My madcap adventures in Germany during my year as a Fulbright Scholar.

25 April 2007

And she's back

Finally, after almost two weeks, my computer came home!

As written, I used my computer-less time to catch up on reading. So far I've totalled more than 2500 pages:

  • The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac

  • Shirley by Charlotte Brontë

  • Silas Marner by George Eliot

  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

  • Tent by Margaret Atwood

  • Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

  • The Gods Arrive ditto

Plus more than half of A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe).

It was lovely to take time off and just read.


For the most part the books I read were very good. The Mark Haddon had a unique narrative voice and was a fun read, but I don't quite understand why reviewers swoon over it. It's not that good; it certainly can't hold a candle to the rest of that list.

But, man, Defoe is dull! He's describing death on a large scale, mass graves, and ox carts rolling through the streets of London, full of corpses ("Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!), and yet it's still an insufferable, dull, rambling, moralizing mess... And it made me praise God for standardized spelling, which is odd, given that I don't believe in God.

But the god who gave us standardized spelling is a merciful god indeed.

I'm hoping to maintain the reading streak for a little while longer; I still have a pile of books from the library, waiting to be read. I might skip the Moll Flanders, because I will claw out my eyeballs if it's as dull as the other Defoe. At the very least I will seek out an edition with updated spelling and capitalization. I just don't see the pointe of suffering thru uneven Speling and capitalized Nouns any longer.

I'll be posting a bit more about what I've been up to lately when I can. I'm going out of town for the weekend, though, so you'll probably have to count on another hiatus. Sorry.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hurray! Your readers are thrilled! we missed you!

1:20 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Did you ike Silas Marner?
I never read it until I was teaching English when I was about your age. I remember loving it, just being shocked at how much I enjoyed it. A year or two later I recall feeling the same way about Great Expectations, another book I had avoided until I started teaching it.

3:15 AM

 

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