Manu Bora Bora itibaren Kąclowa, Polonya
this one gets points just for being so damn dark. it was a tough read, being intended as installments rather than a novel, but as an aspiring goth i gutted through it. ultimately, i enjoyed myself.
Just started
The way Lethem plays with language is brilliant, funny, and touching. The characters and setting are unusual and I found myself liking Lionel Essrog more and more as I read the novel. The mystery element seems to become less and less important in the latter part of the novel. Fortunately for me, by that time I was reading it more for the characters than to learn what happened.
this book is just great. next up is in cold blood. definitely.
I wish I could play mah jong. Right now.
A beautiful protrayal of changing times and the passage of idealistic youth into the jaded winter of her life. Having drawn extensively on her own experience of manic depression to create the character of Septimus Smith, Woolf, as always, throws her equally organised and chaotic mind with full force into the construction of a confused and rapidly changing post-WW1 London. The alienation of commercialism and the interuption of modernity, industrialization and war appear to be symbolized in one fluid action of a plane flying overhead and bringing the London Streets to a halt. That moment, for me, is possibly one of the most memorable parts of the novel. At the centre of all of this is the social pivot of Mrs Dalloway and her approaching party. The uncertainty, mourning for simpler times when one could read William Morris and see it as a possibility, the misplaced love, the substituting of true happiness for the pull of social respectability, they're all there, encapsulated in the characters as they move in their separate spheres of thoughts, occasionally colliding and hitting off one another. They're all stuck and finding themselves asking the same questions that all Modernists always seem to wind up asking... "who are we now?" "What is the world?" "How did we get here?" "what is real?" "Where are we going?" and "What on Earth do we believe in?"
I LOVE this book. It has been one of my all time favorites since I read it when I was 14. I have searched for years to find a copy, finally did on line about 2 years ago. I was almost afraid to read it again, that it would not live up tho th ememory, but I loved it just as much the second time around. The Little Kingdom is a heartwarming, heartwrenching story of a little girl growing up on a ranch in Montana where her friends were ponies, geese and all the other animals she meets.