I'm on a kick of reading the "great books," the ones that you are "supposed" to read. I am a huge reader, but I read too much crap, and there are too many great books that I have never read.
I've found a few lists of great books, and I'll use those as a guide. One list had more than 1000 great books. I have read a few more than 120 of them. Not horrible, but not great.
I just finished Thomas Mann's "A Death in Venice." Sort of cheating because it is only 75 pages, a novella. But I happened to have it in my bookcase, have had it for years, but never read it, and it is on "the list," so I read it. Enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Started off slow, but picked up. It was just the right length. Nowadays, someone would take this little story, of obsession and abandon that was really just a tragic vignette in a life and made it into a 250 page novel, because no one really reads short stories any more.
August 6, 2008: I just finished reading "The Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood. I started it several times, and didn't get into it right away, and mostly likely would have put it down forever if I had not gotten on this "great books" kick. It is on "the list," and since I'd started it, I decided to give it another go. It is a story within a story within a story, and it was hard at first to follow exactly what was going on. But I persevered, and was well rewarded. It was wonderful, masterful, I really enjoyed it, although it was quite sad. I've gotten a little lazy, and have to remind myself that reading a great book sometimes takes a little mental effort. Not sure I will have the mental energy to tackle Faulkner until my kids are older, but I will try.
Now, I am certainly not going to limit myself to "the list," particularly because the list is only of novels, and I am a great lover of non-fiction, and, I will admit, of popular trash, and sometimes, even better, popular non-fiction trash. I guess I will keep this post as a running post and update it with my latest books. It will be fun to look back and see what I've written. Probably won't have time for actual reviews.
So, in addtion to "The Blind Assassin," I just finished a book on mountain climbing, by Ed Viesturs. I forget the title, I'll have to go look it up, but it was about his quest to climb the 14 peaks over 8000 meters. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although it made me like a slug. Not because I'm not out climbing mountains, but because I feel that I just float through this world, taking life as it comes, while someone like Ed is setting serious goals and working hard to achieve them. Shouldn't I be doing that? Why can't I? I'm approaching my 45th birthday and my 10th anniversary, and doing a little navel-gazing as a consequence, and feeling that I've wasted a lot of time.
I've also recently finished "The Diana Chronicles" by Tina Brown. I thought this would have fallen into the popular trash category, but it was really quite well-written, and thought-provoking. Much less biased than previous books on the topic, much more journalistic in style than other books that I have read. Strange, this fascination that so many people, me included, have for the life of this one charismatic, but deeply flawed woman. Can't help it, I do. I actually found it hard to sleep after reading about the night that she died, and how many stupid mistakes led to that accident. I remember when she died, and I was just about to get engaged. Of course, at the time, not knowing all the facts of her life, and the fact that Dodi was mostly likely just a fling for her, I thought she'd finally found her true love. I thought it such a tragedy that she'd finally had real happiness in her grasp, and it had been taken away from her. One of my work colleagues could not stop crying over her two sons losing their mother. I am ashamed to say that I was a bit "yeah, year, whatever" about that. Now, as a mother, that is what I found so sad about the whole story, those boys having their mother taken from them. Children lose their mothers every day, all over the world, in circumstances far more tragic, yet it still haunts. Why? I guess all the photos and media obsession made us feel as if we knew her, as if we had lost a friend.
Well, anyway, next up I have "Beloved," and "The House of the Spirits," I think.
