shoots and leaves

    As I'm currently typing this, I'm well launched into a nasty sugar high and attempting to calm myself by drinking soup from a mug with HARD ROCK NASSAU written around the handle. It's not working, and I'm still jumpy.
   Nothing truly exciting has ensued within this rather long gap of time between my most recent post and now, other than I finally passed ninth grade with a GPA of 3.7 and a final percentage of 89.4 in biology. I've also begun to enjoy reading again, having been too consumed by the Internet to sit down and actually enjoy a nice book. About a week ago I finished Catcher in the Rye, a very good--yet a conceptually confusing--book. Without taking any of the motifs or themes into account, reading the Catcher in the Rye is like reading a play-by-play manuscript of someone's life--it's quite boring. Although it was a terrific book, I found myself not feeling anything after finishing it, maybe accept pity for Holden after he resorts back home after his adventures in New York City, or maybe annoyance. I wanted to shake Holden's shoulders vigorously and shout a few vulgar words into his face by the last few pages of the book.
    I've also read Mindy Kaling's ''autobiography'' (if you've read it you'd understand why I've put autobiography in quotes), which was honestly one of the funniest books I've read. It took me two days to read it in total; Mindy does a wonderful job of breaking up the text into lists and photos so that idlers like me with a seven second attention span can easily enjoy it without feeling overwhelmed or bored. I found myself relating to quite a lot of the topics she'd discussed in her book, especially her essential checklist for All Guys and how she constantly found herself greatly distracted while writing. I wouldn't ever call it a full autobiography...I'd say it's an autobiography that had a lovechild with a self-help book, and the self-help book procreated with the first Sex and the City movie. What a mix.
   Lastly, another book I quickly read and finished was The Breadwinner, a book I was permitted to read as part of my school's summer reading program. There were originally three book choices to pick from, but I chose this one as opposed to the other ones for two obvious reasons:
1. It was the shortest choice. (170 pages? Please and thank you!)
2. It explored the topic of the reality of a young girl's life while living under the rule of the Taliban, a topic that was very intriguing and something that I wanted to further learn about.
   Although The Breadwinner was a very easy book to read and finish (in all honesty, it's probably at a fifth-grader's reading level), its storyline and plot was something you would find in a more advanced novel. The author did an excellent job of writing the book at an easy-to-understand level; she transformed the overall complicated and sinister topic of the book (Taliban rule) into something that all ages can understand and comprehend. And, the absolute optimum part of the book is that all royalties from the novel's sales go towards educating Afghan girls in Pakistani refugee camps, something I'm proud to say that I've contributed to.