Here is what I have read or attempted to read since I got married, starting with books I finished or gave up on:
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Probably less than 25% Completed.
Alyssa and I were reading this together for months, even before we got married. It's a big book. It was easier than I thought it would be to get into it, but it was even easier to get out. Did I say it's big? Cool writing style. I wish I liked whales and the sea and stuff.
Rating: 3 Headhunters
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
100% completed.
I have a soft spot in my heart called russkyus literaturus and I have an imaginary quota to fill. I was curious about ol' Solzhenitsyn and I gave this book a whirl. It's about a guy serving in a Stalinist work camp. Not fun. It convinced me that it would be miserable. It was kinda miserable to read too. It's not Tolstoy or even Dostoevsky.
Rating: 16 Babushkas
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
100% completed.
I haven't read any Roth before, and I was wondering what the deal was about that, so I read this. It's about this star athlete who has a charmed life who has this crazy daughter who is a terrorist and opposite in every way. It is high on writing style, high on character, maybe a little lower on plot. Would I recommend it to my Mom? No. Heck, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone.
Rating: 5 yarmulkes
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
100% completed
Five travelers fall to their deaths when an old rope bridge in Peru mysteriously breaks. Was it some divine fate or just a coincidence? SPOILER! That question remains unresolved. We get a peek into the lives of each of the doomed characters. This book had a very high literary style that tickled my literary bone. The characters were very well-developed as well as their stories. It's a book I feel I need to read again.
Rating: 5 million sombreros
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
100% complete
I love a good dystopia. I even love a bad dystopia. This combined my Russian fix with my dystopic fix, and let me tell you, it went down smooth. It's one of the first dystopias, predating all of your piddly 1984s and Brave New Worlds. In a world where everything is scheduled out down to the number of bites it takes to swallow breakfast, how could anything ever go wrong? Oh man, things sure go wrong. I couldn't put this book down for the first 100 pages, then I started to put it down some but I still read it in like three days. My second recommendation.
Rating: 73 Department of Redundancy Depepartments
The Telling by Ursula K. LeGuin
100% complete
Even though We is sci-fi, I needed an even purer shot, because I thrive on performance-enhancing books. I also read this with Alyssa, who was enthralled at reading her first LeGuin. If you haven't already read her work, why haven't you? This was my second after LHOD (abbreviations make me sound cooler) and I again enjoyed her feminine, social science approach to sci-fi. In fact, I like her ideas the most, but I wouldn't say the plot nor characters nor style were that great.
Rating: 33 ansibles
Now here are some books I am in a partial state of undressing:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
about 25% complete
I snagged this book as well as a book of critical essays about this book, ready to swig some turn-o'-the-century Irish kunstlerroman, get hungover, vomit, and then examine the contents of the vomit. But, blimey, I am having a hard time getting into it. You have tricked me again, every list I have ever seen of the best books ever written! I am enjoying the critical essays more than the book so far, but I haven't given up hope yet.
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
about 75% complete
When this book walks down the street, do people say, "there goes the best book there ever was?" Um, no, they don't. And books don't walk. I do feel like I am breaking a personal vow to never see a movie and then read the book, but we got this book for really cheap at a Red Cross Charity Booksale, and I could hear it calling my name. So I read it and was immediately drawn in because of the familiarity of the story, but after settling in I realized that I actually liked the movie better and I think this Malamud was a bad writer and somehow he got lucky and they made a cool movie about his kinda dumb book.
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
about 5% complete
Too early to tell. Dickens stories have some pretty great expectations from me.
On the Docket:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers
something by Faulkner
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