I mean it’s Jane Austen. Everyone knows about Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and those are fantastic novels, but it was really great to read all of Jane Austen. 1100 pages and I only get to count it as one book for Reading to the Rain.
I think it is all about the vacuum.
Take a container with an opening, and a small hole in the bottom. Cover it with your finger, submerge it in water, save the bottom. Remove your finger. Water will enter where you have created the vacuum.
Or perhaps you will have created a trip that begins in a swampy village yet to become a city, yet to be reborn as a proper city that takes us as far as the kingdom of Prester John (which seems to not quite be all the way to Pakistan) and back, and possibly back again.
Baudolino speaks every language and lies in each of them, he is a master of facts and stories, though he has fabricated most of them and doesn’t know which. And so we follow him through his story into the kingdom of self-created myths, blending fiction and fact in such a way that eight hundred years later they are nearly impossible to tell apart.
Based on our bookgroup discussion one of Brianne’s professors stated that this was Eco proving he knows everything. And it seems like he might. Eco’s personal library is 30,000 books (think double my basement) and it shows. The historical fiction is filled with facts in far more places than I would expect and when actual events are absent the gaps are filed with mythology. Or possibly the gaps are just the interstitial vacuum between corpuscles.
But then nature fears the vacuum.
(I need to read more.)
- Bookgroup November 2007.
I really enjoyed this a lot more than I allowed people to believe I would.
George Eliot’s classic Victorian novel covers a lot of ground, a lot of topics, and has a lot of characters. It has its failings–like where may I ask are the servants stories?–but in all is really quite a masterpiece. Nothing about it is intirely unpredictable, which the conclusion explains as irrelevant, the point being simply to tell the story of those unsung.
Just to cover a few things of interest, and general motifs that I took from the novel
But the story is well told, and most of it stays quite interesting. I do not regret working through all 800 pages, my only sadness comes from only reading a single book in the month of September. I recommend this to fast readers or those with much patience and perserverance.
So honestly, he needed a better editor.
And I understand that when you are insane and writing the first novel that Russia has seen it is hard to find a good editor; and I understand that it was in vogue to be verbose, or as they would say – to eloquently describe every particular of the scene, but please – spare me.
Conceptually the story is interesting, from a literature theory point of view, he is using techniques that would come to define a style triumphed maybe fifty years later, but working through the text is difficult, and in the end not all that rewarding as the end of Part I is not conclusive, urging readers to look forward to parts II & III.
(Part III was never written, Part II was written twice and burned both times – though fragments (which I refused to read) remain.)
I think his short stories will be more promising – and I give him both those stars for cleverness and technique, not for creating a novel I wanted to read.
I noticed that Patrick posted on this book, and wanted to comment as well. James Joyce is an amazing writer, who can play with words in a way that most writers cannot. This is a story of coming of age. It is about choice-Stephen Dedalus has to choose between family expectation of a “normal” life and his artistic dreams. It is semi-autobiographical, and this makes it all the more interesting, to get the chance to look into his mind. Joyce was a forward thinker who began to change the nature of writing itself. If you like his work, I suggest another title of his: Finnegan’s Wake.
I really enjoyed this book. Another one of my early October reads, back before midterms exploded onto the scene was Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed.
This is a wonderful half-parody of a dystopian society, not only is it incredibly well written, but it is a gripping moving plot with forced homosexuality, the necessity of cannibalism, and a fight between brothers who share a lover.
This makes me want to go read more Burgess, so that will have to get added to the to do list.
Oh I am so behind on posting. This is what grad school does to me.
So this was our first book, for the book group I have started to host. The discussion about the book was good, some people liked it, some not as much. A lot of people felt it was hard to get through, with the Irish vernacular and the obscure references to the culture that he lived in.
I enjoyed the novel, though more from a historical period piece on the coming of age of an artist and I really enjoyed both the aesthetic quality of the piece and the comments it had on aesthetics and beauty in general.
