Dec. 6th, 2019 03:30 pm
Reading plan
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muckefuckMy Goodreads account has a feature where it totals up the page counts for the all the books I've read in the year and then comes up with an average for pages read per day. For this year, it's telling me a bit more than 30, which seems pathetically low. That's what I tackle on my commute on a good day, but you'd think that all the free time I have in the evenings and on weekends would bring it up. Alas, no. Still, with 25 days left in the year, that means I should be able to tackle three average-sized fiction books.
I don't really have any particular ones in mind, apart from Zakes Mda's Ways of dying. I bought it back in the summer after finishing The heart of redness and then set aside since it takes place around Christmas. I figure I'll crack it open during Christmas week. In the meantime, I still have Hurramabad to finish. And maybe some nonfiction as well?
Actually, I did start on reading Un nos ola leuad but I don't want to official commit to it since I've bought three Welsh-language novels in the last couple years and finished none of them. This seems both shorter (205 pages) and easier (the narrator is a young boy) than the others I've tried, but I don't want to get my hopes up too much. The style is somewhat elliptical (he jumps from one thing to another without much transition, like you'd expect from a kid who assumes familiarity with these people and places) and the dialect can be somewhat impenetrable at times (e.g. ceiniogwerth > cnegwarth). But it's very well-known and -loved so I can probably find help if I need it.
I raced through A life apart only to find myself disappointed by the ending. I was forewarned, however, as more than ⅘ of the way through, I couldn't see a resolution taking shape. So while there are some terrific bits, I have reservations about recommending it. This is perhaps a minor complaint, but I feel like Mukherjee wants to have it both ways by having a protagonist who is painfully naïve but ignoring this when it gets in the way of a literary turn of phrase or récherché reference he'd like to use.
I don't really have any particular ones in mind, apart from Zakes Mda's Ways of dying. I bought it back in the summer after finishing The heart of redness and then set aside since it takes place around Christmas. I figure I'll crack it open during Christmas week. In the meantime, I still have Hurramabad to finish. And maybe some nonfiction as well?
Actually, I did start on reading Un nos ola leuad but I don't want to official commit to it since I've bought three Welsh-language novels in the last couple years and finished none of them. This seems both shorter (205 pages) and easier (the narrator is a young boy) than the others I've tried, but I don't want to get my hopes up too much. The style is somewhat elliptical (he jumps from one thing to another without much transition, like you'd expect from a kid who assumes familiarity with these people and places) and the dialect can be somewhat impenetrable at times (e.g. ceiniogwerth > cnegwarth). But it's very well-known and -loved so I can probably find help if I need it.
I raced through A life apart only to find myself disappointed by the ending. I was forewarned, however, as more than ⅘ of the way through, I couldn't see a resolution taking shape. So while there are some terrific bits, I have reservations about recommending it. This is perhaps a minor complaint, but I feel like Mukherjee wants to have it both ways by having a protagonist who is painfully naïve but ignoring this when it gets in the way of a literary turn of phrase or récherché reference he'd like to use.
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