Review!!!

As promised this is my book review (or at least an attempt at) of You Shall Know our Velocity by Dave Eggers.

You Shall Know Our Velocity - Dave Eggers

The novel is essentially about two friends, Hand and Will, who are left $38,000 after their friend Jack dies when he is (in the most literal sense possible) run over by a truck whilst in his car. Hand and Will set out to travel to as many places in the world as possible in seven days on a mission to give out this money to the needy. This leads to a variety of hilarious and awkward senarios as the characters try and give out the money to people they know nothing about. Within this journey there is a bunch of literary metaphors all about loss and finding oneself, everything that you would probably expect from a literary novel from an author as reknowned as Dave Eggers.

Before I talk about what I thought of the book, I must confess that when I decided to write this review I soon realised that I actually wasn't sure exactly what I thought of it. The reason I had bought and read it in the first place was that I had read numerous short stories by Dave Eggers and found them to be nothing short of brilliant, all slightly off-centre stories yet edging into post-modern territory containing brilliantly clear and insightful (for want of a better word) ideas about the world. You Shall Know Our Velocity not so much. Afer I had finished reading it I thought it (or perhaps I) was missing something, so before I wrote this review I google searched some other reviews on the book and found this review which managed to articulate what I had been previously wondering. Eggers book is very good, but it doesn't seem to be up to his normal standard. The clarity and ounce of brilliance just doesn't seem to be there. Now I guess I COULD be missing something, it is a possibility but I couldn't help but be slightly disappointed with this novel after readng Eggers short stories.

That being said, I still recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading literary-type books or road-trip themed books or books about silly American males. After all I did finish the whole book. Something that doesn't occur often for me as I'm a picky reader, if I'm not interested, I won't finish it. I also highly reccomend Eggers short stories the most famous of which can be found in How We are Hungry, a collection of his short stories published by Penguin.

I hope that makes some sense but I have to stop here as I have to be at work in half an hour.

Zwei

This is fairly good, two blogs for two days. Some people would say I'm on a roll, some would just say "that's not particularly impressive, Catherine". And they may be right, but when you consider my previous blog count of recent days I think it's worth the accolades.

But enough of that indulgence, I figure I'll start off BMFA with a little summary/update on what is going on in my life. Mid-semester break has just started so we now have a "study-break" for a week in which we try and cram as much fun-stuff as possible while trying to catch-up on all the work we're behind on from the first 6-ish weeks of uni. I know there's a lot off stuff I have to catch up on especially in German, which I was kinda neglecting a bit because I had so many other assignments. The bad news about neglecting a subject that has weekly tests is that the neglect shows up fairly quickly, luckily the tests are only worth 4% and they ignore your worst one when averaging your semester mark, sooo I have a little breathing space to make it better.

In other uni news I am now only doing 3 units this semester because I withdrew from my Calculus unit because it just didn't really fit in with all my other units. I wasn't really prepared to do enough work on it to even justify doing the unit. It just means I'll have to enrol in a fourth unit next semester instead of doing just 3. I already have credit for one unit from my study last year and I could probably get more credit, but I don't really want to because it'll limit the type of 2nd year units I can do next year.

In non-uni news before Easter I went down south with a few friends for three days. It was awesome. It was just so nice to get away and not worry about uni-work, normal-work and not seeing a computer screen for three days was also fantastic. I'll write more about this trip in a later blog (and possibly include pictures!).

I also finally finished reading a book that I have been trying to finish for ages (thanks again to the trip for that too). I think I'll write another blog about that book too, it was really awesome it many ways I really like the author's style of writing. He comes up with some amazing observations and ideas. The book's called You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers is a fairly well-reknowned author especially famous for his short stories which are nothing short of amazing, if I do say so myself.

I think that's enough for today.
See you all soon! (well not really)