Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Day 8

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I have to admit, sometimes I wonder what the point of all this reading is. Objectively, I know why it's all important. Really I do, but when slogging through a book and feeling like no progress is being made... well what else could I be doing with this time? This feeling passes, eventually.

The farther I get with this book, the more I wish Childermas was more of a main character. There's something enigmatic about the man. The longer I read, the more I dislike Norrell. The more I read... well the more antsy I get for the end. Clarke is using language deliberately to make the writing reminiscent of the gothic romances. She does a good job but it slows down the reading significantly.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel - Day 7

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The biggest thing I've noticed about reading these monster books is in how my attention span works. If I can't get through a book in five days or less, my attention starts to wander and I have to deliberately focus on continuing the text. This has nothing to do with whether I'm enjoying it or not. I mention this because it is one of the big problems my students cite when they are having difficulty finishing texts. It's not that I discounted this as a problem, it's just one I don't frequently encounter myself and therefore have trouble finding solutions. Reading things like this and Anna Karenina reminds me what it is like to slog. In short...it's good for me. (shudder)

I've also noticed that I've trained myself into this idea of only blogging when I've finished something....however if I'm reading a 1,000 page tome, that's not going to happen with any frequency and this explains why my writing habits seem to have deserted me. They apparently didn't work the way I thought they did.

For all that this is an absolutely huge text, it is very good. I was reminded of it when the BBC miniseries based on it showed up on Netflix. I committed the cardinal sin of watching the miniseries before reading the text, so now I'm spending a ridiculous amount of time comparing the two. Certainly, the miniseries has captured the feel of things and many of the events but they've been liberal with how the events connect together which changes how the characters come across in some instances.

I'm not done with the novel, obviously, but at this point I would say that they are both quite good. However, I would not recommend watching the miniseries first.

Watership Down

Ok, so here's a book worthy of its hype. This is a very good story which is surprising given that it is about a bunch of rabbits. I mean they are just rabbits who behave like rabbits. Obviously Adams gave them coherent thoughts and motivations, but they don't come across as humans in rabbit form which is often a danger of these sorts of things.

Can I just say that I love road trips, it's one of the few places in my life where I get to really sit and dig into a book. Life is full of disruptions and distractions - which is great, but it disrupts good reading time. I've been doing well keeping the reading going but I've been straying from the journalling, which I will work on.

I've been thinking more about Anna Karenina. Originally a tragedy was defined by the fall of a person of high status in the narrative. By that definition Anna Karenina is a tragedy, and even a good one. Anna's fall, while predictable, affects everyone around her in many ways, some of which are pretty subtle. It's like a stone falling though a web and that's what is interesting about it. Anna is less interesting for her sake to me; it is more interesting to me how her fall from grace has a rippling effect outward.

Anna Karenina - Finished at Last

Finally! I finished it. I woke up at 2 AM and couldn't get back to sleep so I started reading. Part 7 wraps up Anna's story and Part 8 is this weird meandering philosophical narrative from Levin's point of view.

Anna ended as it seemed obvious that she would. Honestly, she started to get so tedious with all of her doubts and histrionics. Tolstoy does an excellent job in presenting Anna's point of view as unreliable. At the same time Vronsky comes across as hopelessly childish and lost. I know that they are supposed to be the central tragedy of the book, but I can't help feeling like they are both incredibly naive. If Anna and Vronsky's story was the only thing going on in the novel, I wouldn't have been able to finish it. Many of the side characters I found much more interesting. I really liked Levin and Kitty and I even warmed to Dolly and Oblonsky.

While I feel very satisfied by managing to finish it, I'm a little mystified by the people who proclaim it the best novel ever written. It is quite good but I'm not pulled in by the love story between Anna and Vronsky in any way. Maybe that's not the point of it. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe it is the consequence of being a high school teacher and watching similar love affairs play out over and over. Tolstoy is very good at portraying people with verisimilitude, but perhaps too much so. It made them somewhat predictable. I don't necessarily mind that, but it is what made Anna so irritating. Just once, I really wanted her to make a good decision and stick with it.

Just once.

Death of a Salesman

I'm not sure why I never read this before; it is a quick read and it really is a masterpiece of literature. I think masterful literature makes the reader look inward and evaluate something in themselves.  "Death of a Salesman" is, at its core, a story about the lies we tell to ourselves and the fictions we turn our lives into. We all do it, I certainly do, and it's chilling to have something like that reflected back at me. On some level I hate that I identify with Biff, but it is unavoidable.

It's strange that I've heard about this play for years and yet never had any real idea what it was about. It's also amazing how relatable the characters are in something that was written in 1949. There's some odd phrasing and archaic attitudes but mostly the writing transcends its era.

I hate and love reading things like this. It's good. It's very good, but now I'm all agitated and rattling around in my head. It's uncomfortable. I probably should just go to bed and let it process overnight.

Anna Karenina - the saga continues

I've fallen behind in both my blogging and my reading but I've spent a very productive week otherwise. It's strange for me to be stuck in a book this long, I'm now at the end of three weeks on it. It's funny that even though I am still enjoying the story, I have a restless urge to just put it down. I guess in general I tend to be the reading equivalent of a sprinter and this is more like running cross country.

I finished Part 6 this morning (two more to go) and it was a bit of a shift in tone. Most of it revolved around Levin and his household instead of shifting as regularly between the three groups. What really struck me was how insanely complicated russian imperial politics were. Levin is completely awash in it for the first time and seems absurdly confused by it while everyone around him seems to conspire to make it look like it is the simplest thing. I wonder if, by his choice of point of view, Tolstoy was making a point about the politics of his day. I have to admit that my sense of russian history is a little shaky and I certainly haven't a clue what Tolstoy's personal politics were. I just get the idea that he was making a point somehow.

In a funny way, I'm feeling inspired to pick up a history on late imperial Russia.

Sirens of Titan

Vonnegut's a weird guy. I finished Sirens of Titan today and I'm left with the feeling that it is a weird religious meditation on predestination and the Miltonian Satan who was set up by God to be a villain. Except it's a sci fi book with flying saucers and sentient machines.

There are so many ideas crammed in here that I'm not really sure what I think except that it seems to me that Vonnegut is sceptical to the idea that we truly have free will. It seems like in all of his books that I've read that his protagonists always end up manipulated by some form of outside agency that operated in such a complicated system as to appear random at first blush.

I spent about half my read fearing that I'd already read it but it turns out that there are certain ideas that were also in Slaughterhouse V  and I was getting the two confused in my head.