Journal 4: Tuesdays With Morrie part 2

I was going to cleverly title this post "*current day* With Morrie," but then I remembered it was Tuesday. So yeah, that's a shame. :I

Anyway, so, Tuesdays With Morrie! Now that I finished it and did reasonably well on the quiz we had in Death in Dying (well, reasonably well for an Ingram test), maybe now I can more appropriately talk about it. I'll admit, I enjoyed pretty much the whole thing. Finished it in two sittings... after I started reading, I became so interested I literally didn't want to put it down. This was a strange phenomenon for me... reading a book and... enjoying it?! I think I need to see a doctor.

No, not him!

So, what made this book work so well that even I couldn't stop reading? I want to say it was the subject matter - Mitch Albom is very, very lucky that he had this experience (not that it's good that Morrie died this way, but... you know what I mean. I hope), because it was basically a winner from the start. A cold, rich journalist changes his ways after meeting with his former, dying professor for one final 'class'? If Tuesdays With Morrie were fiction, I would condemn the story for being too convenient. But since it's real - real enough, anyway - I had no excuse to find the book contrived. Instead, all of Morrie's sayings, all of Mitch's metaphors, all of the interviews, everything had to be taken as completely sincere. And since it's sincere, it's great! Mitch works as a flawed individual that any reader can identify with, and Morrie works as the kind of teacher everyone in the universe wishes they could have. The setup is so perfect that the writing style is almost completely unimportant.

The writing, of course, isn't bad by any means. After all, Mitch is a professional journalist, so I wouldn't have expected chicken scratch. That being said, though, I don't know if I can justify my former comment saying that Mitch could potentially be considered a 'great' writer. Sure, Tuesdays With Morrie is a fantastic book, but after finishing it, I'm pretty much entirely sure all of its appeal lies with the perfect conditions of its plot. A truly great writer, I suppose, would have created the setup all by themselves - Mitch, for lack of a better way to put this, just got lucky. The conditions that led to this book's creation were almost entirely accidental, but they were so perfect that Mitch didn't even need to be a good writer to make the story great. Still, sometimes luck is better than creativity. Faulkner may be a genius to literary critics, but I'll always prefer Tuesdays With Morrie to As I Lay Dying.


Tuesdays With Morrie is not a perfect book - there are a few things in it I feel should have been elaborated on or explained further. For example, numerous times, Mitch reads the newspapers in Morrie's house and recounts horrific stories about murders or similar situations, yet each time he just puts them down and never elaborates. I was expecting him to maybe have a strong reaction to these things after seeing Morrie weep for others he didn't know, or at least have some reaction; instead, he reads it, tells us about it, and that's that. I could have done without these parts, now that I know that Mitch never takes them any further than the straight up shock factor. Additionally, I think the "final class" analogy sometimes comes off as a bit contrived, but I respect the attempt to make any analogy at all. It definitely gives the book a unique sort of feel, though, one it certainly doesn't need since the subject matter is so inherently interesting.

So yeah, great book! I don't say that very often, so such a judgment should not be taken lightly. If you have functioning emotions/aren't a robot, you will undoubtedly fall in love with it. After reading it, I don't think it's possible not to.