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Showing posts from October, 2012

Global Literature Book Review - Weeks 4&5

The Grass Is Singing: A Novel by Doris Lessing
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a depressing novel.  I'm a little confused by the ending, did she have a relationship with him or didn't she?  Lessing never writes that she does, but I guess that's part of this story.  As I read the novel, I kept wishing the characters were different.  I wanted Dick and Mary to at least attempt to work out their differences and try at their marriage.

As depressed as I was reading this book, I have to say it's been my favorite so far in this class.  I really liked Lessing's writing style and I thought the story was formatted great!  You know from the first few lines that Mary is dead, the story is how she winds up that way.  The story is about identity and the struggles that we all face in finding who we are and where we belong.  Sadly Mary never found where she belongs.



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Book Swag from NYCC

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What I'm Currently Reading...

I'm currently reading two books for school:

For the last two weeks our book for discussions/reaction paper is The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. It's a good book, but it's depressing.




Midnight's Children by Salaman Rushdie is a book we'll be discussing later in class but it is the book I picked for my final project so I need to read it now. I'm moving a lot slower than I would like to be, but it's a difficult read and I want to get as much out of it as I can!


My current audio book is:

So far I'm really liking Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. It really is a book that I think I wouldn't have been able to get through if I was reading the print book, but listening to the audio book on my commute to and from work I have time to listen and process the information. Being an Introvert I'm really interested in a lot of the information that basically explains why I am the way I am.


My current Jane A…
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When a Book is a Letdown...

The Maverick (Long, Tall Texans) by Diana Palmer
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was kind of excited about this book, I've been waiting for Harley to have his own story and even though I didn't finish reading this series during the summer I was going to keep reading to fill in the gaps since I had read Jon's book and had holes to fill in. However this book was the biggest let down.  I didn't like the characters, the dialogue or the story.  

There have been a few books that I've waited for with bated breath. Books that are finally telling the story of the character who has been in each previous books, or a romance that has been building up for a number of books.  Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon was one and I wasn't let down by this book, nor was I let down by Kiss of Snow by Nalini Singh.  They were just what I was expecting, the epic stories they had been built up to be.

I wasn't expecting Harley's story to be epic, but I was expecting to at least like Harley's s…
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Global Literature Book Review - Weeks 2 & 3

In order to catch up with the current weeks in the semester I'm combining weeks 2 & 3 into one post. The Stranger by Albert Camus
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It was okay, I don't think I would have picked this up on my own. I've always thought that Camus was a bit heavy and I tend to avoid heavy reading unless it's assigned to me. That being said I thought it was a deep book, and it really made me step back and take a look at how I react to and interact with the world around me.

View all my reviewsThings Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked this book. I was starting to think that I wouldn't like anything we were reading this semester. I was surprised that this would be the book that I liked, since I don't have a favorable opinion of Chinua Achebe. (Long explanation involving earlier Literature classes.) There were things that frustrated me about this book, but it got bumped up to "like" because I can see myself recommending…
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Global Literature Book Review - Week 1

This semester I'm taking Graduate Seminar in Global Literature.  We have a great line up of books and I wanted to share some mini-reviews here.  Here is the list of books I'll be reading:


Week 1 - The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Week 2 - The Stranger by Albert Camus
Week 3 - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Weeks 4 & 5 - The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
Week 6 - Wide Sargasso Sea
Weeks 7 & 8 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Weeks 9 & 10 Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

I chose Midnight's Children as the book I'm going to focus on for my final project/report.  I'll be finishing that up sooner rather than later.


The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It was okay, I don't understand what all the fuss is about with this book.  I thought it was disturbing.


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Death in Venice by Thomas Mann My rating: 2 of 5 stars It was okay, I liked it, but I think i…
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