Just plugging away...

I think I'm on my eighth book at the moment? Let's see...

4. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Smith is a good writer. Individually, her sentences are beautiful. For being her first novel, written when she was 24, it is impressive. However, it just did not hold my attention. The characters and the plot just did not do it for me. They were not likable, just obnoxious mostly. Does that make me racist? I don't know. I definitely prefer On Beauty to this one. If I didn't have to read it for school, then I probably never would have finished it because it was also very long. Oh well. I mean it was good, just not particularly interesting to me. That is all.

5. The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes - Various Authors
It's funny okay, McSweeney's can be quite funny. This is just the perfect book for an English major. I saw this book at a bookstore and realized that they had switched the covers so the back looked like the front and I knew I had to read it. The library didn't have it so I made them order it. And it definitely did not disappoint. Allow me to quote some excerpts.

Phrases on the Marquee at the Local Strip Club to Cater to a More Literate Crowd: "Our Girls Even Drive Oscar Wilde" and "Leaves of Ass".

Possible Titles for Sue Grafton Novels After She Runs out of Letters: "/ Is for Slash" and "F1 is for Help".

Okay there are a lot more funny ones but I am too lazy to type things out for no one to read. And I must admit that I did not read the sections that I knew I wouldn't get anyway, but the ones that I did get were quite funny.

6. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
I don't think this book really needs introduction. It was very quick and very good. Poor Sylvia Plath and all the other "crazy" people in the 50s. I wish she had written more fiction as I prefer novels to poetry. Then I watched the movie Sylvia which I have been meaning to watch for ages ( despite the fact that I do not like Gwyneth Paltrow or Daniel Craig) but have never felt like I could because I hadn't read The Bell Jar. That's some depressing shit right there though. But the movie had good knitted things and that's always a plus.

7. Wild Nights! - Joyce Carol Oates
I never really knew what to think of Joyce Carol Oates. I had always kind of put her in that "books my mother reads" category with Elizabeth Berg and Jodi Picoult. But we read one of her short stories in lit and it was decent, if completely creepy. And also, she's so prolific that I would just have no idea where to start. I don't feel like I can really like an author if I haven't read the majority of their work. She publishes like two books a year or something ridiculous like that. Anyway, I saw this book advertised somewhere and it looked intriguing, which it was. In the book, JCO reimagines the last days of five famous American authors. Except it's not really what you would expect because she completely removes the authors from their usual time and place. And she writes about that author in their particular style. Poe is a lighthouse keeper in South America and Emily Dickinson has become a robot thing and Mark Twain is pretty much a pedophile. It's all very odd, but very good. It never was too weird or too fanfic-y to read. Probably because it was JCO and she knows what she's doing. But I definitely recommend it if you are a fan of American lit. Well that wouldn't include Jesi, but she should read it anyway.

8. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
Okay just started this one, but the intro/defense to the book was hilarious. Mostly because it would just be so unnecessary today. The author of the intro gives examples of what would be considered smut and compares it to excerpts from the book and how Lawrence means so much more than that. I am only thirty pages in, but it is good so far. Of course, so was Sons and Lovers at the beginning, it was only after hundreds pages of Paul hating on Miriam that I got annoyed. And the way they talk about sex in this book is just so, I don't know, quaint I guess. But I think Lawrence was doing a good thing, even if his book didn't get published til 1960 and even then people got upset about it.

Well off to a good start

Hey I've only been off a week, but already I've read three books! Granted they were all on the shorter side, but still.

1. The History Boys - Alan Bennett
This is one of my favorite movies and so my roommate bought the play for me for my birthday. I don't know, I am not big on plays, personally. This one was good mostly to see the differences between the play and the movie, but I need prose. The delivery in the movie is so excellent that I just hear their voices when I read the play. This sounds so negative, but I did really like it.

2. Maurice - E. M. Forster
Another book that I have seen the movie of with my roommate. I highly recommend both. This book deals with homosexuality in early 20th century England and so it was not even published until the 1970s. But it is really quite excellent. I read A Passage to India in high school and never liked it that much, but I recently read Howards End and really enjoyed it so I decided to give Forster another go. I must not be a huge fan of imperialism, because I really like his other works. Howards End is about social class conflict in England and there is really nothing I like better. Forster deals with controversy very nicely I think. I really wanted to annotate this book, but I couldn't since it belonged to the library. Anyway, it is about one man's struggle to overcome his homosexuality in a time and society that definitely did not accept it. And it is beautiful, that is all.

3. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Yeah this one has been on my list for a longgg time. I finally picked it up because I needed something to read on the train that was small enough to fit in my purse. Kate Chopin is awesome! I like that her stories are all about women finding themselves and ditching their husbands. Always a good topic. But the book is really beautiful and Edna is a really interesting character. Although I think that the end is not really a victory. It seems like more of a cop-out. I will not give it away, but the more I think about, the less satisfactory I find it.

4. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Only 100 pages in. Will discuss more later.