Just Readin'

Paul Gauguin is one of my favorite painters. (Actually, as I write this, there is a print of his painting  Mahana No Atua hanging next to me on my bedroom wall.) So, during my winter break, I decided to read his Tahitian journal, Noa Noa . Noa Noa is a travelogue written by Gauguin, first published in 1901. Although, Gauguin billed the book as his genuine experiences, it seems pretty clear to me and other critics that it's mostly fictional or exaggerated. That being said, I found the book to be very interesting. From a narrative perspective, Noa Noa is a bit dull. Gauguin's writing style has a tendency to be wordy and pedantic. However, from an ideological perspective it's quite interesting. To my mind, Gauguin is an excellent example of Romanticism and Romantic thought. If you don't know, Romanticism was an artistic and ideological movement that reacted against the Enlightenment. Romantics believed that the world could not be understood purely though the le...

So, the other day I was on Facebook, you know, like your typical college student with three billion pages to read a night, and I found one of those list challenge where you go through a list of things and mark all the things on the list you've done. Anyway, I found one that was called '50 Books to Read Before You Die'. Anyway, I read a lot, so I thought it I would try it, but out of 50, I'd only read 19, and, while most of the books on the list are famous and well known and note-worthy, I don't think my life would be significantly different if I hadn't read Frankenstein. Which, by the way, was like the dullest book I've ever read. I don't really like this whole idea of list of "necessary" books. It's hard to create a list of books that everyone should read before they die because, obviously, not everyone likes the same sort of thing. That's not to say that I don't think dark or boring books can be valuable. For examp...

So, I recently realized that I haven't reviewed any non-fiction yet on this blog. I feel that that's a little unfair to non-fiction, because I've read some excellent pieces of non-fiction in my life. The reason I haven't written about non-fiction yet is that I haven't really read any non-fiction in a while. So, I've decided to give you a list of what I think is really, really good non-fiction. Granted, all of it's been about historical events/figures, but if you're interested in that sort of stuff, I've got some great recommendations for you. 1) The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough - I originally read this book for a class and it was a great experience. This was a great book, with the readability of a novel and an especial emphasis on the stories of the survivors. It covered more than just the actual event of the flood and the most interesting part of the book was the section on the aftermath, which assessed weather or not the flood was a man m...