Prepping and Books

A friend of ours has recently gotten very into prepping, preparing for a natural disaster or the end of the world. A lot of people recently have begun to prep for the end of the world due to the whole Mayan calendar and I pretty much thought this was crazy. First of all, nobody knows when or how the world will end. It cannot be predicted as history has shown time and time again. It could end tomorrow or in another million years. Second, if the world was to end what would be the point of all that food you had stored and the bomb shelter you had built. However, natural disasters and perhaps one day even a nuke or something major, could and do happen as we've just seen with Hurricane Sandy. Plus if anything ever does happen all those people who were laughing at the preppers are going to wish they were friends with them then. Kind of like Noah's Ark. They all made fun of the crazy old man until the flood hit and they all died. Anyways so our friend, Jody, has been sending us prepackaged type meals and foods along with books on prepping and how to survive and items for use when there is no power or anything at all to use. She wants to start a blog reviewing items like this and also giving tips and advice on how to prep for whatever. Josh and I will be helping her with this and as soon as she gets the blog all set up and ready to go I will be linking this blog to that one so anyone interested can read it.

I just finished three books I've been working on for a while. I'm reading James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series and just finished the 5th book in the series. I find these books really delight the mind as it tries to unravel the mystery and the twist of events that is sure to occur by the end of each novel. I find I can hardly put them down because I so want to know what is going on and who the bad guy is and why. This one particularly gave me the heebyjeebies about trusting my life to nurses and doctors in hospitals who you never even consider are human just like me and you and yet have the power of life and death over you. You just trust they won't make mistakes and they won't abuse that power.

I also just finished Madame Bovary, a novel about a woman, Emma, who gives in to all the pleasures in life including of the flesh and ends up having several affairs and commiting suicide. I really loved how the author wrote this novel. His words are so beautiful and his descriptions of even minor details so exquisite it feels like you are right there experiencing it all firsthand and evokes emotions in even the tiniest of details in a room. However, I really disliked the main character, Emma. She was such a huge drama queen about everything. And so incredibly selfish and greedy. And she never changed. I kept waiting for her character to change and it never did. And she was brought down by it which I think is probably the point of the story but I dislike stories where you never grow to love the characters in the book or identify with them.

The third book I just finished is Utopia by Thomas More. My only reference I ever had to this book is Danielle quotes from it in the movie Ever After. It's not really a story so much as a detailed description of a "perfect" fictional society that exists in the New World. Its ideas are very communist in nature. Much of it sounds like a very peaceful and very good idea in theory. However, in actuality, I think this kind of society is impossible to achieve. And I think that is what More was trying to get at since the very title means No Man's Land.