Some random thoughts

It's been some time since I last wrote. My sinusitis is finally gone thank goodness. While recuperating I finished two books: The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.

The Last of Her Kind is a novel about two women who meet in 1968 at Columbia University. The late sixties were a turbulent time in America and the author captures it beautifully. I'm too young to know what it must have been like since I wasn't born until the late seventies but I've always felt that I had a pretty good idea of what it felt like to be a young person at that time. I became pretty fascinated with the counterculture movement and civil rights movement when I was a teenager. I tried to find out as much about it as I could and am still learning about that time period. I remember watching the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King trial happened and I thought to myself that must have been how it was when the riots in Watts happened. I had a similar feeling when reading The Last of Her Kind. I felt like I was there when the author described certain events that did happen in that time in New York. The anti-war protestors shutting down the universities, Woodstock, and the Weather Underground. After I finished reading this novel I watched a documentary about the Weather Underground, a militant anti-war group that was responsible for several bombings in different cities in the United States who felt that peaceful protesting against the war in Vietnam was not doing enough to stop the war. It was a very enlightening documentary about the lengths people will go to in order to try and create change. I don't completely agree with their ideology and actions at that time but can see where they felt frustrated in their efforts to stop a war that was pointless. I believe peaceful protesting is more conducive to creating change although we seem to have become an apathetic society in recent years.

After the heaviness of the late sixties I felt I needed something fun and light to read. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist fit the the need perfectly. I am a music geek and it was fun reading a romantic tale involving two music geeks. This is a young adult novel but like many young adult novels it has some adult issues...or maybe young adults are growing up way too fast nowadays, hence the adult issues. After reading this I felt very nostalgic for that period in every one's life when you are about to step onto the threshold of adulthood but your dreams are still intact and you're young enough to still make stupid mistakes. Ah youth!