Sometimes life is all about timing.

Last week I finished Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity,” which at another point in my life I think I would have really enjoyed. But for some reason I had a really hard time connecting with it in a positive way. It doesn’t have anything to do with Hornby since I’ve read and enjoyed several of his other books, but rather with how some of the elements relate to things that are going on right now.

One of the major issues is the attitude of the main character, who runs a record shop and uses the story of several past loves as a lens to explain his latest relationship issues. His attitude is awful — brooding, negative, excessively sarcastic — and one that mirrors the kind of thing I’ve been working very hard lately to eliminate from the main character in my own writing project. (Yes, I’m still writing. Maybe I’ll update soon, but it’s been rather challenging in the past month or two.)

Given that he owns a record store, it’s not surprising that music plays a big role in the story. There are musicians, endless top-5 lists of artists, albums and songs, and lots of talk about how certain songs can be closely tied to something in your memory:

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forwards, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.”

We all have those. If you’ve listened to a piece of music at any point in your life, it’s impossible to not have a few notes or a chorus bring someone or something rushing back to your mind no matter how far your brain has to reach. Sometimes that sentimentality is a good thing that elicits strong, positive emotions, but just as easily those songs can leave you shaking your head.

Books can do that too. Another thing that I think skewed my experience with this book was the name of one of the recurring characters. Seeing it over and over again rang notes that brought me back to a situation I once had such fond memories of, but which has since been tainted by a flood of negativity. It’s hard to change those associations.

This was also one of those books that somehow ended up with a lot of dog-eared pages by the time I finished, but looking back at those pages I have no idea why I marked them. I should really start taking notes as I read. I’ll end with one that doesn’t really need any explanation:

“I can see everything once it’s already happened — I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.”

You meet someone for the first time. They’re attractive, nice to everyone around them, have a really engaging personality, and seem like they could succeed at absolutely anything they try. In a word, they’re perfect.

You set this person up on a mantle, an object of envy, someone you wish you could be like. They have it all together in ways you don’t feel like you do.

But as you get to know them more, you see the cracks, those little flaws that bring them down from that cloud of seeming perfection. And yet, you find that as you see more of those nuances the person seems even better than you initially thought. There’s a more colorful story there, one that shoots through the highs and lows of life instead of cruising along at a constant one-note level.

As a character in Helen Simonson’s “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” puts it, “Everyone needs a few flaws to make them real.”

The story follows Major Pettigrew, a retired British army officer who lives in a small town characterized by proper social structures and country club attitude. The Major at once embraces the old set as a defense of traditional British ways against modern excess while also bristling at the lack of progress in cultural acceptance.

The Major strikes up a friendship with a Pakistani woman who runs a sort of convenience store in town, a relationship that brings out more than a few off-handed less-than-enlightened comments from his friends and country club colleagues. As they connect into a deeper and deeper friendship, the Major (a widower) and Mrs. Ali (a widow) find an unexpected renewal of the types of feelings they thought had long ago left their lives for good.

But life isn’t perfect, and when circumstances surrounding Mrs. Ali’s family force her to leave town, the Major is left to discuss the disappointment with a neighbor who pushes him to reach out to her and make sure she knows how he feels:

“You miss her,” she said. “You are not happy.”

“It is a moot point,” he said. “She made her choice very clear. One feels quite powerless.”

Whether it’s a slow realization or an overt rejection, this is one of the worst feelings we can experience. You care for someone who decides they don’t want you as that part of their life. They make a choice and you can’t help but feel powerless as they leave you wondering what it is about you that makes it so easy for them to say “no thanks.”

But sometimes we can save ourselves from that fate, or protect ourselves from that disappointment, if only we pay attention to the subtle and not-so-subtle signs, no matter at what stage a relationship may be. The Major, comforting his son who just had a fight with his girlfriend, offers some wisdom that a girl — or two, or 283 — in my past could identify with:

“You are not the first man to miss a woman’s more subtle communication,” he said. “They think they are waving when we see only the calm sea, and pretty soon everybody drowns.”

It’s really a sweet story about the Major and Mrs. Ali, the Major and his son, Mrs. Ali’s family, and how all of them interact in a community of differing goals, standards and ideas of how the world should work.

I’ll end with one of the Major’s many nuggets of wisdom: “But we, who can do anything, we refuse to live our dreams on the basis that they are not practical.”

[Note: I realize this is the kind of post some people may read too much into. Don’t.]

I can unequivocally say I have just finished the strangest book I will ever read.

I’ve written about some that were tough to get through, but this is something else entirely. It’s one thing to not be totally clear what’s going on with the plot, but usually you at least know who the characters are and have some sense of what they are working towards.

In Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler” you are the main character. That’s right, he starts the first chapter by saying “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”

The chapters then alternate between you reading the text(s) and your increasingly frantic quest to track down a complete copy of this book, and then another, and then another. The first book has a printing error, and each successive time you’re reading the first chapter of a new book that has its own error — and isn’t the one you thought it was — and then trying to find its remainder.

Confused? I think that’s the point. Calvino wants you to stop thinking so much about the ABCs of standard storytelling and look for something else in the text.

After a while this whole process becomes kind of comical. You know you’re reading what will only be the first part of a story, and yet, each one is so engaging you forget for a few pages and are genuinely disappointed when the chapter ends and you realize you have to move on to a new story and new characters.

This is a book about reading — the process, what we look for in a story and what we get out of the act itself. The “books” have nothing to do with one another, but taken together they still represent something.

Usually when I go to write about a book I first go to each of the dog-earred pages, find the section I think I wanted to reference and type it out here. I always include a notation of the speaker in case I need it later. In this case, I didn’t even try to figure out who was talking since the characters are so nebulous.

Again, no idea who said this, but I think it’s an excellent message about how even the smallest experience long ago can play a part in what we do and experience today:

“And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day…I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life.”

Calvino also talks about reading in the same way, that books don’t exist in a vacuum:

“Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings.”

Everything you read builds upon what came before it and creates a bigger story. You and I may have read a lot of the same books, but not all of the same ones. Therefore your “book” is different from mine and affects your next bit of reading in a different way than it would affect me.

That quote is from “a fourth reader,” who is just the fourth person to speak at this table full of people who are reading. That just distinguishes them from the “third reader” and the “second reader.” These are not be confused as being linked in any way to “The Reader” (you) or “The Other Reader” (a girl you meet at a bookstore while trying to find a correct copy of the first book). I told you this book wasn’t “normal.”

While I was reading this book my friend Regan posted on Twitter about a slight issue she had with her own reading:

Having turned the page on three or four now-interrupted stories, I could somewhat sympathize. Even one of Calvino’s characters (the reader, not THE The Reader, but another the reader, ugh) laments that kind of disjointed experience:

“I am forced to stop reading just when they become most gripping. I can’t wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me.”

But we can also have that same kind of experience with complete books. A single book can change over time, as we change and then go back to it for another reading. Like the quote about small things building up into our “overall life” we approach a repeat reading from a different place, and thus are open to new emotions and interpretations.

The third reader (from the same group as the fourth reader above) isn’t sure if he is changing or if it is the act of reading itself which is just inherently unrepeatable:

“At every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern?”

I’m definitely reading a more standard text next, but glad I made it through this one. Not often you read something so very different.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Dave Eggers’ “Zeitoun” but for a multitude of reasons — mainly laziness — I neglected to post about it.

It’s the story of a family living in New Orleans during Katrina, and really about the experience of the father before, during and after the storm. If you’ve read Eggers’ “What Is The What” you’ll recognize the same style of exploring complex issues connected to a historical event through one person’s eyes.

It’s one of those stories that really shows how quickly we can move on and consume the next event without stopping to fully examine what just happened. We’re all sort of familiar with the broad strokes of Katrina — the rooftop rescues, the nightmare at the Superdome, the broken levees — but it’s what people like Zeitoun saw and were subjected to in New Orleans that really give the situation its gravity.

I don’t want to get much into the story and spoil things, so I’ll just mention a somewhat relevant quote that pretty well sums up how I’m feeling about my own project:

“It’s so slow sometimes, so terribly so sometimes, but progress is being made…If he can picture it, it can be. This has been the pattern of his life: ludicrous dreams followed by hours and days and years of work and then a reality surpassing his wildest hopes and expectations.”

What makes mystery fiction compelling is finding out who did it. What makes true crime stories interesting is knowing not only what happened and who did it, but that the writer has an entire book to tell you how and why.

I wrote last month about the experience of walking past certain books over and over thinking that I really should read them someday, but never actually picking them up. Add Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” to the list of books I can’t believe I didn’t read before now, despite considering it for years.

The story is about the murder of a small-town Kansas family, the Clutters, who were shot inside their home at night. Capote, a writer from New York, saw a brief story about the killing in a newspaper and went to Kansas to research what became an exhaustive account of the murder, investigation and resulting trial.

Capote tells you pretty much right away that the family is dead. Shortly after he tells you who did it. In crime fiction, you would have little reason to keep reading. But what is masterful about Capote’s work is the way he reveals just how the murders were committed and how the suspects were captured.

The reader is omniscient in the sense that we know for sure the suspects are guilty, but we only learn many of the details as the investigators do. That creates this sense that, like the townspeople, we want the police to figure out the how and why as quickly as possible. We want to know just like the people who live down the street from a horrific unsolved murder.

It wasn’t the kind of story that led to a lot of dog-eared items for me to expound upon, but I do have two items.

