Louder Than Words by Jenny McCarthy

I admit that I was skeptical when I read my first Jenny McCarthy book, Mother Warriors. Somehow her illustrious career (Singled Out, WWE, and movies like The Stupids, BASEketball and Scary Movie 3) didn't instill in me the confidence that she would be able to write well. I had heard that her pregnancy humor book Belly Laughs was crude but funny.

Now having read both Mother Warriors and Louder than Words, I can say that these books far exceeded my low expectations. Were they Pulitzer Prize-worthy? No. Did I sometimes cringe at McCarthy's salty humor and language? Yes. But overall, what came out of these books was the idea of a mom, not the persona McCarthy has created for herself, who was fighting for her kid and trying everything possible to make him better.

I picked up Mother Warriors first (back in 2008, which is why I am not counting it on my list) and read it cover to cover in about a day. The writing isn't spectacular but the stories of parents dealing with their childrens' autism diagnoses in different ways is touching. Louder Than Words was McCarthy's first book about autism, and was written two years after her son Evan was diagnosed. It is primarily a story of Jenny's prolonged battle to try as many different and possibly effective treatments as possible for Evan, from traditional behavioral therapies to chelation and GFCF diets. Jenny feels vindicated when Evan starts to improve, even as she is making tremendous personal sacrifices to provide for him. Evan's diagnosis eventually contributes to the collapse of Jenny's marriage to Evan's dad.

Jenny's book provides an interesting look at one side of the autism "debate" over whether non-traditional therapies work and whether vaccines harm children. McCarthy is very much in the camp that belives in both those things, along with some pediatricians (known collectively as the Defeat Autism Now! doctors). The other side of the autism coin is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA, the CDC and even some non-profits like Autism Speaks, and says that autism is primarily gentic and cannot be cured. Children who receive applied behavioral therapy can improve greatly but cannot be cured.

All in all Louder Than Words is a great personal story and good reading. Parents of children with autism who are interested in DAN! doctors and non-traditional therapies might benefit more from reading Mother Warriors, whose back chapters list an impressive collection of resources.

Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.

The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When they come in the hosue I'm all in a state of shock and just don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over.

This book was just over 100 pages long, which is the primary reason I read it last weekend. After spending 4,567 days (seemingly) reading The Monster of Florence, I was ready for a wham-bam-thank you ma'am kind of book. And it was on my shelf and I told myself I had to read all the books I own before I buy books again (only 78...102...something... to go!)

This book had a lot of promising reviews. One journalist compared Ellen to Holden Caulfield. I don't know about that. Ellen is 11, and Holden wanted to get with Sally. Ellen is self-sufficient and basically raises herself for a while, and Holden got kicked out of school. Ellen is desperately poor and Holden likes to tom-cat around New York City talking to prostitutes. If Ellen met a prostitute, she'd never get bullied into paying more than $5. Especially if all they did was talk.

Gibbons' story begins with the passage above. Ellen's drunkard of a father bullies her mother, who dies early in the book from stress and a preexisting heart condition. Ellen is perfectly content to live in her house, shopping and cooking for herself, until her father starts to hit her and his drunken friends start to notice her young body. When teachers notice her bruises and the truth comes out, Ellen embarks on a journey to belong somewhere permanently. After noticing a mismatched family at church that other members refer to as "the foster family" Ellen decides that is the one for her. She starts signing her papers "Ellen Foster" thinking that "the foster family" is "the Foster family."

Okay so full disclosure: I'm very tired and kind of drunk and there's a game on TV. This short, disjointed review is due in large part to those factors. Good night and good luck.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

These were history's gifts to my family--and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now life a lofe of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?

This is the first book I've ever read by Gladwell, although I'm pretty sure he's something of a big deal in the literary scene these days. I bet Oprah is a fan. Outliers started out a little dangerous for my tastes. The impression I got from the first chapter was that people are successful because they're lucky and their circumstances facilitate their rise to the top. Now me, I'm a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps type of guy. I was pretty irritated by the first couple of pages. Subsequent chapters make it clear that Gladwell actually thinks (and statistics show) that success comes from those who are lucky enough to find themselves in a situation where great success is possible and then work harder than everybody else in that same fortunate circumstance.

My only real complaint about Outliers is that it didn't seem to have any clear direction. I get that Gladwell is trying to explain all these statistical outliers, but he kinda just bounces all over the place and only ties the different sections together very loosely.

I don't have too much to say about Outliers besides that I think its interesting enough, well-written enough, and short enough that there really isn't any excuse not to read it. Oh, I'll say that Gladwell's explanation for why Asians are so much better at math than me (and my like) was very cool. And surprisingly not racist. Check it out.

