Forgot to mention... and what's next on the agenda...

I also read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton since the last major update. By the way, I LOVED Ethan Frome, so heartfelt and tender, smoothly written and honestly I just didn't want to put it down, nor did I want the book to end.

Vanity Fair, on the other hand, which I finished just the other night, was a tedious, long-winded, tirade that simply could have been accomplished in about half as many pages as Thackeray used. I know that, at the time of publishing, this novel was considered a major form of entertainment and thus brevity was certainly not something that Thackeray would have paid attention to, but really, it should not take ten pages to describe a single moment in time. Well, let me rephrase, it should not take ten poorly written and tedious to read pages to describe a single moment in time.

I guess I just didn't care for the subject matter and the dueling story lines became tiresome at times. When I was reading about one of the characters and her troubles, I was thinking about what was happening with the other, and then when I'd get back to that other, I found her storyline to be boring and trite and wanted to get back to the first. I felt split and thus became disinterested in the whole thing. But, I got through it, all eight hundred some odd pages, which thoroughly impressed my first graders. They cannot believe that I read a book of over 800 pages, I'm kind of like a superhero now, a role I'll gladly accept.

Next on the Kindle is Knut Hamsun's Hunger. The beauty of using Bloom's canon to pick my books is that I'd never have stumbled upon some of these titles without his assistance. The Rise of David Levinsky is one example of this phenomenon as is my current encounter with Hamsun. Described as a Norwegian Dostoevsky (a comparison with which I am agreeing) by the scribe of the forward to the edition of Hunger that I am reading, Hamsun lived from 1859-1952.

Hunger was first published in 1890, and Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920. According to the Nobel Prize biographical sketch of Hamsun, he was an individual who rejected society and civilization and focused his writing around the experiences of individuals who were outcasts and vagabonds. He was a Nazi sympathizer and after the end of WWII lost his property and spent his remaining years in poverty, essentially living the life of his character in the novel I am currently reading, Hunger. Hunger is, according to the Nobel Prize site, "regarded as the first genuinely modern novel in Norwegian literature."

I must say after two evenings with this book, I'm enjoying it's imagery and the pace of the story. I am eager to see where this tale goes and each night I have reluctantly put the Kindle down to get some sleep, now I am off to read again!