Summer Reading

I have been reading a lot this summer. I don't remember reading this much since high school when I would read by the pool while working on a really great tan. (In retrospect, not such a great idea. The tanning I mean, not the reading.) Once I started this book, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, I could hardly put it down. If you like the circus, circus animals or carnivals you will enjoy this. The poor elephant reminded me a little of the one in this post.

"Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison. Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus." Excerpt from Shelfari