Swine Not? and Moby Dick

I will do my best to report on each book as it is read. That being said, the first week of the summer I spent computerless in a cabin in New Mexico, so I am going to do a little catch up and do the first two books finished in this single post.

Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256


First, I have to say I was a little disappointed, because I was hoping a book about a pig would be sillier. In  actuality, it was a book about a normal, single soccer mom raising her two kids and their pet pig. The chapters alternated between the point of view of the pig and one of the children. But it was just a normal family, and fairly normal situations. Not quite what I was expecting. Towards the end of the book the pig teamed up with some pigeons and it started to feel like the book I was hoping for, but it was too little too late.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville; 614


This book was also nothing that I expected, but in a good way. I thought it would be incredibly heavy and boring, an exhausting chore to get through. Not the case.

My high school English teacher once said her dark secret was she got all the way through with a masters in English having never read Moby Dick in its entirety, and I suppose that tainted my view on the book. She talked of how the long anatomical descriptions of whale anatomy and dissection were just too boring and tedious and she never got through them. I never found them to be too much, and plus each chapter is extremely short, so if you get to a part that doesn't particularly interest you, it is over soon. I suppose there are long stretches in it of no action, but I found the descriptions and that kind of thing in it very interesting. And as a bonus, I had heard from different sources that Ahab won and that the whale won, and luckily for me, I couldn't remember which source was credible and which one was my friend who claimed to have read it being a liar, so the suspense was still there.

Averaging 124 pages a day, I am in great shape to finish this list on time. 7 days in, 870 pages down.

1. Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256 
2. Moby Dick; or The Whale - Herman Melville; 870
3. The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule; 1,542 
4. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick; 1,773
5. Duma Key - Stephen King; 2,384
6. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - Alan Alda; 2,608 
7. Greenwich Killing Time - Kinky Friedman; 2,774
8. Murder in the White House - Margaret Truman; 3,009
9. Dexter in the Dark - Jeff Lindsay; 3,312
10. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky; 4,080 
11. The Taking - Dean Koontz; 4,544
12. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe; 4,753
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris; 5,025 
14. Middlemarch - George Eliot; 5,761
15. Beloved - Toni Morrison;6,036
16. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne; 6,228
17. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle; 6,368
18. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath; 6,612
19. Gadsby - Ernest Vincent Wright; 6,768
20. Pulp Fiction Selections - L. Ron Hubbard; 7,456
21. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible - James Frey; 7,856
22. Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night -Lewis Grizzard; 8,125
23. The Greek - Pierre Rey; 8,573
24. The Pleasure of my Company - Steve Martin; 8,736
25. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins; 9,200 
26. Possible Side Effects - Augusten Burroughs; 9,504
27. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote; 9,847
28. The Daybreakers - Louis L'Amour; 10,000