review - Jason’s Feed

Book Review | Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

Joe Russo of We’re The Russo’s recommended Walden on Wheels as a good place to start when researching van life. If you are not watching their youtube videos you should start. Kait and Joe are very entertaining and full of useful information for anyone interested in van life.

In Walden on Wheels, the author Ken Ilgunas takes us along on his adventure to reduce is college debt. Like many of us, myself included, Ken, followed the societal norms of going to college after high school, simply because that is what was expected of him and what he was taught he should do.

After college, he has a large amount of debt he needs to pay off and fast. But with a degree in literature, he has trouble finding good paying jobs. The readers will follow him on various adventures to Alaska among others in order to find work where there is also free room and board offered. This is great because all of the money he is making goes straight to paying off his debt.

Once the debt is paid off, when you think the book is about to end, Ken actually continues his adventure by going back to school. What?! What about the debt he will incur, wasn’t that the whole thing about the book?

Ken has a plan. He is going to live in a van while going to school and eat hardly anything while working in all of his spare time. For me, this is where the real adventure started. This book is a really fun ride and helps you appreciate just how much that we have that we don’t really need. What is life about, possessions or experiences?

This is the first book I have read in 2018. Well, finished in 2018, I started it on December 29th. The best part of this book, besides the content, of course, is that the book is free for Amazon Prime users and is also part of Kindle Unlimited if you have that.

Book Review | Being There

Another goofy novel similar to The Importance of Being Earnest. Short and funny. I think in the 160 pages that Jerzy Koskinski has he does a better job telling the story of Being There than was done in The Importance of Earnest. Things are clearer but still funny.

I would think may have seen the movie but might not realize that there was a book first as that happens so often now. The book was first published in 1970 and the bubbling but lovable Peter Sellers does a great job 9 years later portraying Chauncey Gardiner. Sellers is depicted on most of the covers of the book that you can find now.

Chance or Chauncey as he is later known in the book is a gullible simple-minded man. The is the gardener of a fancy home near Wall Street. When his wealthy benefactor dies, Chance has to leave the house. He runs into a nice young lady that is completely convinced he is a rich businessman of amazing intelligence.

What follows is a comical series of events where Chance is basically set for life, even though he is still the simple-minded fool we meet at the beginning of the book.

I found the story entertaining and very telling of society and the way we only see each other, but don’t really know each other. The book also made me reminisce of when I had seen the movie many years ago as if pulling the memory from the deepest part of my mind so that I could just bearly remember seeing the movie a very long time ago. The book heaved those memories to the forefront and I was pleasantly surprised that I knew the story, but still needed to be reminded of how everything turned out for Chance.

I happily bestowed 4/5 stars for Being There.

Book Review | Rape: A Love Story

This book was very difficult to read. The title is not misleading. You are getting exactly what you think with this book. With that said if you can stomach the awfulness of this Oates writing is very good and this is an important book. These stories need to be out there. This specific book Rape: A Love Story is fiction, but so often it is not for many, many others.

Again this is very tough material. You will cringe you will want to put it down and not pick it back up. But again, this is worth repeating. This is some people’s life. We must learn about this. Not that we will understand their pain, but so we can at least begin to understand the horridness.

A local woman known to all in the small town takes a shortcut. She is accosted by some local men and you know what happens. The story is told in parts with the timeline all mixed up. You don’t get the whole story until the end. You will live through the pain with Teena as she fights to maintain her sanity. And there is one more thing and it’s even worse, her daughter is with her when it happens.

I gave this book four stars, it may have earned more if not for the topic. It was just so damn hard to get through. If you want to challenge yourself with a tough read like I did, then you can try this book, but you have been warned, it is not a pleasant read.

Book Review | Library of Souls

Library of Souls is the third and final book in the series, Miss Peregrin’s Peculiar Children. I loved the first two novels very much. Not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this final installment. It is a young adults novel as is the entire series is. The main character Jacob continues his journey and it is an adventurous one. While I thought the outcome of everything was pretty clear before this last book began, I did really enjoy the journey. And most of the good reads community agrees with me.

77% gave it 4 or 5 stars! That is really good! I’m one of those 5-star reviews. This one was as good or better than the first two books. I don’t see anyone picking this up who hasn’t read the first two books so I’m not going to go into the story, but if you liked the first two you will like this one.

If you enjoyed the movie, then you will love the books. As I’m sure you know the book is almost always better than the movie. Ransom Riggs is a great writer and I want to explore more of his writing. It doesn’t look like he has too much else out there at this point, but I can wait and see what he comes up with next.

Book Review | Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I may have said this before, and if so, it is still true as before. You can’t go wrong with Steinbeck. Maybe it is because I’m a California boy myself, but for practical damn good books, Steinbeck is the man!

I read Travels with Charley the best possible way. While I was unable to recreate the journey that Steinbeck takes in the book, I was able to listen to the audiobook while traveling up the California coast. The best part of my trip, aside from listening to some great writing was that I got to stop at the Steinbeck museum. That’s right, he has his own museum. He is the only American writer to have his own museum in America.