Highlights: Explaining how Koreans are really good at math but really bad at not crashing airplanes
Lowlights: Making me feel like I could never play professional hockey not matter how hard I tried.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get hurt, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

As soon as I saw heard that Neil Gaiman had written a book called American Gods, I knew I had to read it. I'm not a particularly rabid Gaiman fan. In fact, aside from this novel the only work of his I'd read was the sinister short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" (which I highly recommend, you can find it online and read it in about 15 minutes). But I really like Gaiman's writing style and I'm obsessed with all things mythology. American Gods did not disappoint.

The story follows Shadow, a man recently released from prison after three years of incarceration. Shadow is released a day early after being informed of the death of his wife. On his way home back to Indiana, Shadow meets Wednesday, a man that would throw Shadow headfirst into a battle between the Gods of old and the Gods of new. When I say 'the Gods of New,' I mean modern society's deities. Our worship of the internet, of fast food, of highways, of television, etc. Essentially, American Gods is a story about America, a land of immigrants. Immigrants who brought with them tales and legends of Leprechauns and Ifrits. American Gods asks the question: "If every time a new people came to the New Land they brought their pantheon of Gods with them, what would happen to those relocated deities in a time and a place without faith?"

I thought the idea of foreign Gods wandering around America trying to make lives for themselves after losing all their worshippers was a brilliant idea. I often wonder what it's like for a country like Egypt, where thousands of years ago polytheism ruled the land but now the Bast's and the Osiris's have fallen from worship to become tall tales like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill.

I really enjoyed this book from start to finish. Gaiman introduces Gods from all different regions in interesting, often appropriate fashions. Shiva as a prostitute, Anubis as a mortician, Loki as a con-man. The dialogue is clever and sharp. It's a very trippy plot, bouncing back and forth between POVs and timelines, dealing with deaths and resurrections and reincarnations. Gaiman manages to keep things on an even keel, however, and the conclusion is more or less satisfying in tying up the two dozen or so loose ends created in the narrative. I should mention also that there's a really well done murder mystery subplot set in the all-too-peaceful town of Silver Lake, Michigan. A small girl disappears and Shadow is asked to help in the search. That's about all I can say without giving too much away, but its a really interesting subplot with a satisfying ending.

Like I said, I'm a mythology nut, so this book was almost tailor-made for me. I'll still recommend it to anyone who'll listen though because its a well put together story with interesting characters and a memorable plot.

Highlights: Odin, Mad Sweeney, the Silver Lake subplot, murder by vaginal mastication
Lowlights: No Greek/Roman gods, a little too much Deus Ex Machina... But I suppose that makes sense all things considered.

Ironweed by William Kennedy

That scab was the first man Francis Phelan ever killed. His name was Harold Allen and he was a single man from Worcester, Massachussetts, a member of the IOOF, of Scotch-Irish stock, twenty-nine years old, two years of college, veteran of the Spanish-American War who had seen no combat, an itinerant house painter who found work in Albany as a strikebreaker and who was now sitting across the aisle of the bus from Francis, dressed in a long black coat and a motorman's cap.

Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen's eyes put to Francis.

Ironweed is a prime example of the letdown of strong memories; some books you think of very highly at one point in your life only to find upon re-reading them that, though still good, they don't live up to the way you remember them.

Francis Phelan is an ex-ballplayer, an ex-father, and an ex-husband, but he is currently a bum. He has returned to the Albany his youth with his bum ladyfriend Helen, to do bum things like taking small jobs and drinking and sleeping in old ruined cars and drinking. This is the time of the Great Depression, and Phelan's condition is unexceptional; he lives in a subterranean bum culture where he knows everyone and is known by everyone. Francis has no illusions about the cause of his poverty: He is his own downfall. But he is also the downfall of others, and on this pair of days in Albany--Halloween and All Saints' Day--he finds himself being followed by those whose death he has caused in his life. None of these murders is indefensible--the killing of the scab was (mostly) unintentional; another bum he killed when attacked; a horse thief he simply failed to pull onto a moving train-car before he was shot in the back. And yet they are attached to Francis in death nonetheless.

The most significant of these is his son Gerald, whom he dropped as an infant, a crime for which Francis has not forgiven himself and which caused him to leave home. Gerald does not follow Francis around, but they "meet" in the beginning of the book, when Francis visits the graveyard:

In his grave, a cruciformed circle, Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting. Should he absolve the man of all guilt, not for the dropping, for that was accidental, but for the abandonment of the family, for craven flight when the steadfast virtues were called for? Gerald's grave trembled with superb possibility. Denied speech in life, having died with only monosyllabic goos and gaahs in his vocabulary, Gerald possessed the gift of tongues in death...

Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.

Perhaps Francis sees his life as a slow death, inching aimlessly toward the grave that others keep falling into. But perhaps it is through the bum's life--the sickness, the hunger, the decreptitude--that Francis is unconsciously repaying the immensity of his sins. Late in the book Francis revisits the house of his estranged wife, and looks on as the collected souls he has killed build a set of bleachers in the yard. Though Francis' steps toward rehabilitation are small and they seem to come without premeditation, we are invited to see them as a grand finale in which wrongs finally become righted. There is a strong undercurrent of Catholicism in Ironweed, and this is a particularly Catholic idea: To be of a bum is to wear a hairshirt for decades; forty years of saying "hail-mary."

Bits like the ones I quoted above keep the novel interesting, but they are ponderous and Ironweed never seems to come up for air. Even in Francis' rehabilitation the sense of loss is crushing, and Kennedy's slow, genealogically detailed style makes it sometimes a difficult slog. One exception is a long chapter in which we follow Helen, who has left Francis to fend for himself, as she does what bums do all day: wander and scrounge for food. Without the troop of the dead following the narrative, it becomes lighter and more fluid, and perhaps Helen is just more genuinely likeable than Francis. And I think perhaps the conceit of the dead physically following a man around is too doggedly literal; Kennedy shows Francis his ghosts to remind him that they are there, but they are given awfully little to do and too often seem untethered to present events.

Thinking back on the book now, after having put it down for about a week, perhaps my initial thoughts were unfair: Ironweed has a lot to think about, probably more for me now than it did in high school. And yet, I don't think I'll be picking it up a third time.

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

"Tell me about this Monster of Florence."
"You've never heard of him?"
"Never."
"Isn't the story famous in America?"
"It's completely unknown."
"That surprises me. It seems...an almost American story. And your own FBI was involved - that group Thomas Harris made so famous, the Behavioral Science Unit. I saw Thomas Harris at one of the trials, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. They say he based Hannibal Lecter on the Monster of Florence."
Now I was really interested. "Tell me the story."

The Monster of Florence, co-written by Douglas Preston, an American crime writer, and Mario Spezi, an Italian journalist, sounds intriguing from the very first page. And for the first third of the book, it mostly is. The book is written from the first-person perspective of Preston, and in the first part of the book, he focuses on Spezi's experience with the case. Mario Spezi has been researching and writing out the Florentine serial killer since the "first" killing in the 1970s.

The killer had an unusual modus operandi - he would prey upon couples having sex in parked vehicles in the Tuscan countryside. He typically crept up to the window of the car, shot the male to incapacitate (and kill) him and then killed the female. He would then drag his female victims out of the car and mutilate them before leaving the bodies out in the open. The killer would make unusual and calculated cuts on the females. At first he removed their vaginas, and in the later killings, sometimes a breast too. It was speculated that the killer had surgical experience based on the precision of the injuries, as well as a deep-seated hate of the female gender.

Spezi was called to the scene of the first discovered crime in the mid-1970s and became fascinated and horrified by the crime. Later, an earlier killing of the same type was linked to this and the legend of a serial killer stalking Florence was born. The Monster of Florence killed 8 couples during his reign, mostly young unmarried Italian couples living at home who parked on dark country roads for a little privacy on the weekends.

The first third of the book focuses on the killings themselves, the feelings and tensions in Florence during the 10 year reign of the Monster, and Spezi's experiences with the investigations of each killing. As the book moves chronologically into the future however, it loses focus. Rather than remaining a tightly wrapped narrative, Preston starts to incorporate a host of characters, one after another. The four page long "Cast of Characters" at the book's beginning should have warned me that this would happen. The Monster case was the largest and most involved criminal case investigated in Florence up to that time. As more and more investigators, prosecutors and laymen became involved and were introduced by Preston, the book began to plod.

Preston and Spezi devote most of their time in the last half of the book to describing the various trials and generally terrible theories that the Italian criminal justice system can come up with to explain how their arrested suspects could have masterminded or participated in the killings. At the end of the book, when they themselves are accused of obstruction of justice and actually particpating in a coverup of the crimes, it does not give the book the jolt of energy it so desperately needs.

This was a slow read. While I buzzed through the first half of the book in a few days, the second half was painfully dull. The more cockamamie characters Preston and Spezi introduced, the less interested I was in the outcome of the criminal trials.

