Recent Musings

Long time, no book blogging! So what the heck happened here, anyway?

To be honest, I haven’t the faintest idea why I stopped blogging here in the first place. I was doing a fair amount of reading from the list o’ doom, but then… life happened, I guess?

And then I thought about restarting the blog here, but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to do retroactive comments on some of the books I’d read. True to form, I put it off the decision for too long. So my comments on those past books would be little more than “ugh” or “yay” at this point.

Not only that, but I just haven’t done much reading this year. And much of the books I HAVE completed aren’t from the list. So I’m really limited by the original premise of Bookworm’s Quest.

So… what’s a blogger to do?

Right now I have two book-related subdomains. One is BQ, and the other just lists all of the books I’ve read for the past 2 1/2 years. (Why I set that one up as a subdomain is beyond me. Damn you, past Kris!) I’m most likely going to consolidate the two somehow. I may end up including a general book blog (with a subcategory for BQ). Or, I may just ditch the blogging part altogether, I haven’t decided yet.

Hmm. Lots to ponder…

Posted on 07 August 2009 - 11:11 | No Comments
 

I, um, kind of forgot about this blog. Not that I’d been reading much - I’ve said this before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but I have way too many hobbies and I’ve never quite figured out how to balance them all out.

But the bookwormy me is back now…

I still haven’t finished Dos Passos’s The Big Money. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this probably isn’t going to happen until December, mostly because it’s just really slow going. Oh well, though. I finished re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia earlier this year, and I’m currently going back through the Harry Potter series. (Only the first four are on the BBC top 100 list, but the last book’s coming out in a couple of weeks, so of course I’m also going to read Order of the Phoenix and Half-blood Prince…)

Fairly recently, I also finished the following:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain: This tries be too many things at once. One of the main themes is satirical, a commentary on the over-romantization of chivalry and the Middle Ages. However, I kind of wished that the main character was real, just so I could meet him and punch him in the face. Hank’s kind of an uncompromising jerk, and this undermines Twain’s satire in places. Oh well, it had its amusing moments. I definitely don’t love it, but I don’t hate it, either.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte: I found this surprisingly enjoyable, considering how prominent the love theme was and all. (Why, no, I don’t really care for romance… why do you ask?) It’s probably because I actually really like Jane. There are some remarkable concidences and some overly dramatic moments, and parts of it are a bit tedious. But though I didn’t always enjoy Bronte’s style, I do like the overall story and the way she brings the main characters to life. It’s also nice to read about what life was like in that place and at that time - there’s some great description in there.

Atonement, Ian McEwan: The overall plot and themes are interesting, the writing is generally vivid and otherwise well-done, and the structure is well-suited to the story. The first part moves really slowly, but I flew through the book once I got past that. The second part is especially compelling, but I couldn’t put the book down during the third part, either. And the latter really says something for McEwan’s writing, I think, because the third part focuses on Briony and I really dislike her. Though at least there’s a reason why she’s written the way she is…

That’s that for the finished works. I still have some cleanup to do on the site itself, but that should be done by the end of the day, at least.

Posted on 03 July 2007 - 09:23 | No Comments
 

Okay, so I’ve been totally slacking with BQ. I’m not entirely sure why. I know why I’ve been taking my time with The Big Money - I need to concentrate a bit more to keep the characters apart, and I haven’t had enough focus lately. But I don’t know why my most recent BQ read took me so long. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading it, and I don’t know why it took so long for me to get through.

Because I really enjoyed Richard Adams’s Watership Down. It’s been one of the books on my “to be read” list for years. Since sixth or seventh grade, if you can believe it, as one of my fellow bookworms just could not get her nose out of that book one year. But it kept getting pushed down the list by other books until now.

It’s not completely a bad thing that it took me so long, though. Because I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it quite as much as a ten- or eleven-year-old reader. It’s not a “children’s book,” per se, and it’s just so involved - you’ve got the main plotline, the informative bits about rabbit behavior, the underlying mythology, and so on.

And a big plus? The characters are nowhere as anthropomorphized as, say, Brian Jacques’s Redwall mice. Okay, so the rabbits talk, but they don’t wear clothes and swing swords and have the most improbable feasts; they do actually share instincts and behaviors with their real-life counterparts. They’re fully realized despite - or rather, because - of these behaviors.

Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

Posted on 25 September 2006 - 13:03 | No Comments
 

Brief thoughts on my more recently completed books:

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle: I hadn’t read this one in a couple of years, but my opinion of it hasn’t changed very much in that time. On the surface it’s a lovely fairy tale about destiny and immortality and love. But there’s so much more to it than that. There’s a charming blend of anachronisms and traditional fairy tale settings, characters who are trying to discover themselves and truly understand their own depth, humorous references to the story’s own genre… the book is so much more than I can put into words, and I know I’m not doing it justice here. It’s just really beautifully done.

The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells: I don’t find the actual writing to be particularly remarkable, but the concepts are pretty well thought out; for example, Wells details the practical challenges of being invisible. I didn’t love it, but I’d say it’s worth reading, and it goes by fairly quickly (it’s very short, and the plot’s pretty straightforward).

