Learning English 3

New Year's holidays and I'm on a reading spree. I'm determined to finish all the books that I left half-read, though I have no idea exactly how many there are and for me "being half-read" has a rather broad meaning, ranging from the last 10 pages to the last 300 pages or more.
Yesterday I finished "Skipping Christmas" overnight. I thought I got a glimpse of how important Christmas is for Christian countries. In fact it's sort of an enlightening experience for me. I realize I knew next to nothing about the customs of the country whose language I've been learning. These days not a few homes in my neighborhood decorate the outside of their houses with Christmas illuminations, but I doubt that any of them has a Christmas tree inside their home. No exchange of Christmas cards. No party. The book taught me how much the Christmas tree means to the people. It's hard for me to imagine ever having the same level of material affluence in my country, whether it's the end of the year or any other time. The whole story seemed to me like something that unfolds on a different planet. Countries where people can afford such holidays are called developed countries, whereas the rest of the world is called the third world, in which we belong, like one of the key characters in the novel. It seems that although it's been so long since Christmas made its way into our country, we (or I) still don't know anything about what Christmas truly means.

Last month I finished "Timeline" by Michael Crichton. It's a crazy novel and I wish I hadn't picked it up. Like many other Crichton's, it fails to seamlessly integrate every element into the flow of the novel, to borrow words from a review on one of his novels on Amazon.com. What the reviewer was saying was that he succeeded in seamlessly integrating all the elements together, like in any other of his novels, though. The beginning of the novel has nothing to do with the long rambling story that follows. Worse yet, it completely lacks a sense of humor, just like many of his other novels, and honestly I had a hard time reading it through to the end. On the other hand, "Skipping Christmas" was full of wry humor and that made reading it a lot of fun.
BTW, my take on novels is that they are, first and foremost, detrimental to health. And generally there is little to gain from them. However, living life vicariously is sometimes better than getting bored to death.