Starting at the action

I'm listening to Kafka's Metamorphosis, and the first sentence is him waking up as a giant insect. This is how stories should be told. So many other writers, amateur or not, would write however many thousands of words about the day before it happened--but why waste time getting there? Since the story is about him …

Too many books for patience

I started listening to Remains of the Day by the new winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Kazuo Ishiguro. After 15 minutes of nothing happening, and multiple restarts cause I zoned out thinking about something else, I gave up and returned it. I know I have criticized today's people for having no patience, for …

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Reading this was a bit of a wake-up call to how vapid and soulless(hehe) vampire movies and books are today. Dorian Gray, in a fit of youthful exuberance, trades his soul for endless youth, and gets more than he expected. Not only does time not affect him in any noticeable way on the exterior, nothing seems …

The quest for youth

I've started listening to the Picture of Dorian Gray, and it has a lot of intriguing dialogue so far. I like that Dorian is so jealous of the painting even right from the start. That it will stay young and he will get old is such a painful idea for him, that he brings it …

Love in the Time of Cholera

This was the story of love between many people over a lifetime. There were so many little nuggets of goodness in this novel that it's hard to give a general idea of why I liked it. I loved the description of Florintino, and found a lot of myself in him. He was also laughable at …