The Monster of Florence does not have the characteristically tight dramatic writing style of a legal thriller but then neither does it have the necessary excitement of a crime drama. It would be hard to characterize this book as anything other than disappointing.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

At dawn, a juggernaut of thunder wheeled over the stony heavens in a spark-throwing tumult. rain fell softly on town cupolas, chuckled from rainspouts, and spoke in strange subterranean tongues, beneath the windows where Jim and Will knew fitful dreams, slipping out of one, trying another for size, but finding all cut from the same dark, mouldered cloth.

In the rustling drumbeat, a second thing occurred:

From the sodden carnival grounds, the carousel suddenly spasmed to life. Its calliope fluted up malodorous steams of music.

I had never read Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I have good memories of reading Ray Bradbury's short stories as a boy, including two other books tangentially related to this one, The Illustrated Man and Dandelion Wine. Then, a year or so ago, I happened to pick up Fahrenheit 451, which I had never read. It was good, I thought, if a little scattershot. But I was disappointed by one of the appended stories, "The Veldt," which I remembered fondly but upon returning seemed shallow and artless. I figured I had overestimated Bradbury as a teenager, biased by a love of speculative fiction.

For that reason, I was blown away by Something Wicked This Way Comes, which, along with Dandelion Wine, I had always thought of as juvenile fiction--and true, Something Wicked seems like it might appeal to a particularly bright kid, as it embodies a lot of what is at the heart of childhood: a sense of immortality and limitless fantasy, coupled with an ironic desire to be older. But it is also about nostalgia, and the desire of adults to have what they lost by leaving their childhood. Also the prose, while bold and full of strong visual imagery like you expect from YA fiction, has a certain obtuse flair that kids might find hard to follow, but that really makes the book enjoyable for an adult reader.

Macbeth's witches provide the title: "By the pricking of my thumbs / something wicked this way comes." That "something wicked" is a carnival, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, populated by a number of freaks: the ancient and mummified fortuneteller called Dust Witch, the human skeleton, the dwarf, and the Illustrated Man, Dark himself, who is covered head-to-toe in tattoos--tattoos which we find represent the souls trapped in bondage by the evil carnival. Cooger and Dark have travelled the world with evil intent for centuries, kept in stasis by a carousel that can age a rider forwards or backwards, depending on the way it is ridden.

Two boys, Jim and Will, discover the carnival's secret and set out to destroy it, in typical fashion. Will is horrified by the carnival, but Jim is seduced by the idea of the carousel. I love Bradbury's descriptions of Jim's character:

Waiting, his eyes were dark as twilight, with shadows under the eyes from the time, his mother said, he had almost died when he was three and still remembered. His hair was dark autumn chestnut and the veins in his temples and brow and in his neck and ticking in his writsts and on the backs of his slender hands, all these were dark blue. He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smilled less as the years increased.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years worth of taking in the laundry of the world.

Jim is "marbled with dark." That says it all, doesn't it? Jim's counterpoint is Will's father, Charles Halloway, who works at the local library and longs to recapture the magic of youth. Dark's carousel, of course, provides that opportunity, but at a tremendous cost. A lesser book would present this as a conflict of conscience, where Charles is forced to choose between youth and the safety of his son, but Bradbury is wisely content to present Charles as a man who has no doubts when it comes to helping his son, but aware of his own temptations all the same.

Though Will and Jim are its heroes, some of the most powerful passages in the book come from Charles:

His wife smiled in her sleep.

Why?

She's immortal. She has a son.

Your son, too!

But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones, own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terrible mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

I love that. That passage alone rehabilitates Bradbury for me, and I think I'm going to have to revisit Dandelion Wine in the near future. All in all, this is one book I am glad that I stole from school.

Beep Your Horn for HIV Prevention by Peace Corps Cameroon

I'll keep this short because I know I'm basically just begging for alms. Some of you already know that I'm a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. I'm working with other volunteers in the West Province on an HIV/AIDS education conference next month. We're targeting motorcycle taxi drivers. Moto drivers are usually young men (20s to early 30s) who make up a sizable portion of the population and have unfettered access to the people of the village/town/city. This mobile population is highly implicated in both the transmission and prevention of HIV, and yet it is often overlooked when it comes to HIV prevention education. Imagine doing a nation-wide college lecture circuit on the dangers of binge drinking... but not inviting any of the frat houses to attend.

Anyway, if you'd like more information about the project or to make a donation (any small amount would be hugely appreciated) then just follow this link to the donation form.

