What makes a book hard to read? Aside from finding little interest in a book, things that can make a book hard to read for me are not what you would probably expect. The author has a need to show off their vocabulary? Not usually a problem for me, and if I happen to not be able to figure out what a word means from the context I just look it up. Complicated sentence structure? No problem. Strange book structure, like no punctuation or paragraph breaks or 7 pages for one sentence that is entirely in italics with a open parenthesis that never closes? Been There.

What makes a book hard to read for me is when I can’t pronounce the characters’ names. This may sound strange, but if I can’t pronounce the names, I can’t follow the story in my head. I had a professor who said he would give nicknames to characters whose names he couldn’t pronounce, but this hasn’t worked for me. This is why I’ve been reading Doctor Zhivago for almost a month now and am only on chapter four.

What makes a book hard to read for you?

So, no e-reader for me. However, if I were not an English Lit major, where most of our books for class are novels, an e-reader would have been a more serious consideration for me. I would definitely choose a gadget if the alternative was lugging around heavy text books.

I cannot end this post without mentioning that Nintendo has stated that e-reader features may be in the 3DS, now that would be something else to consider since I already want a DS.

Meyer writes about doing things on purpose, not waiting till she “feels like” doing them. She writes about not being afraid or doing things afraid, so as to not let fear rule you. That I get. But she also says things about how she, at times, will decline speaking invitations or other such things because she doesn’t have peace about it.

My problem is this: how do you know the difference between something being a fear and it just not setting right with your spirit?

I considered prayer as the answer, and maybe it is. For prayer to be the answer though, a person would have to be completely open to hear God and be able to tell the difference between what God is saying to them and what their own feelings about the situation are, something that is incredibly hard to do if fear is involved.

If you have seen it or read it, where’s your review?

Oh, and did you hear about Christian Bale being arrested for assault?

I was browsing a few websites, looking for new books to review and found a new edition of Fitzgerald stories is being released in August and it’s because there is a movie based on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” coming out this Christmas starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

For those not familiar with the story, it is one of Fitzgerald’s less common fantasy stories. The idea for the story originated from a comment that Mark Twain once made about it being a shame that the best part of life was at the beginning and the worst part the end. So the story is part joke, yet melodramatic as it tells the story of a man who is born old and grows younger and younger. He falls in love but while she ages normally, he continues to get younger.

Enough chit-chat, here’s the trailer.

I think it’s going to be strange, creepy, and fascinating. More than that, I think it’s a great opportunity for those less familiar with Fitzgerald’s work to give the new edition of short stories a chance. While I was searching for the trailer I even found a website where you can read the story (and other stories from Tales of the Jazz Age) in it’s entirety.

What do you think? Will it be good, bad? Maybe you don’t care; what movie are you looking forward to?

One of the things that I wanted to post when I originally decided to post about the water crisis was this photo essay from TIME, which includes photographs from the book Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World. Right now you can download the book for free, in pdf form, from that Amazon page. Though, if you can afford to, you can purchase the book from Charity:Water and $70 of the purchase goes to the charity.

While Charity:Water is a great organization, I know more, and feel more strongly about giving to Blood:Water Mission (yes, the charity started by members of Jars of Clay). Blood:Water exists to provide sustainable water sources in Africa by building wells with emphasis on reducing the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Check out the site for information on what they’ve already done, what they’re doing now, and how you can help.