December's Books & The Book of the Year

Happy New Year to all! I hope you all had a lovely holiday. Mine was quite pleasant, especially since I get the week between Christmas and New Year's off from work. Happy Happy Joy Joy!

I only read two books in December as it was taken up with knitting, as usual for December. I watched a lot more movies, but I want to dedicate one entire post to the books because the one was too important, I feel, to get passed over, as I'm sure it would be, if it were part of a super long post.

My dear friend GtG gave me the book Three Cups of Tea for my birthday and it had been a book I had seen before and contemplated buying, but hadn't yet. I can't even begin to tell you how much I loved this book. Words fail me. It's the story of Greg Mortenson who in the early 90s failed in an attempt to climb K2, got lost coming down the mountain and wandered into a little Pakistani village which took care of him. He promised that one day he would come back and build them a school as they didn't have one.

He talks about how he went about typing on a typewriter 200 letters to various people asking for money to help build this school. He was living out of his car to save money while working as an emergency room nurse. The amount of money needed was a paltry sum (if I remember correctly, $12,000) when you think about constructing a building of any type.

It talks about his travails in acquiring supplies in Pakistan, getting said supplies to this little village, and how they had to first build a bridge, etc. There is also the time he got kidnapped and held hostage for a period of time by tribes known to be quite brutal, but once they heard he was in Pakistan building schools for girls, they let him go.

This book shows that the way to defeat terrorism is NOT with warfare and bombings, but by buildings schools which have a balanced curriculum. One of the reasons there are so many suicide type terrorists coming out of Pakistan these days is the rich, ultra-right wing branch of Islam is building huge schools in Pakistan and indoctrinating them in their own brand of Islam. The last few years three of my friends and I have chosen not to exchange gifts, but to donate to each others' charity of choice. I had chosen Nothing but Nets for the second year in a row, until I read this book and changed it to the Central Asia Institute in time for my third friend to donate, because I believe in Greg Mortenson's way of fighting terrorism.

I want to buy this book for every person I know and have them read it and pass it along to everybody they know.

The other book I read was The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I had bought this before The Zombieslayer gave it a bad review. And I think his review helped in that I wasn't expecting much. I ended up appreciating the book. I'm not sure I believe in its message, which I think was essentially "Go for your dreams." Not that that's a bad message, but I'm not going to be selling my sheep and traveling to Tangiers, anytime soon. I did, however, quite like the little twist in the ending, and I laughed out loud. My copy of the book included some questions for discussion at the end and they made me realise that I read for fun these days and not for analytical purposes. Life's too short to answer philosophical questions about books. I believe in reading one and moving on to the next one.

I think you all can probably figure out that Three Cups of Tea is the book of the month. It is also Book of the Year with damn near no competition.