2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
8. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
Brilliant and beautiful. Oddly compelling, because it doesn't (or didn't) feel all that great as I was reading, and yet the pages just kept flying by. I think it's because Quoyle's transformation is so gradual and subtle that you don't really notice it; it was about 250 pages in when I realized he was a totally different person, someone that you really liked and wanted to be happy. Beautiful ending, too:
For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
Unfortunately that's probably the last bit of new pleasure reading I'll be able to do for a while, since I'm going to buckle down, quit being a spoiled little bitch and actually do my school work this semester; probably a good thing since it'll also give me the opportunity to finish Morte and the Sonnets. Definitely want to pick up more of Proulx's work, though there's the new Stephen King book, Cell, if I wanted something fluffier, or Anasasi Boys. I also decided (after my contemporary foreign lit class earlier today) that this is the year I'm going to make it all the way through Ulysses, and read some Virgina Woolf. And if I manage that, possibly Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (more Joyce).
Christ...I'm a nerd. But at least I'm a well-read one. Hurrah for intellectual snobbery!
No comments:
Post a Comment