Life of an Investor: 100 Must-Read Book Reviews
A few weeks ago, I decided that I was not well enough educated in literature. Many of the “classics” I have never gotten around to reading. You can imagine how well I do when watching Jeopardy. I went on a quick search for list of classic books and found a list of “100 must-read books before you die”. I avoided a lot of the lists that recommended greek tragedies and other types of ancient books that I knew I would never make it through. This list had quite a few modern books and many that I had never heard of, so I decided to give it a shot. What else was I planning on doing with the next 4 years of my life? When I started this, I had no plan to review these books on my blog, but I might as well. After all, one of the points of investing on this site was investing in myself. Reading books is most definitely an investment in yourself. These will not be your typical book reviews. No flowery words will be used and I will not analyze the characters. I will probably most often give a one-paragraph reaction to the book in general. Basically, these reviews will not be useful to anyone but myself. Enjoy.
This page contains a running list of all reviews. Each review will also be posted individually.
Review #1 -
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest- by Ken Kesey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_(novel)
(Article contains spoilers. Don’t read if you plan on reading the book)
When I went to the library to pick up a few of the “classic” books on the top 100 list, I noticed that several of them were in the juvenile section and listed on the High School reading list. I was a bit surprised, because I never read many of these books when I was in high school. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I attended a Christian school and if we even had books in our library with “bad” words or “bad” parts, then they were blacked out with a marker. No cussing, no sex, etc.
After reading Cuckoo’s Nest, I can guarantee you that this book was not in our school library. If it had been in our library, a fourth of the pages would have been covered in marker and the story probably wouldn’t even have made sense. Overall the book was enjoyable, but I’m not sure that I got anything useful out of it. Maybe that is just because I cannot relate to the characters (mostly emotionally weak and delusional mental patients or sadistic hospital staff). In one way, I guess it could encourage those with self-esteem issues to take on those who are oppressing them and it might help them gain some confidence, but I’m not even sure of that. In fact, I really am not sure why this would be on a high school reading list. I wouldn’t encourage my teenagers to read this (if I had teenagers). The book is filled with constant discussions of smoking, sexual activities, drunkenness, prostitution, cussing, abuse of power, violence, defiance against authority, suicide, murder etc. It really doesn’t even end well. It’s like one of those movies that kind of leave you empty when you walk away.
If nothing else, at least I finally know who Nurse Ratched is. I always thought people were saying Nurse Ratchet.
Review #2 – OK, so I’m bad at finishing projects, but I love to start them. Let’s just say that I only made it through one of my one hundred books, so I’ll have to delay this project for another year. 