I'm still reading Smilla's Sense of Snow---fittingly, since it's snowing here, for real (I shoveled the walk a couple days ago).
I've given up on the plot--I cheated and read the summary online, so I don't have to wonder what happens--and just as well because it's inconclusive...
I don't care about the characters either. Also, I can't tell them apart--they all have the same name. (Of course they don't, but it seems like it.)
I continue to read--slowly--for the snippets of interesting history, geography, arresting images––
for instance, that you can locate an arctic rabbit by the steam of its breath––and occasional insight:
"The bad thing about death is not that it changes the future. It's that it leaves us alone with our memories."Yes. I hate that.
I just started The Great War and Modern Memory about World War I and "some of the literary means by which is has been remembered," by Paul Fussell. The author writes, "If the book had a subtitle, it would be something like 'An Inquiry into the Curious Literariness of Real Life'".
LOL
It's been sitting on the shelf at work for a year, and I think it was mentioned in Achilles in Vietnam, so this week I picked it up.
I just started it and it's fascinating.
Bully on you for plodding through Smilla's Sense of Snow. I sometimes skip to the end also. Harry did that in Harry Met Sally -- his excuse was in case he died before he finished the book.
ReplyDeleteThe Great War and Modern Memory sound very interesting. My dad collected books on the Great War as he always felt that too many writers focused on the more current wars. Every once in awhile I'll come across one and buy it.
Kirsten
Hi Fresca,
ReplyDeleteI didn't go to Vietnam. I've never been to war. I was never meant to have that fighting experience this time around. I believe that the powers on the other side of the curtain of creation see to such things. Draft be damned.
Speaking of which purgatory. Previous post. I see someone or someones, trying desperately to figure out that which we were never intended to know. But what about the one who was kinda bad but not so bad? Should they too go to the everlasting fire where the lord of all good shows his infinite love by burning an offender for infinity? No, that would not be fair. Lets just burn them a little, purgatory.
I was born into and raised in the Catholic church, alter boy, choir, the whole bit. It took me a while to finally figure out that churches are big clubs that folks choose to belong to. And that other side is amused, I'm sure, at our conception of it all.
What about a goat update? We have not seen one picture from that Marz of any goats. Are those goats incognito? Do they have names?
Snow. I haven't lived in it for a good number of years, but I always enjoyed it.
Thanks, have a great day...
Tom
It's interesting that you've had trouble with Smilla, as did I. My question is, WHY was this book a best-seller? Who liked it? I haven't met anyone yet.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever read "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon? I had a similar reaction to that book. I LOVED everything he wrote prior to that, but I just could not get through the Yiddish policemen. I kept getting all the characters confused!
KIRSTEN: I haven't seen When Harry Met Sally in many years--I'd liked it when it came out---I wonder how it's aged...
ReplyDeleteI don't bother finishing books I don't like--there's enough in Smilla to keep me reading, though I've slowed to a glacial rate. :)
I can send you The Great War when I've finished---the way it reads history through/as literature is interesting.
TOM: Sort of amazingly, the whole question about reward/punishment after death is the topic of the TV show The Good Place.
I'm almost done watching the last episode of the 4th and final season--I'm amazed it didn't get cancelled,
but maybe a lot of people are asking your question,
"what about the one who was kinda bad but not so bad?"
The goat farm is off the grid (power is solar, toilets are compost). Internet and phone connex in the hills are spotty. Marz hasn't sent many photos--and none of goats!
I want to see them too!
STEVE: I wonder too, why was Smilla a best seller? Was it the start of American readers' taste for Scandinavian noir?
I do like it for the atmosphere and info about Greenland, which is new to me...
The only thing I've read by Chabon is Moonglow--someone recommended it to me because of my vague interest in NASA and space.
I liked it but thought it went on too long.
Though not as long as Smilla--
That book would be soooo much better if it were half as long.
I also wondered why Name of the Rose was a best seller. I liked it when I read in when I was 25 and biking through Ireland--the perfect setting for a story about theology and medieval history, which I was interested in at the time---
But did all the people who buy it really slog through that?