the irony is beautiful

I've been here for the past two hours, give or take an hour or two, trying to complete a test for my online philosophy course. I say I've been 'trying' because I lack the resources to accomplish my task and I have finally given up hope that this test will be completed this evening. It's due at 8AM tomorrow and the book I ordered for the class, which I need, is due in on Tuesday.

This lack of a book got me thinking about how much more I read over the summer than during the school year. In fact, I've read two books so far this summer. You're probably thinking 'two books? big deal!' But factor in the 50+ hour work weeks and the 12 hours a week I spend at class plus my ridiculously extravagant 5-6 hours of sleep per night, I lack the time for reading now that I have the drive to read. At school? Time is all that I have (had) while I was there. Yet, I did no reading. Relatively no reading, I at least read enough to get by where and when I needed to this past year.

Somewhere along this train of thought I happened over the brilliant idea that I should do a book review of some of my highlights. I recently went out to Border's and found the 3-fer deal going on, I got 3 books for the price of the most expensive two. I grabbed a Kurt Vonnegut, a Comparative Religions book and Jimmy Buffett's newest 'A Salty Piece of Land.'

In the vein of creative writing, Buffett starts his tale out at near the end of the book so that the majority of the read is a flashback. A useless nuance that flowed well, but I found myself confused when the transition took place from the flashback to the real part of the story. It's not a large issue since, like I said, the vast majority of the book takes place in the flashback form. Now that the negative is aside, I can get in to why I liked this book.

A Caribbean adventure from cover to cover, you go on a sailing, fishing, and well... adventuring. Buffett never gets too detailed into what could be the boring bits and pieces of sailing, though he does give enough to paint a vivid picture of life on the islands. The slow moving bits of the character's time spent as a fishing-guide were also glazed over, which deserves a tip of the hat to the author. By the end of the book I was ready to pick up and move down south to live my life to the fullest on the beautiful islands and wondrous lifestyle of the sea-going adventurer. I want my own salty piece of land, and I think that anyone reading this book will come away with the same feeling.

Whoa. I feel as if I should be saying "but don't take my word for it..." right now. "Take a look, it's in a book" and all that. Perhaps I should stick to my true to life musings if I'm to continue this endeavor. At any rate, I ought to be able to keep this up this time. Productivity is up. And that's all I have to say right now.