Last Orders by Graham Swift

Last Orders is the second winner of the Booker Prize I've read in a row, after Disgrace, and later this year for my English class I'll have to read Kashuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It's about the death of Jack Dodds, the local butcher in Bermondsey, London, and his last request: that his three best friends and his son carry his ashes to the British beach of Margate and scatter them to the sea.

The book tells the story of Jack and his family and friends via flashback. Each of the characters, plus a couple of others, including his wife Amy, gets a series of short chapters in which they tell their version of events, so to speak. If a book about transporting someone's remains told with a shifting point of view sounds familiar to you, it should: That's As I Lay Dying.

But whatever. Swift doesn't crib from Faulkner directly, though he has pretty clearly lifted the plot. He does all right by it, though: the characters, who at first seem to run together like any trio of old strangers sitting in a London pub might, eventually separate themselves into quite convincing portrayals. Peculiarly, Jack is the main character of the book (while Faulkner's matriarch almost certainly wasn't), even though he is dead, because the format allows us to see him from every angle: his faults, his assets, his passions and character. Swift seems to imply that the line between existence and non-existence is not death but memory; once you are forgotten you truly cease to exist. This explains why Jack's wife Amy continues to see her mentally retarded daughter June in an institution every week, though Jack refuses to come: it's as if when Amy stops coming to see her, June will cease to exist because she is completely out of mind. Last Orders is a book keenly interested in what it means to exist at all.

This is the second book in a row I've read that dealt heavily with the theme of aging (and, by extension, death). That may be all well and good for my professor, but it seems as if the course is missing out on literature that deals with my own problems and questions. Surely these books are worth reading at any age, but I can't help but feeling that I won't be able to understand them on the deepest level for some time now. Hopefully, a very long time.

There was a movie made of this with Michael Caine. It's probably pretty boring.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace is about David Lurie, a professor at Cape Technical University who is forced to resign his post because he has an affair with one of his students. For the first half of the book, it seems like the "disgrace" of the title is describing chiefly Lurie's disgrace as he deals with being jobless and being sent to live with his daughter, a lesbian rustic who lives on the East Cape and owns a dog kennel, but the book is split in half by a moment of unspeakable violence when a trio of Africans break into their house and rape Lucy and assault David. In a way, it reminds me of the film In the Bedroom, in which what you believe the movie to be about is replaced by something much darker and more difficult in one fell swoop.

But that's really what tragic moments like that are like, I suppose: one moment your life is one way and then before you can blink it's something completely different.

This book doesn't seem like it's really meant for me; there's too much about aging. It reads like a book written for those who have to deal with the same things as Lurie: the loss of virility, the acceptance of senescence, the abandonment of previously held ambitions. Still, Coetzee's style is so plain that it's easy to connect with his characters, even ones as unlikeable as Lurie.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

I purchased Tuesdays with Morrie at the height of its popularity, while I was in an airport bookshop. I was waiting on a connecting flight, and felt kind of stupid putting a $1.50 pack of gum on my checkcard. For whatever reason, I did not read the book during my flight. (I was probably too busy eating peanuts and drinking watered- down ginger ale.) In fact, I did not read it for many years.

Earlier this evening I was sitting in my easychair, staring at the wall, trying to determine what I should read next; when a stack of books toppled over, and a few of them fell off the bookshelf. Of those mutinous books that made it to the floor, Tuesdays with Morrie was the only one that I had yet to read. I took it as a sign.

When sportswriter Mitch Albom found out that his college mentor had contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (often referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease), it had been sixteen years since he had last seen the man. He began visiting Morrie every week and discussing topics with him, such as, marriage, family, regrets, forgiveness, and death. The book is a written record of these informal interviews.

While Albom is a good writer, it is not his prose that makes this book shine, but the words of Morrie Schwartz that Albom dutifully transcribed. Morrie's thoughts and witty aphorisms were what kept me eagerly turning each page. They were entertaining, insightful, often poignant, and always candid. While discussing the fear that many people have of aging, Morrie states, "Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that your live a better life because of it."

Each chapter of the book focuses on a different Tuesday, a different topic. Sandwiched between each chapter, Albom spends a page or two reminiscing about the earlier experiences that he shared with his professor, most of which took place during Albom's time as a college student at Brandeis. Although brief, these reminiscences provide important context for the Tuesday interviews.

At pocket size and only 200 pages, the book is a quick read. But Tuesdays with Morrie's size belies its literary and emotional stature. Simply put, the book is powerful.

Since its initial publication, Tuesdays with Morrie has been read by millions of people, has been made into a feature film, and has earned the somewhat nebulous title of "modern classic." I realize that I am about a decade late in reading this book. Given Morrie's penchant for aphorisms, I think the best way to address my severe tardiness is simply, "Better late than never."