time to read it due to finals and life.  I plan to finish this before Christmas, or least read enough to make some notes on it (i.e. what needs work, what should be omitted).
Road Trip focuses on a group of young twenty-somethings (who sound and act like high school seniors) who are spending the weekend at a secluded cabin miles from civilization.  From what I read so far (which is the first three chapters), it sounds a lot like Scream or Cabin Fever.
I kinda know where this story is going which is partially why I have been avoiding reading it.  There are a few characters I like and it would be better to focus the novel, or maybe write a whole new novel, around them.  There are a couple of secondary characters that should be omitted simply because there's too many people around and not enough to do for all of them.

Those are three books (and one unpublished manuscript) I plan to read for break so far.  Hopefully I can find more stuff to read over the next six or seven weeks that is not a blog, TIME or Entertainment Weekly.  Though funny blogs are welcomed to my reading curriculum.