Rocinante is what Steinbeck named his truck that he traveled in. It is also the name on Don Quixote’s horse. The museum in Salinas has his truck on display even including a replica of his dog Charley in the front passenger seat. You can also see the inside of the camper (shown below):

The book was marvelous. I heartily give it a 5/5. Again, it follows Steinbeck on a trip across America. A trip he felt he needed to take to reacquaint himself with the American people. He felt he had lost his relationship with the common man and the trip was a way to rekindle that relationship.

Book Review | Utopia

Utopia was a very difficult book for me to read. Every sentence was a run-on. And the writing was at a time so removed from modern writing it was arduous to read. So much of what was written felt like a high schoolers attempt to make a paper longer. Way too much detail that did not propel the story along. I found reading Thomas More’s Wikipedia article much more fascinating. He was a very strange man!

Look at this guy! He is not a happy man. More wrote Utopia way back in 1516. It later became the forerunner of the utopian literary genre. After he refused to accept the king as head of the Church of England, he was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1535. He was canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint in 1935.

I read the book because it was the start of a whole fiction and fantasy genre, but the book is very stale, duh, it was written in 1516. The book only earned 2 stars with me. The real interesting story here is the author. What a character!

Book Review | The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

I found The Romanov Sisters to be a little dry. I know this is a very niche history book, I get it really. At 381 pages it’s not that long, but it was just too much detail for me. I did fear from the beginning that it might be a little slow for me, so I started “reading” this book via Overdrive a tool that my local library subscribes to which enables me to download an audiobook to my smartphone where I can listen to it. I had I think 10 or 12 days to finish the audiobook. But I just couldn’t do it. I had to re-borrow this audiobook again after a forced period of absence. It was on hold by other patrons, so I had to wait my turn in the queue again.

I’m glad I finished the book, but this would not be one that I keep in my personal library even if I had purchased it. I’m glad for the free lend from the library in this case. I gave the book 3 stars. I was interested in the mystery of how the family was murdered, but the story was all about how they grew up and even quite a bit in the beginning about their parents. If you have a deep interest in this family, you will probably appreciate the thoroughness of this author. If like me you are just interested in the mystery around this family, this book will probably bore you.

Book Review | The Importance of Being Earnest

An Oscar Wilde classic that was made into at least two films in 1952 and 2002. I had not read this book before but I am familiar with Wilde’s other works. The Importance of Being Earnest is a short 76 pages that is a funny one-sitting read. When I think of this book I have trouble not remembering the 2002 film. It seemed to be on of those shows that were on TBS or TNT a lot. While reading the book I remembered a film very much like the book then when researching for this post, I understood why and finally made that connection.

This book earned 5/5 stars with me mostly because it was a quick laugh. Hard to find something to dislike in such a short and funny little story.

Book Review | Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Ah, Mr. Márquez, how your years of solitude challenged me! That book with its 457 pages was so drawn out. But he really did develop those characters and boy can the man write. His prose is beautiful. But, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a different animal altogether.

Its a quick book at only 120 pages, so the story is forced to move quickly. You still get invested in the characters because the character development doesn’t seem rushed and magical prose is still there in this work just as it was present in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Gabriel García Márquez from Flickr User: Ver en vivo En Directo

The astonishing part about the story is that everyone sees what is going to happen before it does. The way that Márquez weaves the story is just amazing. Following the story from one character to the next without stuttering, so smooth. This novel earned a 4 out of 5 stars. Not bad because after Solitude, I wasn’t sure I would read any of his work again. Márquez is one of those authors that I fear, I just don’t get and there may be so much more to his writing that I’m just not able to grasp. Lucky for me he as written more.

Book Review | The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

The first one was better. Could I end my review there? Maybe. But I won’t. I really love the image of this guy above, this is sometimes how I see Bryson in his traveling books. Bryson is a local guy, an American, but he moved to England for some time and has written about different locales all over the world, my favorite still being A Walk in the Woods.

To me, The Road to Little Dribbling, sounds like it could be a book about a baby that drools. I’ve never understood why the names are themselves funny in England, I guess we have a lot of those in America too though.

Bill Bryson by Flickr User: The National Churches Trust

Bryson is a funny and engaging travel writer and I have read many of his books. There hasn’t been one that I disliked. All of them have been entertaining enough. This is the only book that I know if that is a sequel to one of his other books, Notes from a Small Island. I gave both of these books 3/5 star rating. Not great, but in no way bad. Still entertaining and I will keep them and re-read them at some point in the future as well.

The only reason they got a low’ish’ rating is that there are a lot of inside jokes that only Englishmen will get. Not being one a lot of references to people and places went over my head. Maybe this is why I liked A Walk in the Woods so much. Since that book takes place in the Application Mountains it’s a little closer to this California boy than England is.