I was mentioning this to Little Sister and she told me that she read Wuthering Heights in the seventh grade when she was 12 years old, and it scared the crap out of her.  Although there is a really big age difference between the two of us, we both went to the same elementary school and had the same crazy teacher in seventh grade (though luckily for me I only had to deal with Hamlet).  This woman was in a category all her own, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.  She was a hardcore vegetarian and fanatically into animal rights, showing horrible documentaries of chickens and cows been brutally killed in slaughterhouses.  Keep in mind she is showing these movies to 12-year-olds and trying to get us all to be vegetarians.  We were all sitting there, jaws dropped in horror, half of us crying.  Of course I totally jumped on the bandwagon - for about two weeks.  During that time I ate a lot of McDonald’s french fries so I’m not sure if the whole vegetarian thing was really working for me.

Crazy Teacher wore sweatshirts with bedazzled tigers and cutesy puppies.  She threw chalky erasers at anyone talking and not paying attention.  She’d make you kneel by your desk if you didn’t do the homework from last night.  If she saw a boy and girl talking during class she would say, “Make dates on your own time” which always made the poor kids absolutely embarrassed.  She would give some of the kids nicknames, such as the unfortunately named Gregory-Do-Nothing who was called that all year although the only reason he did nothing was because he was straight up off-the-boat and didn’t speak a word of English.  Incidentally, she was fairly fluent in his native language but would never admit to it.

The back corner of our classroom could be made into a sort of triangular prison cell by swinging the classroom door and the closet door towards each other.  Crazy Teacher called this Siberia and would regularly stick a bad kid in there.  As there were several bad kids in our class, at one point she had to forget about Siberia and get out the big guns.  She made the three worst kids stay in the coat closet for the entire day.  This went on for probably a few weeks.  She encouraged us to throw our lunch leftovers in one of the garbage cans so that it would get rotten and smelly.  She then put the garbage inside the closet with the bad kids.  She rarely checked in on them as she was too busy scarring the rest of us for life.  Apparently the kids in the closet were having a lot more fun than the rest of us because one of them was bringing in a portable TV every day.  Rotting fruit probably seemed like a small inconvenience when you got cartoons playing all morning.

I’m sure there are other ridiculous details that my subconscious has managed to suppress.  In the meantime I think I will go eat a nice juicy hamburger.  And maybe finish that damn novel.

This month the books are The Hunger Games, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.  I should have used my break to actually read these books so I could at least comment with some intelligence.  Actually, I had read Curious Incident a few years ago but due to my early-onset senility I’ve forgotten 99.9% of it.  All I remember is that it is about some autistic kid.  Or maybe he’s not autistic.  Maybe the autistic boy was in The Last Samurai.  Not to be confused with the movie The Last Samurai which shouldn’t be confused with The Seven Samurai.  Not to be confused with The Magnificent Seven.  Wait, where was I?

Yeah, so check out Very Bookish.

So throw some at me - YA and adult, fiction and non-fiction, recent and oldies, something you really love, or warn me about something especially horrid.  I need all the help I can get.

The book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy and it has taken my head to a whole ‘nother level.  There is the style of writing and the vocabulary and the turn of phrase.  Words I’ve never heard, words whose meaning I don’t know but I somehow understand as I read because they make me feel their meaning. 

The book is about a man and his young son wandering the road after some sort of nuclear fallout.   It’s apparently been a few years so that there are little supplies and food is a very rare find.  There are some survivors, but most of them have long forgotten how to be human.  It is eat or be eaten.  The book focuses mostly on the cerebral, on the thoughts running through their heads, on the slim chance of survival in a hopeless world where ending it all would be the easy way out.  The young boy is taught that if they are attacked, he is to put the gun with it’s last remaining bullet in his mouth and pull the trigger.

With each sentence, each page, this book cuts out a tiny piece of my heart.  It has dug deep inside of me and settled in.  I want to know what happens but I don’t want it to end.  It has invaded my dreams and sent chills over my arms.  I’m more than halfway through it.  I’ll be able to sleep soon enough…if I can fall asleep when it’s done, if its haunting force ever wears off.