Countdown to the tropics!!!!

So, I'm counting the days until my vacation to the DR. I'm really excited. I'm just hoping another hurricane won't screw up my plans yet again. What am I bringing besides textbooks? Well, Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine comes out tomorrow, so that will definitely be in the carry on. I know I said I wanted to bring something light and fast-paced but I'm finding that with school and everything on my plate I really don't want to waste my time reading bad books just for the hell of it.

I started Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy and I won't waste my time finishing it. Talk about a major disappointment. I listened to the author's interview on NPR this summer and he made this thing sound like the second coming of the Bonfire of the Vanities. Boo. The main character, the Brazilian shoeshine guy, is a great protagonist. He's earnest, funny, and the common-sense realist in this greed-glossed world that Wall Street types have created for themselves. But the Greg character (I like to think of him as Aguilar's patron saint) is just too New York liberal-yuppie-whining-self-satisfied-wannabe anti-establishment for me. I can't take it anymore. Next!
I picked up 90 Minutes in Heaven from the library because it's high on the best-seller list and I thought I'd get some spiritual insight. I got about 50 pages in and, well, that's as far as I'm gonna go. I don't want to get into whether or not this really happened to this guy. It could have. But this is just not my thing. What's heaven really like? I'll wait till I get there to find out. :)

Obviously, I'm striking out with the light and fluffy stuff. So here's my list for my week of vacation: Secured Transactions (yup), Criminal Procedures hornbook (oh yeah!), The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, Brother I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. And I'll try to finish The Middle East, actually by the end of this week before I go on vacation.

I'll have short reviews of each hopefully within the next two weeks.