#181 - Barely-begun is no fun.
Jul. 15th, 2008 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reileenI have this bad habit of starting books (getting less than 1/4th or 1/5th of the way through) and never finishing them.
Current list includes:
The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Balthasar Gracian
The Complete Plays of Aristophanes
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman
The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
A History of Japan by R.H.P. Mason and J.G. Caiger
To be fair to Plath, those unabridged journals are dense and lengthy - I've had the book for at least two years now, and I can never get farther than a few pages at a time because there's just so much in them. And Plath tends to linger on minutiae. I adore her prose and the clarity of her observations, but it doesn't make for light reading.
Oddly enough, I seem to have a fair amount of nonfiction on this list. Too bad I'm in a fiction-reading mood, having blown through nearly all of my library novels even though I'd just gotten them a few days ago. That leaves Ada and The Blind Assassin, and if I had to pick one I'd pick The Blind Assassin because Ada made me want to throw the book against the wall in frustration and disgust by the first chapter. I hate to leave a book unfinished, especially since I left off only on page 36 in a 440+ page book, but Ada doesn't seem to be for me. No, not even the incestuous love affair between Van and Ada is enough to keep me from thinking of seriously giving up on this book.
-Reileen
Take the glitz back, I want the soul instead
Current list includes:
The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Balthasar Gracian
The Complete Plays of Aristophanes
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman
The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
A History of Japan by R.H.P. Mason and J.G. Caiger
To be fair to Plath, those unabridged journals are dense and lengthy - I've had the book for at least two years now, and I can never get farther than a few pages at a time because there's just so much in them. And Plath tends to linger on minutiae. I adore her prose and the clarity of her observations, but it doesn't make for light reading.
Oddly enough, I seem to have a fair amount of nonfiction on this list. Too bad I'm in a fiction-reading mood, having blown through nearly all of my library novels even though I'd just gotten them a few days ago. That leaves Ada and The Blind Assassin, and if I had to pick one I'd pick The Blind Assassin because Ada made me want to throw the book against the wall in frustration and disgust by the first chapter. I hate to leave a book unfinished, especially since I left off only on page 36 in a 440+ page book, but Ada doesn't seem to be for me. No, not even the incestuous love affair between Van and Ada is enough to keep me from thinking of seriously giving up on this book.
-Reileen
Take the glitz back, I want the soul instead
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-16 02:07 pm (UTC)Although I quickly learned I couldn't read the book aloud to my Christian family--they just didn't want to know the history behind their own holy book and tended to get mad.