What are you reading? - Page 8

Midterm assignments

Because it's a translation.

Steinbeck.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Rather.

"Call me Ishmael" is up there too, in that it manages to encapsulate a major theme in the first three words.

Finally finished the 630pp of The Time of Our Singing. The final 3 pages made for a terrific ending that makes you realise you were unknowingly reading a book of a different genre than you thought. I won't spoil it, but this is a great book.

As a Dickens fan, I quite like the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Flabby. Blondie did it in 2.

I'm not sure I get your point about the last 3 pages - I'll have to re-read them when I get home tonight - but I agree in general about the books. Powers is one brilliant guy. My favorite is still The Gold Bug Variations, but that's probably b/c it's the first thing of his I read.

Back to an old favourite..

Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

The odd departure for Dame Christie, I feel, was "Passenger to Frankfurt". Another odd one was "The Dressmaker's Doll"--more like a Shirley Jackson story. Some translations are better than others especially given that translations receive Book of the Year prizes.

My point has to do with who the little boy at the concert turns out to be. Tied in with David's theories about the physics of time, it seemed to me to shift the book into a SF/fantasy resolution that I had not been expecting.

Now reading The Good Husband of Zebra Drive. This is the 8th book in McCall Smith's series and I think he has now taken what was an innovative and fresh idea, and devolved it into soap opera. I have tried all his other series, and they all seem unbearable. I think I must have been over-rating him, and I think this will be the last of him that I read. That said, someone should still go out and make a film of the first one, with Morgan Freeman playing Matekone and maybe Queen Latifah as Precious.

Literary starter kit