Literature
- Summer Is Over...
It sure went by super fast, huh? Much of my time was spent working and reading so it wasn't too miserable. On a positive note, I'm actually proud of myself for managing to read 50 books this summer as part of my Literature Frenzy Challenge, phew!...
- Books To Movie Challenge!
I just could not pass up the opportunity to participate in this exciting book challenge hosted by Two Bibliomaniacs despite my previous commitment to other challenges and my propensity to procrastinate. Nevertheless, I like to think of myself killing...
- Teaser Tuesdays!
I'm jumping on another blogging bandwagon hosted by Should be Reading, which looks promising. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:--Grab your current read--Open to a random page--share two ?teaser? sentences from somewhere on that...
- A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories By Flannery O'connor
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." It is difficult to see clearly from the semi-distorted cover but there is a man wearing a farmer's hat, his hands raised...
- A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
"What's it going to be then, eh?" O, my brothers, I viddy that A Clockwork Orange is a real horror-show! Having seen the wonderful Kubrick film adaptation a few years ago and finally getting around to reading the actual novel now, I...
Literature
It's Monday! What are you Reading?
I'm conforming to social protocol amongst the reader's blogging community hosted by Sheila at Book Journey so let's see how this goes. I managed to read three books last week, which is pretty darn impressive considering my inherent laziness: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find (and other stories). Solaris was a little disappointing and I am now curious to watch both film versions by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh to see how each director interpreted the novel since in my mind, much of the narrative seems impossible to film effectively. Thankfully, Burgess' novel redeemed an otherwise rocky start to the reading week and is now quite possibly the best novel that I have read all year. O'Connors work was enjoyable for the most part despite being slightly underwhelming as a whole. I recently started with Willa Cather's My Antonia, which continues my foray into early American literature focusing on rural communities such as the deep south in O'Connor's stories and now the prairie state of Nebraska with Cather's novel. My initial impression so far is lukewarm at best and I am hoping that the novel picks up with some interesting story developments. Even though Cather is able to paint a vivid picturesque portrait of the prairies, endless poetic descriptions of the physical environment tends to get tiresome after a while.
I'd also like to take the opportunity to indulge in a little self-flagellation and congratulate myself for reading 32 novels so far this year with 27 of them read since the beginning of April. Woot! Woot! Not bad for someone who never took an avid interest in literature until now. My goal is to read 75 books this year and I am looking for recommendations from you kind folks for my Literature Frenzy Challenge so feel free to suggest me some good stuff to read in the comment section. Just for fun, here is my top 5 books read in 2011 so far:
- The End of the Affair
- A Clockwork Orange
- A Scanner Darkly
- The Stars My Destination
- Of Mice and Men
- Summer Is Over...
It sure went by super fast, huh? Much of my time was spent working and reading so it wasn't too miserable. On a positive note, I'm actually proud of myself for managing to read 50 books this summer as part of my Literature Frenzy Challenge, phew!...
- Books To Movie Challenge!
I just could not pass up the opportunity to participate in this exciting book challenge hosted by Two Bibliomaniacs despite my previous commitment to other challenges and my propensity to procrastinate. Nevertheless, I like to think of myself killing...
- Teaser Tuesdays!
I'm jumping on another blogging bandwagon hosted by Should be Reading, which looks promising. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:--Grab your current read--Open to a random page--share two ?teaser? sentences from somewhere on that...
- A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories By Flannery O'connor
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." It is difficult to see clearly from the semi-distorted cover but there is a man wearing a farmer's hat, his hands raised...
- A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
"What's it going to be then, eh?" O, my brothers, I viddy that A Clockwork Orange is a real horror-show! Having seen the wonderful Kubrick film adaptation a few years ago and finally getting around to reading the actual novel now, I...