Ok, so the reading tapered off for a while and the posting tapered off even longer. Now that the TV is gone from the house the reading has picked back up. I actually finished The Bridge to San Luis Rey and On the Road before the baby was born and I had started The Blind Assassin.
I suppose I’ll start with On the Road since it is the one I finished first. We actually listened to it in the car when we went on a couple of trips. It had some good parts and some slow parts. The end started getting a little boring but overall I thought it was ok. I feel that I might have enjoyed it more if (1)I had not taken so much time to get through it with long stretches of not listening to it and (2)if I had read it instead of listening to it. My thought on the main theme is that man is a constant wanderer, never satisfied with his present state.
Next I finished the Bridge of San Luis Rey. I was a little biased against this one going in because I had tried to watch the movie that came out a few years ago and was bored to tears by it. But the book wasn’t bad. It among the shorter books on the list so that helped too. It is basically about this guy who witnesses a bridge collapse that kills five people. Then he tries to find out about their lives and why God would choose these specific people to die. All of their lives intertwine but are very different at the same time. Interesting but either I don’t remember or I don’t get what his final conclusion was…that’s what I get for waiting so long to post about it.
Next I read the Blind Assassin. I really enjoyed this one. At first I was a little confused by it. There is a lot going on. It is written by this old woman who is remembering back on the life of her and her sister. So there is the story of what is happening to her in her old age and the story of her childhood. But that’s not all. Also throughout the book there are sections that when put together are the book that her sister wrote and was published shortly after her apparent suicide. But the book is about a couple who is meeting together and having an affair and they are also writing a story of their own. And there are also little newspaper articles and the like interspersed in it. But once I got the hang of what was really interesting. The end was particularly good, a couple of good twists. Some I picked up on quicker than others.
And finally, I finished Brideshead Revisited a week or so ago. I enjoyed it too. The reviews of it described is as a funny book and it wasn’t really that. From what I understand, it was more literary comedy like a comedy of errors, where the main characters keep messing their lives up and making bad decisions. Not really funny to me, but whatever. Anyway, it was an interesting read with really nice character development.
I’m working on The Big Sleep now and will hopefully finish it pretty soon since it is a short one. I plan to update a little more frequently but there is much going on so we’ll just have to see.
