"Solzhenitsyn's book is quite remarkable, but I can only read relatively small portions at a time. His description of the tortures the inmates had to endure is difficult for me to take. I'm still working my way through the book, but I am going back and forth between it and other reading material in order to keep my sanity."
Not being able to take large doses of The Gulag Archipelago, I took up reading books that weren't as intense. Of the nine I've read since the middle of March, I've read a few books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, discovered a new favorite in Marie Belloc Lowndes, and read William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary, to name just a few.
I picked up a copy for Kindle, of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! . I attempted to read Absalom, Absalom! several years ago, but set it aside. I've plowed my way through 50% of the novel this time, but I don't see myself ever finishing it. Maybe it's simply over my head, but I find the novel tedious, to say the least. I like commas as well as the next fellow, I use them often enough myself, but Faulkner's sentences can be unbearably long, and I haven't even made it to the longest sentence in Literature as written in Chapter six.
In her novel, A Chink in the Armour, Marie Belloc Lowndes uses the word brobdingnagian, which lead me to recall that I haven't actually read Gulliver's Travels. Like everyone else, I was familiar with the portions of the book that covered the voyage to Lilliput, but was unfamiliar with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th parts of the satire. To remedy that, I've downloaded the work from Project Gutenberg and started in on reading it. I'm currently reading the 2nd part.
The only comment I have so far, is that, in the sections I've read so far, it seems to me that Swift mentions Gulliver's defecating and urinating more often than I realized. You don't get that in the movies or cartoon versions of the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment