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 …
The Plague, by Albert Camus
I finished it, and though parts of it made me think and feel and were interesting, overall I was mostly bored and impatient with it. I enjoyed the close-view narration style of The Stranger a lot more, and maybe if I'd gone into it more expecting a sort of dry historical style account for most …
Out, by Christine Brooke-Rose
What did I just read? I'm not quite sure. At the end it became slightly intelligible that the POV character was of some higher or lower form of consciousness, and had a brain procedure performed on him. So that sheds a bit of light on the bizarre and confusing way this story was told. One …
uh oh, the French are at it again
I've started reading The Plague, by Albert Camus since I liked The Stranger so much, and .... sigh. It's the same problem I had with Madame Bovary and to a lesser extent, Swan's Way. There are no characters, and just descriptions of things happening in a very passive, drawn back way. I don't know if …
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
This one was a bit of a trial. It took me several months to read because it got so bogged down in historical details that I don't care about. In this story, a group of editors decide to create their own conspiracy theory about the Templars in order to sell books. They go about it …
Jonas David 