I cannot put this book down. After reading the second part of the novel I can’t help but wonder where it is going.

I really enjoy how this book is out of chronological order. Most of my favorite, and many of the best movies are shot this way, and I feel this is the reason that I am really glued to the pages. Vida sets us up kind of in the middle of the action. But it’s the middle of the action at two separate points in time: with her fiancé and while on the train. I am really enjoying how she slowly fills in the back-story as the present time rolls on in every other chapter. She is leaving me trying to piece things together and always wondering what’s next.

The background about her mother leaving and how she coped with it is an essential element in her character. The ability to just pick up and leave is in her blood. Her mom did it. She did it looking for her mother. It just seemed too easy. It was one of those things that just didn’t really sit well with me. I could not do that. I guess that is a gap. I have never had anyone run out on me, and I have never done it to someone else. Therefore I cannot fathom what it would feel like or how I would cope. Another thing that is just kind of eating at me was the story of her mother kissing the drunk. The author just kind of slides that in there without any real explanation. It leaves me to wonder why exactly the mother was so unhappy and so compelled to leave.

Frankly I could not believe she found her father so quickly. I thought that the journey for her father would drag out much longer than it did. I felt that the author was going to take the book in a completely different direction. My guess would have been that she finds her father late in the book after failing in the first town she tries. Then she would finally track him down and gain some vital piece of information about her mother. This info would be basically useless to the father but would help Clarissa piece everything together and find out where her mother disappeared. And now that I know that isn’t really the case, I cannot help but wonder, where is this going?

I have always considered myself a “good reader”. I do well with comprehension, I read quickly and I have read a fair amount of books. But there is one small flaw in this equation: I do not read enough anymore.
In my younger years I was a reading fanatic. I remember my first “chapter book” as we used to call them. It was a series of GI Joe World War II stories. I remember my favorite of them all. GI Joe and the Storming of Iwa Jima. It came with a toy dogtag. I loved it. From there I started reading series such as The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids and Animorphs. After that came the Harry Potter series and a few Tom Clancy novels. Simply put, I loved to read.
Once I reached about the 7th grade reading became a chore. I don’t think it was necessarily that I lost interest; it was just that feeling that if the school required a book report after I read it, I couldn’t enjoy it. For a few years, sans the Harry Potter’s every so often, my pleasure reading vanished.
High School took my view of reading and skewed it even more. After tediously studying literature in the historical context for four years, my aversion to “wasting my time reading” was stronger than ever. It was only over the summer that I ever really had a chance to enjoy reading. I read maybe one book a year that was not required. Which paled in comparison to how much I used to read.
Over my high school years I only really remember two books that I read for enjoyment. They were both highly entertaining but only moderately informational. I read Bill Murray’s book about Caddying. Entertaining as it was, I didn’t gain a whole lot of insight into the world of golf. Freakonomics became one of my favorite books though. I had yet to take actual economics class and I gained so many abstract ideas about how perceptions and stereotypes influence the economy. It kept my mind completely open while studying actual economics my senior year. That was when I realized how reading on my own could transfer into my academics and into everyday life.
I wish I could say that was the turning point in my life and I started to read like a madman, but I sadly cannot. I longed to read but I just never made time for it. I was a busy man. From 6 am to 1030 pm everyday I was occupied. High school was the busiest time of my life thus far. Reading naturally got pushed to the back of my mind. This summer I worked a lot as well. Therefore I only read sporadically, never really completing an entire book. But every time I pick up something that I am not required to read, I am reminded of how much I love it and wish that I could read more often.
I have found that I can sit at a desk and read critically and interpret what the deeper message is and so on. But I really would rather just simply sit in my bed and spend an hour or two enjoying the book. I feel that for the most part, in both high school and college, I have been reading critically and it’s basically just more of the workload. I know that reading as work is inescapable, but I would really just like to enjoy it from now on. I have read the first section of Blue Highways and I did find myself liking it. So maybe this is the start of a new era in my reading. Maybe I will look back on these novels with the fondness that I recall my childhood ones.