Posted on 08 August 2006 - 16:14 | No Comments
 

“What is this crap, and who the hell cares?” I asked myself several times while reading Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind. I quite probably would have pitched the latter off of my balcony and into the neighboring apartment complex if I didn’t remember that it was a library book I had to return.

I have to talk about both of these books in the same entry, as Xenocide doesn’t really end and Children of the Mind absolutely cannot stand alone, as it starts right where the previous book left off. In fact, in the foreword for the last book, Card says something to the effect of being allowed to split Xenocide into two novels so that he could tell the story in more depth.

I adore Ender’s Game and enjoy Speaker of the Dead well enough. But unfortunately, Card’s inability to write a series ending that lives up to its beginning’s promise surfaces yet again. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

The later two books are overly didactic and “philosophizing,” though I put the latter in quotes because Card’s “philosophies” in these books are only half-developed. I don’t really care about any of the characters and their contrived conflicts, though Han Fei-tzu and Han Qing-jao have their interesting moments. And my god, don’t even get me started about the ridiculousness of the plot.

I’m not trying to say that Xenocide and Children of the Mind completely lack merit. The role of the descolada virus is still intriguing enough, and I was definitely fascinated by the bugger society and its relationship with the piggy and human societies. But that merit gets buried in the constant half-baked metaphysical and philosophical rambling.

I highly recommend that you do not, under any circumstances, bother with these books unless you’re a die-hard Ender Wiggin or Orson Scott Card fan. As I am neither, I am simply going to pretend that Xenocide and Children of the Mind don’t exist and move on with my life.

Posted on 11 July 2006 - 13:14 | No Comments
 

One of the books I brought back from my parents’ house in April was my copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Not having read it since my freshman year of high school, I decided I’d read it again, but I wanted to do a bit of research first. Mainly because I’d always felt a bit of a disconnect between the book’s two parts, and I thought I’d be able to better understand and appreciate it this time around if I had more context. I don’t know why I never bothered to seek out such information before, given how many times I’d read the book and come across that disconnect. But I finally did, and I found out that there’s a very obvious reason for it all.

Many modern editions of Little Women compile both the novel of the same name, originally published in 1868, and its sequel, Good Wives, published the following year. My copy is one of these editions. The two parts are clearly marked, but there’s no indication that they were originally separate novels.

So now it all made sense. Which brought up an interesting question: what does the Little Women on the BBC’s top 100 list refer to? Does it refer to just the original novel? Or does it refer to the compiled edition of both Little Women and Good Wives?

I don’t really have a good answer to that question. The BBC list is kind of inconsistent when it comes to book vs. series nominations: the first four Harry Potter books each get an individual nomination, while His Dark Materials gets one entry for an entire series. So the way I’ve decided to go about it is, I’m going to assume that entries on the list refer to individual novels (e.g. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) unless the title clearly belongs to an entire series (e.g. The Lord of the Rings). Well, if you really want to be technical about it, I guess The Lord of the Rings is one novel in three volumes and not an actual trilogy, but I’ll save that discussion for another entry.

Anyway, this means that on my recent re-read, I decided to stop where the original Little Women volume ends, rather than continuing through Good Wives. And going about it that way definitely gave me a different perspective of the work. (For the better, even, as I don’t really like Good Wives anyway.)

Not that I needed much help gaining a new perspective. I’ve commented before that just a couple of years between re-reads makes a difference; just imagine how much difference ten years makes!

One big difference: I’m much more aware of the moralizing and Christian elements of this novel now. I’d noticed them before, of course - it’s kind of hard not to - but I don’t think I realized just how central they are. And I think I’d be even more aware of that theme if I’d read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which Little Women frequently mentions and probably even more frequently alludes to. It doesn’t really detract from my enjoyment of Little Women, but it does considerably change my perspective on it.

And I do still enjoy it. Admittedly it’s partly due to the nostalgic element - I’ve owned my copy since I was six or seven, and I read it quite a bit when I was younger. But putting that aside, it’s an easy and fairly light work, even with the didactic element. I like several of the characters, and the sisters’ dynamic strikes a familiar chord.

Posted on 06 July 2006 - 23:26 | No Comments
 

I finally finished José Saramago’s Blindness last week. I still haven’t quite put together all my thoughts about it, so this entry may be a bit scattered, but…

Sometimes I read for sheer entertainment value. Blindness isn’t a novel you can do that with, though. The writing style alone made me put in a lot more effort, a lot more careful attention. A vast majority of the sentences are at least half a page long, at least in the edition I read. And the dialogue isn’t separated by quotation marks or by line breaks, only by commas. I originally thought that the disorienting nature of the latter was a deliberate parallel to the blind characters’ disorientation, but I’ve read elsewhere that it’s part of the author’s general writing style. In either case, not easy to sort through at times.

There’s some very strong imagery in this novel, which, compounded with the writing style, made it even harder to read. For example, certain scenes during the main characters’ internment became so vivid in my mind, I couldn’t continue for a time - it’s that intense and overwhelming.

