...it gives me the willies. Last night, after I finished my first blog, I finished reading "The Pianist". I had seen snippets of the movie awhile ago and have ever since been interested in reading the actual book. It's taken me a year or two, but I finally got off my butt, drove to the library and got it. I had to renew it a few times before I finally got to reading it (plus a small late fee), but let me tell you, it was worth it. I can't say that it was good. At least, not in the way Harry Potter is good, or Biology for Dummies is good. I can't say that it was well written, since all it him recounting his life during WWII. He does it with the oddest....calm, I guess is the word. He just says it as it was, as though he were simply dictating something he was watching on a screen. In the afterword, Wolf Biermann describes Szpilman's way of writing like a "melancholy detachment". So, should I call it amazing? No. I don't know where I'm going with this. I feel like I'm writing an essay or something. Basically, I think it's a book that needs to be read. Just like I think movies like Schindler's List or Band of Brothers need to be seen. Such things are as close to seeing what the war was like as we today are ever going to get. I fully stand by the saying "Those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it". The Pianist was hard to read, and it left me empty feelings in my stomach. Despair, perhaps? When I finally finished it last night, I was scared to turn of my lamp and be in the dark. I'm not sure why. I wasn't scared of Nazis coming out of my closest or from under my bed or anything. Just being in the dark, alone....after having just read about how Szpilman had spent months in such a position in deserted and destroyed Warsaw. What would it feel like to be the last person left, even if only in a town. But Warsaw had been his world. I mean, if I woke up tomorrow and Salt Lake had been destroyed and the I was the only person around, even if I knew the rest of the world was just fine, everything I have know and loved my whole 19 years would be gone. Anyways, blah blah blah. Read The Pianist. It is a must. I'm going to check out the movie and see if it is any good. Er, not good. See if it's.....whatever I just said about the book.
PS There was infact a banana in the kitchen this morning. It was pretty good, besides a big bruise in the middle of it. Ew. But it made my flax cereal taste much better. Hurrah for flax seed.
