The Rosie Project: A Novel by Graeme Simsion (2013)

Pink Sweetheart Roses. Source: muffet1 via deviantart

You know when you stay up super late because you started a book, and you just have to finish it before going to bed?

It’s almost 1 a.m. local time, and I just finished this book. I’m still processing. I can’t sleep yet, so I figured I’d blog about it instead.

You know when a book is so good that as soon as you’ve read the last page, you want to flip it over and start from the beginning again? Even though you figured out the plot twist halfway through and you know how the story ends?

I have to work in the morning, so I can’t re-read this right away. But it’s still a newbie at the library, and pretty popular (and for good reason) so it’s only a seven-day loan. Which gives me ’til Saturday. I only started this book on my lunch break today, so I’ve got plenty of time to re-read it before it goes back to the library. Maybe even twice.

The Rosie Project just reminds me so much of ME, and it reminds me so much of SO MANY PEOPLE I KNOW, and it’s like it explains so many things about the human condition, and yet I’ve got more questions now than I did before. I kind of teared up at one little section towards the end, and I don’t know why, of all the scenes or sentences or phrasings, that was the section my brain went for.

More questions to answer. More thoughts to ponder. Not sure if I’ll fall asleep with my brain on like this… maybe I’ll start re-reading Rosie again right now. (Rosie is the name of one of the main characters, by the way.)

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M.E. Thomas (2013)

I actually finished this book last week, but it’s been stewing in my brain for a while… I described it to a friend as “more interesting than good”, but now I think maybe I was just being judgemental.

I always like reading get-inside-my-head type stories, but I was uncomfortable inside this person’s head. (M.E. Thomas is a pseudonym; she gave a lot of details about herself without any of them being too specific. I wonder if anyone who read this knew her and figured out who she was?) I like to think I’m a nice person, but some of the things the author said and did were not so dissimilar from myself. And since sociopaths or psychopaths are supposed to be the worst of the worst (rapists, murderers, liars, thieves, …) this was unnerving.

But I think this is exactly M.E.’s point — how different are we all, really? I mean, the first chapter is called “I’m a Sociopath and So Are You”. Everything and everyone is on a spectrum; it’s just that most of us think we’re on the ‘good’ end, while people like her are on the bad end. But then she describes her life as a powerful lawyer and a law professor, and tells stories that illustrate how much she really does love her nieces and nephews, and you think, huh. Maybe she’s not so bad, and maybe I’m not so good.

This is the forum for sociopaths on M.E. Thomas’s blog that she started back in 2008, before she wrote this book.