It was 80 degrees F (26 C) here over the weekend. The first time in recorded Minneapolis weather history that we have reached 80 in March. My tulips are up, my forsythia is starting to bloom, and my spring perennials are starting to appear too. Crazy! The library where I work has not turned off the heat in the building yet and when I arrived at 7:30 this morning it was 80 degrees inside the library with no air moving around. Stifling. I live in Minnesota. I am not a hothouse flower. I wilted. Of course just near the time for me to leave for the day, the building started to cool off a bit. Tomorrow I will go to work dressed for summer and it will end up being freezing cold.
But you aren’t here to read my complaints about building temperatures and weird weather. You are here for book talk. As usual I am in the middle of all kinds of books. I recently finished Summer by Edith Wharton and The Metamorphosis by Kafka. Both were excellent and I will post about them in the next couple of days. I read them both on my Kindle and now I am reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I decided to go with that one as my Dickens selection for my year’s reading goals when I found out from Bookman that it is his second favorite Dickens book. Since I haven’t read it before I figured I should give it a go. My, how Dickens loves the repetition of words and phrases in this book! It is a rhetorical device that must have a name but I don’t know it. You know the book starts with “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” and goes on in the “it was” pairing for a page or so. Well Dickens does this for other things too, descriptions mostly. It gets to be a bit much after awhile. When the technique gets used so often it loses its power in my opinion. I am still in the first third of the book so hopefully Mr. Dickens will chill out and find some other expressive methods to use soon.
Saturday from the library I picked up The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs. I’ve been patiently waiting my turn. It is a slim book and I am enjoying it very much. I also brought home Q’s Legacy by Helen Hanff. For this I blame Danielle who has mentioned it several times so that she finally broke down my resistance.
I am slowly making my way in the review copy I have of Lionel Shriver’s The New Republic. It’s good, but I am finding it a bit slow and difficult to get into. I am getting a little tired of the chip-on-his-shoulder narrator and not much of anything happening when I am just shy of the halfway mark.
I’ve been so busy trying to keep up with all the library books that can’t seem to properly space themselves out, that I haven’t gotten the chance to read another Borges story or anymore essays from Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand. I did read another Nabokov literature lecture over the weekend, the one of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It was good but not quite as satisfying as the other lectures I have read so far. I guess even Nabokov can have an off day, and really, his off day is what most normal people would consider a banner day.
I have yet to start the Willa Cather novella, My Mortal Enemy for the Slaves discussion on March 3st. It is short so I’m pretty sure I can read in over this coming weekend. I did borrow the Library of America copy though which also has essays and other things by Cather in it thinking I could read in addition to and add some interesting insights to the discussion, but I will be surprised if this ends up happening.
I still have Stephanie Staal’s Reading Women on my pile but if I don’t get to it soon it will have to go back to the library. Also on my pile is a book Richard sent me, Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times by Eyal Press. I read a great review of it in the NY Review of Books and Richard read the book and liked it very much so I am really looking forward to it.
There are, of course, a whole bunch of other books on the piles clamoring for my attention but these are what have me going for now. It all changes so fast though there is no telling what I’ll be reading two or three weeks from now!
I loved, loved, loved reading “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction”! I had never read an Alan Jacobs book but his style of writing left me smiling all through the book and for days afterward!
I have been told that Dickens was paid by the word and a man has to eat so perhaps that is the reason for his often absurd use of descriptive words? I think to this day he would win awards for the most verbose author!
I enjoy your blog very much and read every post from top to bottom but this is my first time leaving a comment.
~Hope
Hi Hope! Thanks for your wonderful comment! I’m so glad you enjoyed Jacob’s book so much, that means, since I’m only on page 55, that the rest of the book will be just as wonderful as the part I’ve read. He does have a nice style, I agree! Heh, I do believe you are right that Dickens got paid by the word. But for me, part of his charm is his verbosity. I currently just wish he would use more of a variety of sentence structures. The story is still good though!
I’ve just finished listening to Kafka’s Metamorphosis over the weekend and found that it left me feeling sad and abit angry. Sad for Gregor, who having worked so hard to provide for a better living for his family, had to end up being rejected by the very same people and be thought of as a burden to be rid of. I was especially irked at the part where the father threw those apples at him so mercilessly and caused him such injury and suffering as a result of that injury, which thereafter set off the begining of a slow death for him.
Michelle, oh yes, I was sad for Gregor too and angry at his family! That Gregor was so self-effacing and self-sacrificing and his family so cruel to him. The apple scene was horrible. And that they could forget him so easily at the end!
I’m going to be curious as to how you get on with A Tale of Two Cities. It’s my least favorite of all Dickens’ novels that I’ve read so far (although it does have those memorable, quotable lines). I think I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it as a younger person, but I read it for the first time 4 or 5 years ago.
So far I’m getting on pretty well. I missed my train stop this morning because I was so intent on reading it! I’m not sure whether it will end up being a favorite or not though, it’s still early. The story is good but the actual quality of the writing seems to be not quite up to par with Bleak House, the Dickens book I read last year and thought was extremely well done.
Stefanie,
You pick all the most interesting books! And I’m really interested in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Look forward to your review. We’re having an early spring too. This past winter is the 8th warmest on record for us. But I don’t have flowers yet, Calgary is still Calgary, have to wait till June for them. Happy spring reading!
Thanks Arti! I am enjoying The Pleasures or Reading so much I could gobble it down but I am forcing myself to savor it. 8th warmest winter for you? It was 4th for us. I bet you’ll h ave flowers sooner than you think. Neither Bookman nor I like hot weather and we keep joking that we’ll have to move north eventually. We could end up as neighbors!
Isn’t the weather weird? It’s been so warm that I wore a thin shirt with three quarters sleeves to work yesterday but froze as the air has been cranked up. Today I dressed a little wiser but it’s cooled off a bit. I’m not complaining for the nice weather, but it’s just very early! I can so relate to your post as that is exactly how I read and after chatting about a group of books, in another week it will likely be an entirely different group I’m reading. I am trying to focus more to actually *finish* them before moving on to others first, however! I really want to read Kafka this year, though I think I need to be in the right mood. I am nearly finished with Dumas (another wordy writer–though not at all as bad as Dickens I think), and I am going to pick a *shorter* classic next. I’m pleased though that I haven’t set it aside as I can’t seem to read really long books of late, so maybe this will start a new trend. Q’s Legacy is a quick, breezy book and should make a nice companion to the Jacobs–well, both bing about love of books anyway. I’ll be reading the Cather over the weekend, too. It has been sitting on my night stand for about three weeks now, so my intentions are good.
I had to pull out some summer clothes from their storage boxes over the weekend. shorts and t-shirt and barefeet in March! You and I have such a similar reading style it is spooky! You’ve been moving along well through Dumas! Kafka is short and so very different from wordy Dumas and Dickens, he could be a breath of fresh air for you
I am looking forward to Q’s Legacy very much. I’ve had Cather on my desk for a few weeks. She will be getting lots of attention soon from both of us!
Oh your reading plan is exhausting me Stefanie … but I love to see what you are up to. BTW, in case you didn’t notice, I finally read and reviewed Woolf’s The mark on the wall. Thanks so much for pointing me to it.
heh, I probably read too much, but many of these books are short so even when I try to read them slowly they go fast. I noticed in my feed reader over the weekend that you read Mark on the Wall. I will be catching up with you shortly! Glad you liked it!