Literature
Read from May 28 to 31, 2011
- A Passage To India By E.m. Forster
?Adventures do occur, but not punctually.? Sometime in the early 1900's, a young English woman named Adela Quested arrives in India accompanied by the elderly Mrs. Moore with the the prospect of marrying her son, a government official stationed...
- Tender Is The Night By F. Scott Fitzgerald
?Actually that?s my secret ? I can?t even talk about you to anybody because I don?t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.? Three main thoughts circulated my mind while struggling to labor through this insufferable 315 page snore-fest:...
- The Heart Of The Matter By Graham Greene
"It isn't beauty that we love, he thought, it's failure--the failure to stay young forever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long." Despite being an unabashed Graham Greene fan-boy...
- 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...
- Solaris By Stanislaw Lem
"We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is." There are moments of scattered brilliance and profound philosophical...
Literature
My Antonia by Willa Cather
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."
This was one of those novels assigned in my grade 12 high-school English class that I did not bother to read and in retrospect, I do not regret my decision. If only I had the foresight to not pick it up 10 years later because it was completely disappointing. I can understand its status as an American Classic within a historical context, but there was nothing within the narrative that struck me as exceptionally memorable. Cather is able to successfully create a vivid portrait of prairie life in Nebraska during the late 1800's to the early part of the 20th century but the interminable descriptions of nature and the rural environment are excessively tedious.
Unfortunately, the story is exceptionally dull with bland characters. Jim Burden nostalgically narrates his experience of growing up as a young boy on his grandparent's farm and his relationship with the an immigrant Bohemian farm-girl named Antonia except his story comes across as painfully insubstantial. There are moments of lyrical beauty (such as the above quote) but these moments are rare. The novel's concern with allegory, feminism, sexuality and autobiography vs. fiction would be topics of interest for those concerned with performing an in-depth analysis but I remain far too indifferent towards Cather's novel to engage in such literary criticism.
Unfortunately, the story is exceptionally dull with bland characters. Jim Burden nostalgically narrates his experience of growing up as a young boy on his grandparent's farm and his relationship with the an immigrant Bohemian farm-girl named Antonia except his story comes across as painfully insubstantial. There are moments of lyrical beauty (such as the above quote) but these moments are rare. The novel's concern with allegory, feminism, sexuality and autobiography vs. fiction would be topics of interest for those concerned with performing an in-depth analysis but I remain far too indifferent towards Cather's novel to engage in such literary criticism.
Read from May 28 to 31, 2011
- A Passage To India By E.m. Forster
?Adventures do occur, but not punctually.? Sometime in the early 1900's, a young English woman named Adela Quested arrives in India accompanied by the elderly Mrs. Moore with the the prospect of marrying her son, a government official stationed...
- Tender Is The Night By F. Scott Fitzgerald
?Actually that?s my secret ? I can?t even talk about you to anybody because I don?t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.? Three main thoughts circulated my mind while struggling to labor through this insufferable 315 page snore-fest:...
- The Heart Of The Matter By Graham Greene
"It isn't beauty that we love, he thought, it's failure--the failure to stay young forever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long." Despite being an unabashed Graham Greene fan-boy...
- 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...
- Solaris By Stanislaw Lem
"We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is." There are moments of scattered brilliance and profound philosophical...