Kundera

I finished my K book for the A to Z list a few days ago. It was a long time coming. I think I started it a few months ago. I could say that with summer school and my sister being here, I just wasn't finding the time...but I'll be truthful. I just couldn't get into it.

I've had a lot of friends and respectable people recommend his work to me. I started The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years back, but never could get more than a few pages into it. After perusing the K section, I thought he would be a good choice. I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

From the get go, I pretty much knew I wouldn't like it. In my opinion, he shouldn't have written a book, but an essay or series of essays. I got the sense that I was being preached to, or even looked down on as if I wasn't good enough.

I will say that I gave the book a good hard chance. I read the whole thing through and tried to take what I could from it, but in the end, I felt unappreciated as a reader. I got the very strong sense that Kundera, or the voice he was writing through, was very pretentious.

I distinctly remember a portion where he discusses how a spoken word can be emphasized. Here's a very short excerpt:

He said the word "subtle" as if it were in italics. Yes, some words are not like others; they have a special meaning known only to initiates.

I don't know about you, but I know what emphasizing a word means and I know that when it's in italics, it's being emphasized. I also know it can create special meaning for said word. This whole little section sort of sums up how I feel about the book.

It felt a bit preachy, had a holier-than-thou type of feel. I just wasn't, and couldn't get, into it. Maybe in a few years, at a different point in my life I'll like it more, but I'm pretty iffy about that.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

I finished my J book a few weeks ago and due to finals never had a chance to blog about it.

It's by Shirley Jackson and I believe it was her last novel. I haven't read any of her other stories, though I know her short story, The Lottery, is famous and lauded many times over.

The book was quite good. The story was interesting and the narrator, Merricat, was fascinating. She seemed crazy, maybe delusional. Her accounts of events, at first, were fully believable, as it seems a narrator should in a book. However, the more I read, the more it appeared Merricat might be more than just kooky. The idea of a narrator skewing stories works rather well with this book.

The story itself is flat. The characters are static, situations don't change. In this respect, I could see why some people wouldn't like Jackson's novel. For me, though, it really pulled the story along. I thought the story wasn't so much about Merricat and her sister, but about their surroundings, their neighbors and how people reacted to them.

I loved it for its dark, creepy thoughts. I loved it because it didn't hold back much from the cruelty of others, the cruelty people can force onto others just because they can.

I have no complaints about this book. It was beautifully written and well worth a read.

PS. I'll post a picture later.

Never Let Me Go

I finished this book by Kazuo Ishiguro almost entirely on the plane ride back from Chicago. The combination of reading it in one sitting and being surrounded by people, yet completely alone had a profound affect on my opinion of the book. It was a nighttime flight, so most people were asleep and after reading the book I was offered a good two hours to just contemplate what I'd read.

The story was written from the protagonist's, Kathy's, viewpoint. She sorts through memories of her past and we are taken from past to present. This is, I believe, the only was this story could have been written with enough appeal, since for the majority of the book, the true reasons are hidden. Had he initially told the reader the main secret, it would have been far too campy and predictable. However, written the way it was, it came around quite nicely.

The chapters and paragraphs are tied into each other by a simple, often times annoying, tactic of leading the reader through. For example, a paragraph would end with something like "This reminded me of that autumn day Tommy and I met at the fountain." The next paragraph or chapter would then chronicle what happened at said fountain. This in itself would have been tolerable had the author not chosen to use the method repeatedly through the story. It's a small irritation, but it irked me nonetheless.

The eventual outcome of the book is unsettling, yet strangely calming. In the plane, when I finished the book I closed it and placed it in my little storage pocket. I poked my head up and stared at the domes of hair, most of which were lolling in uncomfortable sleep. It further enhanced the strange feelings of living in a world quickly being engulfed by technology, a world where in a 5 hour plane ride I spoke not one word to a stranger.

I enjoyed the book, even grew misty eyed in the last chapter. I didn't want to put it down, not once. I'm under the distinct impression that had I read it at a different time, not in an airplane that I might think different. As it stands, I did read it now and on an airplane and I did enjoy the book.

Author J, whomever you are, I'm coming!

She

I chose the book, She: A History of Adventure by H Rider Haggard, for my H book. I wanted something that wasn't a classic and that wasn't too contemporary. I believe this book came out around the same time as The Jungle Book and it has the same sort of feel.

It follows two men on a mysterious adventure deep into the jungle. An old chest with an ancient story on a shard of pot leads them to believe that a great queen simply named, She, is the murderess of a long gone relative and that he must exact revenge upon her.

While the storyline is interesting, it is a bit typical of an adventure novel. I will say though that it was probably near the first of its kind and I'm probably just late to pick it up. The speech gets a tad tiresome as it's all "thou must, thou shalt," and a whole lot of other very proper ways of speaking.

As a whole, the book was good. Not great, the speech killed it for me, but a good adventure story.

Ps, sorry for the standard internet-searched photo. I'm still in Chicago and don't have anywhere to upload pictures!

Good Books Go Fast

I have finished (so much faster than my F book) my G book. I chose The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff.

I thoroughly LOVED this book. The beginning line alone, "The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.", is intriguing. In one sentence, the author has already created an outline of imagery that is just the right amount of vague to capture the reader.

Her characters are lovable, in the sense that they are full of contradictions, doubt, and flaws. The main character, Willie, is a strong, smart, and driven woman, that still trembles from self-doubt and fear. Her mother, Vi, is strong as well and veiled in mysteries that unravel through the novel.

The story line flips through time as Willie searches through archives, letters, and books searching for her long lost father. The book was especially wonderful simply because of the choice in storytelling. It could have been told from one perspective in one era in one flat boring line. However, Groff takes the reader through history to experience individual feelings and thoughts. With this jumping from past to present, there could have been a great rift in storyline creating problems with flow, but Groff travels seamlessly through time pulling the reader through a multi-layered complex story involving a 50 foot monster, estranged fathers, and plots of murder.

If you can't already tell, I had a terrific time reading The Monsters of Templeton. There were so many different genres in this that I feel I could recommend it to a wide range of readers. If you're reading this and you've gotten this far, I recommend it to you!