Also if you guys could, in the comments section, mention that you saw this on fiftybooks.blogspot.com so I can properly thank you guys after all the money is in. Thanks again and God bless you all.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

"Katniss, it's just hunting. You're the best hunter I know," says Gale.
"It's not just hunting. They're armed. They think."
"So do you. And you've had more practice. Real practice," he says. "You know how to kill."
"Not people," I say.
"How different can it be, really?" says Gale grimly.
The awful thing is that if I can forget they're people, it will be no different at all.

Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12 of Panem, the dictatorship that rose from the ashes of the United States. The Capitol of Panem is surrounded by 12 districts, which it rules with an iron fist, a "fist" that obliterated the revolutionary District 13. District 12 mines coal, and seems to would no doubt at one time been called Apalachia. As a reminder of its power, the Capitol hold the annual Hunger Games. Two teenagers are chosen from each district to fight to the death in a place referred to as "the arena." The last man or woman standing gets to live out the rest of his or her life in relative luxury. Katniss little sister is chosen during this draft, but Katniss volunteers to go in her stead. The other teenager "reaped" from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, who has a bit of history with Katniss. Of course, this is someone who Katniss must view with a kill-or-be-killed mentality.

This book is equal parts: Running Man, Survivor, and Lord of the Flies, with just a dash of teenage romance. The relationship between Katniss, Peeta, and her "friend" from District 12, Gale fits into the YA fiction model. That is to say, it is not very interesting, nor noteworthy. The action that takes place within the arena, however, is worth mentioning. The book is incredibly violent. Blood is nearly its own character. Children are impaled, stung to death, and eaten alive -- not by other contestants, cannibalism is one of the few no-nos in the Hunger Games.

The novel reads quickly, in large part because there are no flourishes to Collins prose. It is fairly straight forward and to the point. Most of the plot moves rapidly, mimicking the pace of its characters as they attempt to outrun and outsmart each other. The second half slows down a bit, with Katniss trying to nurse Peeta back to health. I am sure that Collins was trying to make a statement about the effects of violence and war on children, but there was not enough psychological development of her characters for this to be effective. There were some minor plot points that I simply had to look over. For example, these "games" were supposedly televised to the entire country of Panem, but at no point does Katniss mention seeing a camera. There were other similar plot devises that while annoying did not have a huge effect on my enjoyment of the book.

For YA fiction, this was pretty good.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is about a seagull named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is also full-length feature film, and an accompanying soundtrack by Neil Diamond (no joke). It took me all of 30 minutes to read, and I almost feel bad counting it, but, hey, it looks like a book, it quacks like a book, and I need to catch up.

He was alive, trembling ever so slightly with delight, proud that his fear was under control. Then without ceremony he hugged in his forewings, extended his short, angled wingtips, and plunged directly into the sea. By the time he passed four thousand feet he had reached terminal velocity, the wind was a solid bleating wall of sound against which he could move no faster. He was flying now straight down, at two hundred fourteen miles per hour. He swallowed, knowing that if his wings unfolded at that speed he'd be blown into a million tiny shreds of seagull. But the speed was power, and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull decides that he wants more out of life than eating and fighting for food scraps. He devotes all of his time to mastering the art of flying, so much that he's cast out of The Flock. He spends his entire life perfecting every element of flying just for the joy of it, then dies, only to find that his devotion in life to a higher calling earned him a place in the next world, full of its own challenges to be conquered. Ultimately, he realizes that his true place is helping others out of their trapped mindsets in The Flock, and becomes a sort of seagull messiah, leading other seagulls (like Fletcher Lynd Seagull, Henry Calvin Seagull, and William Martin Seagull) from ignorance into light.

In case you can't tell, this is a seagull-themed self-help book. It has some great sentiments, but they can all really just be boiled down to "be true to yourself." This book bothered me for the same reason that Ishmael bothered me. Daniel Quinn and Richard Bach both came up with a semi-philosophical treatise, and instead of publishing it outright, they drape it in some unnecessary anthropomorphic animal story, which is borderline patronizing. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a more inventive character, and a fuller one, than Ishmael, whose explanation of how he came to be able to communicate telepathically was "I can't recall, but let me tell you about some hunter-gatherers." I think Quinn did it because his premise is completely impractical and impossible and smells a bit like eugenics. Bach probably needed a seagull because his self-help goes from warm and obvious to just plain silly. Here's his plan as told through Jonathan Livingston: do what you love most (yeah), ignore your limitations (got it), pass on to the next world and master teleportation and time travel (wait, what).

I know a lot of people love this book, so if you think I got it wrong you should just take the 20 minutes to read it. Seriously, this thing is the size of a postcard, has two inch margins, huge font, and pictures of seagulls every two pages. Still, hard to hate a book full of pictures of seagulls, lovable scamps.