This weekend.

The weekend isn't even over and I've already finished the two books I wanted to read first this summer. I guess to be fair to those who are reading (from what I can tell, that's maybe two people), so far I've read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a good book, though I felt that Foer used a lot of the same elements in this book as he did in his first one, Everything is Illuminated. He did do some work in this book with art and the actual layout of the book, playing around with things that authors don't normally concern themselves with, but I still felt he didn't do many things new compared to his last book. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, to be honest. I'll probably read whatever book he comes out with next, partially because I enjoy his writing and partially because I'm curious if he's a one trick pony or not.

I just finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I had decided I wanted to start running this summer and thought what better motivation was there than a book by my favorite author? As it turns out, he writes not only about running, but a lot about writing as well. Lo and behold it just so happens to be that I also wanted to start to get back into writing this summer. This led to an odd experience while reading this book, I felt like it was written for me. I know that's self-centered but it spoke to me on many levels. Here was a man who I idolize as an author, maybe even as a person, telling me how he goes about living his life, how he goes about running and how he goes about writing his novels. I wanted to write to him, to tell him all of this, but I can't find any contact information. I realize though, I don't need to send him all of this as it doesn't mean anything to him, only to me. Simply writing it down somewhere (here) is good enough. In any case, thank you Mr. Murakami, you have yet again inspired me.

Speaking of, The Great Gatsby keeps popping up in conversation or I keep reading about someone mentioning it and I continue to ignore it. Once again this happened while reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and I've decided to stop running away from it. I read the first few chapters my junior year of high school, but then my teacher decided we didn't have enough time to spend on it and told us we didn't have to read it, so I stopped reading. Honestly, I don't remember what happened, what the writing style was like, or if I even enjoyed it. I think at that point in my life I still had a struggle with enjoying something I was forced to read. That's something that I've overcome as I've entered college. This is a really long way to say that I'm going to be reading The Great Gatsby next.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to start with a run and who knows, maybe I'll sit down at this desk and attempt to write something?