Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Summer Reading
I thought it was about time to punish my readers again with my thoughts on my latest literary conquests. That's right -- I read, you suffer. It's all about the division of labor.
So in the category of "books I'm embarrassed I didn't read in 10th grade like everyone else," I read Willa Cather's O, Pioneers! this month. I guess it's popular with the high school English teacher set because it's short and folksy. It kind of reminded me of Deborah Norville; inoffensive but also not that interesting. No, there are parts of it that are really rather vivid, and I can tell you from my own firsthand experience of the plains that it captures their feel pretty accurately. It's a nice book, a perfectly sweet, gentle read, but not anything that would have utterly altered the course of my life had I read it back in American Lit.
I also read Salinger's Nine Stories, which I made a point of saving until this summer. I like Salinger so much (and he has written so little) that I have forced myself to resist the urge to binge on his work. This was no exception. I just love how Salinger is unafraid to take small moments, even just everyday conversations, and mine the beauty and mystery in them. And his style seems so clean and contemporary to me, never dated. So yeah.
Then there was Lewis's Babbitt, which I don't have a whole lot to say about other than that it really made me see where my grandmother's worldview comes from. I was also interested by how much Lewis picks on the character who is for all intents and purposes his protagonist.
And finally, I just finished A Farewell to Arms. They ought to call it A Farewell to Legs, ha ha! Anyway, it's sort of flowery, at least by Hemingway standards. It's not as objective as you usually expect. But it's the same game as always, with the hollow people failing to have feelings about dreadful experiences in a war. Definitely good times.
Anyway, I probably won't be doing as much leisure reading from now on, so you can expect this vexing feature to be less frequent...
I thought it was about time to punish my readers again with my thoughts on my latest literary conquests. That's right -- I read, you suffer. It's all about the division of labor.
So in the category of "books I'm embarrassed I didn't read in 10th grade like everyone else," I read Willa Cather's O, Pioneers! this month. I guess it's popular with the high school English teacher set because it's short and folksy. It kind of reminded me of Deborah Norville; inoffensive but also not that interesting. No, there are parts of it that are really rather vivid, and I can tell you from my own firsthand experience of the plains that it captures their feel pretty accurately. It's a nice book, a perfectly sweet, gentle read, but not anything that would have utterly altered the course of my life had I read it back in American Lit.
I also read Salinger's Nine Stories, which I made a point of saving until this summer. I like Salinger so much (and he has written so little) that I have forced myself to resist the urge to binge on his work. This was no exception. I just love how Salinger is unafraid to take small moments, even just everyday conversations, and mine the beauty and mystery in them. And his style seems so clean and contemporary to me, never dated. So yeah.
Then there was Lewis's Babbitt, which I don't have a whole lot to say about other than that it really made me see where my grandmother's worldview comes from. I was also interested by how much Lewis picks on the character who is for all intents and purposes his protagonist.
And finally, I just finished A Farewell to Arms. They ought to call it A Farewell to Legs, ha ha! Anyway, it's sort of flowery, at least by Hemingway standards. It's not as objective as you usually expect. But it's the same game as always, with the hollow people failing to have feelings about dreadful experiences in a war. Definitely good times.
Anyway, I probably won't be doing as much leisure reading from now on, so you can expect this vexing feature to be less frequent...
