attention, all three people who follow me
I've been thinking recently that I should be getting more into posting here again, especially since I'm not writing much at the moment (I still use my livejournal all the time for looking at communities and so on, but I haven't posted for ages. And the last post I made wasn't even an interesting one; given the heavily left-wing bias on this site it was about the most generic thing I could have said. I'm sure I've given a very bad impression of myself) and seeing this on my friends page made me think, you know, I could try it:
So, my topic is going to be the next 100 books I read and at least a brief comment on each one, except for the shit ones that I don't want people to know about. I'm currently in the middle of two, so those will be coming up soon, but I'll start with the one I finished yesterday, which was Midnight's Children.
1. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie, 1981 (first-time reading)
It's a long one. It is long and slow and there were times when I had to drag myself through it by committing to read at least fifty pages by the end of the day. I probably would not have tried that hard if it hadn't been extremely useful both for English and History, in which we're studying Indian independence, but it was and I did and I'm very glad about both of those things.
I did, for the most part, enjoy it. I might have enjoyed it slightly more, or found it easier to do so, if it had been edited a little more heavily, but then again my favourite aspect of it was its amazing creation of atmosphere (so that's why everyone thinks Rushdie's prose is so fantastic!) and maybe in cutting it down that would have suffered, so I will remain ambivalent. I wasn't particularly enamoured of Saleem, I thought that his sister's sudden and total transition into a completely different character halfway through the novel was jarringly unrealistic and unnecessary, and the only characters I was genuinely interested in learning about were the older generations of the Aziz family, perhaps because they were introduced at the start when I was freshly enthusiastic and had not yet been tired out over the course of hundreds of pages. But as I was reading the novel and when I had finished it I felt that I understood India, as a place and a culture and a collection of cultures, a little better. And if a piece of fiction can get you to understand something real a little better, isn't that, really, the whole point?
So, my topic is going to be the next 100 books I read and at least a brief comment on each one, except for the shit ones that I don't want people to know about. I'm currently in the middle of two, so those will be coming up soon, but I'll start with the one I finished yesterday, which was Midnight's Children.
1. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie, 1981 (first-time reading)
It's a long one. It is long and slow and there were times when I had to drag myself through it by committing to read at least fifty pages by the end of the day. I probably would not have tried that hard if it hadn't been extremely useful both for English and History, in which we're studying Indian independence, but it was and I did and I'm very glad about both of those things.
I did, for the most part, enjoy it. I might have enjoyed it slightly more, or found it easier to do so, if it had been edited a little more heavily, but then again my favourite aspect of it was its amazing creation of atmosphere (so that's why everyone thinks Rushdie's prose is so fantastic!) and maybe in cutting it down that would have suffered, so I will remain ambivalent. I wasn't particularly enamoured of Saleem, I thought that his sister's sudden and total transition into a completely different character halfway through the novel was jarringly unrealistic and unnecessary, and the only characters I was genuinely interested in learning about were the older generations of the Aziz family, perhaps because they were introduced at the start when I was freshly enthusiastic and had not yet been tired out over the course of hundreds of pages. But as I was reading the novel and when I had finished it I felt that I understood India, as a place and a culture and a collection of cultures, a little better. And if a piece of fiction can get you to understand something real a little better, isn't that, really, the whole point?