The first comes from the description of Nancy Clutter’s bedroom. She is the teenage daughter in the family of four.

“A cork bulletin board, painted pink, hung above a white-skirted dressing table; dried gardenias, the remains of an ancient corsage, were attached to it, and old valentines, newspaper stories, and snapshots of her baby nephew…”

When I was a senior in high school, I had a locker just a few down from my friend Kristen, who lived in my neighborhood and caught a ride with me to school. Early in the year I saw her put a red rose upside down in the back of her locker. I made some sort of comment about why she would put it in there to just let it die and disintegrate all over her stuff.

She kindly informed me of the apparently widely known practice of drying flowers like that. Still, I was dubious, and spent the rest of the year peaking into her locker and saying things like, “Hm, doesn’t look so good today” or “It’s starting to go, I can sense it.”

You can learn some unexpected things at school.

Late in the book, after the suspects are captured, they spend an extended time waiting for their punishment to be carried out.

“In March 1965, after Smith and Hickock had been confined in their Death Row cells almost two thousand days, the Kansas Supreme Court decreed that their lives must end between midnight and 2:00 a.m., Wednesday, April 14, 1965.”

April 14 is my brother’s birthday, but also a day marked by a few not-so-good events. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre. In 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg. It’s also Pete Rose’s birthday.

If you’re interested in reading more about Capote’s role in launching “New Journalism” with this work, or the scandalous rumors about his connection to one of the killers, here’s a pretty interesting piece from Salon.

Whenever I go to a bookstore I inevitably walk past a few books I’ve looked at a dozen times but never brought home.

I even think to myself, “I’ve looked at this a dozen times, I should probably just go ahead and read it.” And then I put it down, walk away and get something else.

I am happy to report that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” will no longer be one of those books.

If you’re not familiar, “Brave New World” is in the same vein as “1984” and “Fahrenheit 451” — stories that see a future world controlled to an exceptional degree by a government. In my post about “Fahrenheit 451” I mentioned that author Ray Bradbury explained “1984” as author George Orwell tackling the implications of governmental control while he deals with the societal fallout.

Bradbury writes about a government that bans books in order to deny its people information. Orwell’s government changes the information to suit its present needs. Huxley’s government manipulates its people from birth such that it is unnecessary to worry about history. The past is banned and irrelevant, pushed aside for a world of newness and consumption.

I’m always a fan of editions that include extra notes about the story or the author. They help put things in context of the time (“Brave New World” was first published in 1932) and often include primary sources from the author.

My copy of this book has a letter Huxley wrote to Orwell in October 1949, a few months after “1984” was published. Huxley thanks Orwell for sending him a copy of the book, then spends the entire letter explaining how Orwell’s version of a controlling future government is “unlikely.” He sees his story as an evolution of the Big Brother regime.

“I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that world I imagined in Brave New World.”

The letter comes off almost condescending and mean-spirited, but Huxley at least ends on a positive note:

“Of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war–in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.”

In Huxley’s world, children are manufactured through a highly efficient process that creates distinct classes with specific characteristics. The one thing the vast majority of people share is an unquestioning adherence to all of the mantras that have been systematically drilled into their heads since birth.

The system creates a world where dissent doesn’t have to be squelched — it’s non-existent. Everyone has a job perfectly fitted to their abilities and is happy in the simplicity of having everything they believe they want.

The leader explains, “They’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.”

There’s no need for Orwell’s Thought Police when the citizens instinctively do what is desired of them.

When reading these “futuristic” books written long in our past, it’s hard not to think about what the author may have gotten right. One tool of social engineering the “Brave New World” government uses is soma, a hallucinogenic drug that will turn any frown upside down. People who feel the least bit of anxiety, fear or sadness say one of the soma-related slogans to themselves as if they instinctively know the drug will solve their problem:

“Half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…”

Many of the workers get a daily ration as soon as their shift is over. Huxley describes the scene of one group waiting in line for their soma, and the crusading figure who attempts to disrupt the ritual and break the government’s spell.

I couldn’t help but compare them to a Black Friday crowd waiting for a store to open. The ritual, the thing they need, will be theirs if they wait in this line. As long as everything goes according to plan, everyone is calm and continues to be happy.

At the soma line, the character muscles his way to the front. He grabs the daily ration and throws it on the ground. All hell breaks loose.

At Wal-Mart, flatscreen TVs are 70 percent off. The minutes count down as the store prepares to open. The crowd slowly pushes towards the door in anticipation. An employee unlocks one door and swings it open. The front of the line walks in calmy, or rather tries to. The people in the back want those TVs — need them. They surge. In our world, unlike Huxley’s, there’s no police force on hand to spray a calming gas on the crowd.

Nah, that could never happen.