Post #7: The Color of Water vs. The Pursuit of Happyness vs. The Blind Side

While I do realize everyone is reading this book, The Color of Water, I'm not really reading another book because well, I, for whatever reason, just lost my complete interest in The Bourne Identity. It was a good book and all, but it really was getting hard to follow, and with having to read The Color of Water, it was going to be difficult to follow... sorry for those of you out there who liked my posts... even in Poland, weirdly....

Anyways, back to The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride. I love how, in this book, it goes back in forth between both Ruth's story and James' story, rather than detailing one story in a "part one" and "part two"-type novel.

I generally like the memoir genre, and this book stays in line. Two of the last three books I've read  were The Pursuit of Happyness, and The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, in which both tell a life story. All of these books are actually, pretty similar, but how they are told is much different, giving me a different feeling with each book. In The Blind Side, the novel is told in two, simultaneous "parts". What makes this different then the format of The Color of Water is this isn't about the lives of two different people; rather, one "part" is about Michael Oher, which, if you've seen the movie or read the book, you know his story. But in the movie, barely anything is mentioned about the other part, and with good reason: it's about the "Evolution of" football. It really narrows the would-be audience of the movie, and isn't really interesting to anyone who doesn't "know" football.

In The Pursuit of Happyness, the formatting is different then the other two books because well, it is about one person, Chris Gardner, and his life is told in a memoir, which he chooses to split into three parts. Definitely different than the other two novels.

All in all, though, these books are actually kind of similar. Obviously James becomes a writer, Chris becomes a stockbroker, and Michael Oher is currently in the NFL. But how they got there is quite similar. They all came from poor families (easily evident in all of them), they have some major schooling troubles, they each have a large family, they work hard, however, to excel.  These three books are all similar and different at the same time, but I thought each book presented a different and unique story that I can enjoy.