At-Swim-Two-Birds was among the more unenjoyable books I’ve read. I couldn’t tell you what the first half of the book is about. I tried to look up Cliff’s notes and Spark notes but unfortunately they don’t have any for this one. I looked up a brief synopsis and basically it’s a fictional autobiographical work about a student who is writing a story about an author who is writing a story about an author whose characters start to write a story about him because they feel they are being mistreated by him in his story. Yeah. So add to that the fact that this is written by an Irish guy who uses Irish lingo so there is at least one word per sentence that I don’t understand. And the book has no quotation marks in it. I finally started to catch on at the end but it totally wasn’t worth the effort.
Beloved was pretty good. I didn’t really know what to expect with this one. I knew it was about black people, that it won a Nobel prize and that a lot of kids have to read it in school. Of course I went to a private school so we didn’t really read about black people so much. Anyway, the story was a little hard to follow in places because it would jump back and forth quite a bit in flash backs that weren’t in chronological order, but apparently that is one of the major criteria for being on this list because it seems that most of the books I’ve read so far have that characteristic. It was kind of hard to get into the mysticism and superstition but once I did, the story was quite enjoyable. It has come to my attention in reading these last couple of books that I’m not getting near what I should out of these books. What I mean by that is, if I were taking a class or even really taking time to think about symbolism, themes, etc. I’m sure I’d get a lot more out of my reading. But I think I like it this way. Then if I want to I can go back and really study the books I enjoyed the most and I can at least have a semi-intelligent conversation about the rest of them.
Next on the list is the Berlin Stories. I haven’t started it yet so I’m not really sure what to expect.