But strangely enough, even though these things and more really bothered me, I still found Blindness to be compelling. For all the breaks I needed to take from it, for all the difficulty I had with it… it’s still an incredible novel, and I’m very glad I persisted and completed it. Not all of the imagery is horrifying; there are also scenes of calm and hope and even joy, and these scenes are every bit as vivid. It’s also beautifully written, probably much more so than the translation can begin to convey.

I just might re-read it some day.

Posted on 27 June 2006 - 22:02 | Comments Off
 

I haven’t updated in quite awhile. Nor have I done much reading from my list. Oh well. Like I’ve said before, this is a super-long-term project, so…

I did finish 1919 back in April, and I started The Big Money. I’ve still not finished the U.S.A. trilogy, though. Nor have I finished Blindness by Jose Saramago, which I started in late April and have only picked up sporadically in the past couple of weeks.

It’s partly because I’ve been distracted by Stanley Cup playoffs. I picked a bad year to start reading from these lists, because there are only four things I’d care to watch when they’re actually televised and three of them - the Winter Olympics, Stanley Cup playoffs, and the World Cup - are 2006 events. Okay, so the Stanley Cup happens every hockey season, and I’ll be missing most of the live broadcasts of the World Cup games because they’re airing during business hours, but still.

It’s also because work’s been crazy, and I’ve been putting in massive amounts of overtime. Taking it back into Bookworm’s Quest territory and away from personal blogging, this means that I haven’t had the energy to invest in the books that I’d had in progress. The Big Money is even more difficult for me to read than the preceding book in the series, and the characters really start to blur together when you’re seriously lacking sleep. And Blindness, while well done and compelling so far, is not always “enjoyable,” and it’s hard to keep track of who’s speaking (which I’m sure is deliberate, a subject I’ll touch upon in a later entry).

So I opted for lighter reading material throughout the month of May. Most of that material is not on my master reading list. But, well, my sister had shown me the Memoirs of a Geisha DVD the last time I saw her. (Terrible movie, by the way - not only is it far too much of a chick flick for my tastes, it’s also a poor adaptation, and my sister kept asking me to elaborate events and details.) For the sake of comparison, this meant that I had to read the book by Arthur Golden.

I hadn’t read it since 2003. I really liked it at the time, but it looks a little different three years later. Now I feel that it moves a little too slowly for my tastes, and it gets to be a little sappy. But, I still think it’s pretty well-written, with some lovely descriptions. And it suited my needs nicely. It’s entertaining enough, and I don’t have invest too much energy and thought into it - I can just let go and enjoy it for what it is.

Blog entries and other site updates will be sparse for a little while longer. But I’ll be back with more bookish blather soon enough!

Posted on 31 May 2006 - 22:10 | No Comments
 

I had read through a good portion of The Sheltering Sky and then had to put it on hold for a bit. You can only renew books once in the San Diego city library system, and I’d already done so just before the Olympics (and before realizing that I’d turn into a complete couch potato for almost all of the renewal period).

Anyway. I finally completed it. And my final impression does not match my initial impression. A couple of chapters in, I liked it. But now, while I certainly don’t think it’s bad, I just couldn’t really get into it, particularly in the later chapters. I probably would have liked it better if I had a reason to care about the characters, but I found them to be pretty empty, and therefore thought, “okay, but so what?” more than once throughout the course of the novel.

Maybe that was deliberate. Maybe Paul Bowles wanted to draw more attention to the themes than to any of the characters themselves. If that’s the case, then he succeeded. In fact, there are places where I felt like I was being beaten over the head with those existential themes.

It’s actually a relatively quick read (all my breaks from it notwithstanding), and the writing style does suit the story rather well. From an objective standpoint, it’s a job well done on Bowles’s part, and I can see why it’s on the Modern Library’s top 100 list.

I still wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for an enjoyable read, though.

Posted on 15 March 2006 - 23:13 | No Comments
 

I haven’t finished a book since February 4. I haven’t even read much in the past couple of weeks. While I normally use the TV just for DVD viewing, I turn into a complete couch potato at certain times. And the Winter Olympics are one of those times.

I should be back to my normal bookwormy self next week, though.

1919 is getting more difficult for me to read, mainly because there are so many characters in U.S.A.. 700+ pages into the “trilogy,” I’m having a damned hard time keeping everyone straight, particularly since most of them aren’t remarkably interesting in and of themselves. The indistinctness helps create the social portrait - some of them are so vaguely defined, it’s easy to see them as an “everyman.” But it makes it harder for me to remember where they fit or how exactly their stories are progressing.

The Sheltering Sky is quite a bit easier, and I’d be done with it already if I just stopped sitting in front of the TV. I haven’t gotten too far into this book yet (I’m only a few chapters in), but I fly through it when I actually pick it up. I like it so far but can’t quite pinpoint why.

Hopefully I’ll finish at least one of these books by the end of the month. But we’ll see.

Posted on 23 February 2006 - 13:31 | 1 Comment