Saturday

I finished this book. It was really good.

My reading as of late has been pretty slow, I was maybe fitting in one or two books a month. So the fact that I finished this one in a week is a good sign of its quality (IMO). The language was very simple but he dealt with a lot of big ideas and struggles and the plot moved along nicely (I've never been so drawn into a game of squash).

But what I really want to talk about isn't his writing or the story at all. Instead I want to talk about this sensation I get when reading about the events surrounding nine-eleven and the Iraq war that followed. For some reason I'm adverse, or hesitant to read novels based around these events or the politics of these events. I'm not sure why exactly but it sort of feels like I'm being told, "this is how you should feel about nine-eleven." Or maybe it's all too fresh, it hasn't sat in our collective consciousnesses long enough for anything worth while and good to be written about the events. Which is really just perhaps an indication that I haven't fully digested the events and so there is some internal unspoken assumption that no one else could have made sense of it already either. Maybe a bit of "if I haven't figured it out then surely you haven't either." I don't feel this way about other major events in history (WWI, Vietnam, Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor) but that might be because I wasn't around then, so the events don't feel personal, they weren't mine. I wonder if other people feel this way about nine-eleven and if prior generations still feel this way about other historical events.