Well, that was certainly anticlimactic

...but it gave me three posts, four if you count this one.

If you were expecting something else, something more anteclimactic (if that isn’t a word, it should be), I’m sorry if you experienced a letdown. No pun intended.

If I were sorry every time someone was disappointed in something I did, I would be sorry most of the time.

I started to say I’m much better at the arts than at the sciences, but better is not the right word. Let’s just say I’m much more interested in the arts than in the sciences, and it was only fair to give the other side of my brain equal time.

Mission accomplished.

This week I read The Road, a 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy that was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Wikipedia calls it “a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed much of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on earth.” I read it in a single day, and it was interesting in a depressing, I-hope-this-never-comes-to-pass kind of way. It wasn’t clear what the cataclysm was, but a lot of ash was involved, possibly radioactive ash from worldwide nuclear war or violently-spewed-into-the-sky ash from worldwide volcanic eruptions or just the general chaos fomented upon the rest of us by the more riot-prone sections of the general public (the jack-ashes).

Last week I read The Help, a 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett about African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s. According to Wikipedia, “[t]he novel is told from the point of view of three narrators: Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children, and who has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson, an African-American maid whose back-talk towards her employers results in her having to frequently change jobs, exacerbating her desperate need for work as well as her family’s struggle with money; and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white woman and recent college graduate who, after moving back home, discovers that a maid that helped raise her since childhood has abruptly disappeared and her attempts to find her have been unsuccessful.” It took me two days to read The Help, almost as long as it took to read that sentence from Wikipedia. I consider Wikipedia’s use of the word “exacerbating” to be elitist.

There could not be two more different novels than The Road and The Help. The only similarity, to my way of thinking, is that both books have two-word titles. What if it were against the law to read anything but books with two-word titles? I’ll tell you what. You could read The Robe but not The Gospel According to Peanuts. You could read Quo Vadis but not One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. You could read Mein Kampf but not And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. You could read Little Women but not Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. You could read...well, you get the picture.

Perhaps I am beginning another of my sporadic reading cycles. Only time will tell. I have been known to go years and years without reading anything at all and then try to catch up all at once in a sudden reading frenzy.

I’m funny that way.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Helen O'Connell from the 1940s and and she’ll tell you the same thing (2:38).