I forgot to mark one book as part of the Norwegian Book Club’s list, so I had to go back and fix that, and then I realized that Gargantua and Pantagruel is actually the collective title of five books, so I had to go back and muck around with the database even further. So it turns out that technically, I have 543 books to read. Oh well. Let’s get on to the thoughts on the books and not the site, shall we?
Anything I read (or re-read) before late December 2005 is marked only by the year, and in many cases, that date is just an estimate. Anything later than that is marked with the exact day I completed it, and I’m considering those to be the first books for the quest.
Since I promised them in my previous entry, here are some quick thoughts regarding those inaugural novels:
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe: It looks like it should be a quick read, but if you want a book that you can finish reading and be completely done with, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. Personally, I found it to be pretty thought-provoking, and mused about the themes for some time after completing the book. The apparently simple story of a flawed, proud main character and of colonialism in Nigeria left me with some mixed feelings, but not in a bad way; the ambiguity I see in the text makes me want to go back to it, so that I can sort everything out.
The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos: As I mentioned in my previous entry, this book doesn’t have a real ending, and is really the first part of one long novel. See that entry for my thoughts regarding the U.S.A. story.
An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro: Another fairly quick novel, I enjoyed this one because I felt I got to really know the character. There’s something so wonderfully real about the main character’s narration – for example, he can digress by sharing his memories, but in a way that’s unforced, and in fact, it reminds me of the way friends and I tend to go off into seemingly-unrelated-but-actually-very-pertinent tangents. (Whew, lot of hyphens there…)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland now belongs on this list, though I talked about it in my previous entry and don’t really have anything to add. Fun little read! I’ll be starting Through the Looking Glass shortly.
I decided to put Gulliver’s Travels aside for now, because I’m just not in the mood for it, and pushing through it in that circumstance would give me a skewed opinion of the book. So, I randomly checked a few books out from the library, and I’m not entirely sure which one to start with. I’m going to hold off on starting something new until I finish at least Ender’s Game; I don’t think I should have too many books in progress at any given time.
All posts