Today's my birthday. My birthday is December 4th. It's pretty much a full calendar year yet it always seems to unexpectedly creep up on me. This year's probably been the most difficult year of my life because of the wound issues that I'd had since shortly before my birthday last year. All that's resolved now but it took a lot of perseverance, stress, tears, anger, personal strength, & support from my family. I was in the hospital twice this year. Once in May & again for the whole month of September. There were medications that made me feel awful as well. I'm grateful for the supportive nursing staffs in the community health unit & in the hospital that did dressings for me throughout the whole prolonged affair. They didn't always tell me the best news but they were always able to help me put it into perspective despite my baggage of various health concerns throughout my life as a person with the disability Spina Bifida. I certainly wasn't always the most pleasant person to be around when it felt like things weren't progressing quickly in healing amongst other things. It added a whole other layer of stress during times of the year when I was going to classes regularly. The hospital stay in the month of September meant a loss of a semester. I felt like I was going to miss the semester anyways because I was determined to get everything healed up completely. I'm glad that I've developed a bit better knowledge of current books that are available. I've always enjoyed reading but had usually been mainly reading required works for English or History classes. I did read some other works by authors that I'd discovered while studying but I also read other things that I didn't expect to be drawn to. I started reading the works of Rick Riordan. Mainly the entire Percy Jackson series, The Red Pyramid: Book one of Kane Chronicles & The Lost Hero: first book of The Heroes of Olympus series, sequels to Percy Jackson & Camp Half Blood. He's technically an author for younger teens but like Jo Rowling's Harry Potter books there's something universally appealing about the worlds he's created through his writing. I read Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden's loose sequel to Three Day Road. It was interesting because it reiterated themes from Three Day Road, a book about soldiers at war & re-envisioned the dilemmas of these guys through their descendants in Contemporary Canada & USA. To be more in depth is to deprive people from discovering these books. I got into Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim comic books aka graphic novels through a cousin of mine giving me the first book to read while in the hospital. It's a comic book but I'd lump it in with several other books I've read that have completely impacted my life.
It's the only thing I've read that accurately conveys growing up in North America in the last 20 - 30 years and all of the cultural influences that have been mashed up to create the supposed prolonged adolescence & young adulthood of today. This year was the first time that I'd really analyzed Shakespeare's work through a course devoted to his works. It was wonderful. If I didn't take that course, I just might have avoided reading several of the Shakespeare's works that I now consider amongst my favorites of his output. I read several more books about the Asian experience in North America. I'm glad to read books like this because it speaks to who I am as a person. I still haven't got around to getting a copy of Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco but I will hopefully in the future. I've started reading Wayson Choy's All That Matters. It's a book I've looked forward to since reading his debut novel The Jade Peony. So far it isn't as good as Peony but it does cover a much longer period of time. I've picked up copies of George Orwell's 1984 & J.D. Sallinger's Catcher in the Rye because they're 2 "classics" that I've heard so many good things about but I've yet to read. I haven't started them yet but I'll get to them in 2011 definitely. It's the year that NBA Jam has triumphantly returned to the video game scene. It's the year that there was finally a really well done Batman video game named Arkham Asylum (& I demolished it in incredibly efficient fashion)
Most of all, it's the year that my Brother moved away to California. It's only been a few months since he left but it was the end of an era. The era of living together as a 3-4 person "nuclear" family unit. I still talk to him on the phone, text, & communicate with him on the internet but it's just different.
This year has been stress, change, & a rekindling of my love of reading. I forgot to mention in detail discovering that I love the sitcom Big Bang Theory & rediscovering that I love the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Not to mention, my favorite TV show LOST ended with fans heavily divided on the way the final season played out. I loved it all the way through because I like having my intellect stroked. It's a lot better to keep the mind sharp through constant speculation & making your own story connections than to have a show tell you how to watch it.
This is a birthday post but it's more like a year end wrap up. That's OK. I hope that 2011 treats me more kindly. 2009 & 2010 have been physically taxing & I'd really like to have less stress.
Later everyone
Hey, Happy Birthday! I hope things go well next year with both your health and your studies.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I've always felt that "Catcher in the Rye" is a bit overrated. If you wanted to give it a more accurate title, you could just rename it "The whiny self-absorbed kid who whines a lot". It's not that I hated it or anything, it's just that I never got what the big deal was. I guess the style of writing was groundbreaking for its time, but these days you can find the same style of writing in just about half of the blogs you might read.
On the other hand, I've always considered 1984 to be one of the best novel I've read. Of course, I haven't read it in quite some time, so I might have a slightly different opinion of it now. I read it as a 13-year old back in 1983, and I'm sure many of my opinions about the book were influenced by the Cold War. I'd be curious about how the book might read in a post Cold War context. Back then, I thought of the Soviets as "Big Brother", but now I'd probably be more inclined to associate "Big Brother" with the George W. Bush Administration.
Rich