Well, I didn't finish all five, but I've got one down. 380 pages of size 10 font and single spacing. This task is going to be a tough one. I read the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair this past two weeks. I took advantage of my being sick to just lay down and read the past couple of days. It was amazing how fast you can read through a book when you have many hours of uninterrupted time.
I don't know why I picked the book. Actually, it was about two weeks ago that I went to the library to check out Chariots of Fire and just decided to look for a book to read. I wandered the aisles of the library and decided that was the book that I wanted. I wasn't looking for it specifically, but have heard about it before and had some interest in reading it.
The book is definitely not one that is a fun read. It follows the life of a Lithuanian family in their quest to find a better life in America. They found the opposite and everything went wrong. It was kindof like "Meet the Parents" meets (insert any sad movie that has people dying in it). Anything that could go wrong did.
The one thing that made the end difficult was the fact that the whole book turns into socialist propoganda for the last three chapters. It is a tough way to finish such a story, but it was Sinclair's intent to write the book for the betterment of the Socialist party. If this book were written in today's world of literature, I am sure that it would have left planty of the Socialist stuff out.
After finishing the book, Melissa and I were preparing for Bible study and came across the question of, "If you could spend some time in conversation with any person that traveled the earth in the last 1000 years, who would it be?" I thought about it for a little bit and decided it would be my great-great-great-grandfather (I think that is how many it is) that came over from Luxembourg after the Chicago Fire. I thought about the book I had just read and wondered how life was for him and his family coming to America. I can only imagine that times were tough. I have read plenty of stories that have told of very meager beginnings for immigrants to America, and I wonder what it was like for the Weis family when they got here.
Overall, I am happy I read the book. It opened my eyes to some of the things that went on in our country and I think I learned a lot from it. This is an American classic novel that I am happy that I read.
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