Much like the others I've read by this author, this book deals heavily with memory, loss, and--more directly than the others--the holocaust. The narrator recounts his experiences with four characters, in four sections of the book. Each character is an emigrant from Germany, and each, in some way, seems to want to forget some aspect …
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
This was an interesting and entertaining, though not always very engaging read. Told from the point of view of Claudius, a stuttering, limping, nephew of the emperor Tiberius. I have no idea how much of this is historically accurate beyond the births and deaths of these people, but it painted a disgusting picture of the …
Scent in writing
I'm reading Perfume: The story of a murderer, by Patrick Suskind, and am impressed with the amount of detail he's put into describing smells. It is an underused sense, in writing, and maybe that is part of why it seems so amazing, but I'm really being drawn into the strange way this character perceives the …
What I want to read…
I've been reading Burial Rites by Hannah Kent with a book club I just started with some friends. It's much more enjoyable to read a book when you have people to discuss it with, but how can anyone ever get their friends to read the same books... if you're even fortunate enough to have friends …
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
I love reading about artists. I can usually identify with those kinds of characters pretty well. This story was an interesting look at the 'miniaturists' of 16th century Istanbul. And what held my attention most, was the way they looked at art. In that time, 'style' was seen as a flaw. If anyone could tell …