Pages

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Summer readin', had me a blast

As per Susie's request, I will talk a bit about the books I have read over the Summer. The last three books i've read are The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, Gertrude by Hermann Hesse and Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour.

For a bit about the Mary Shelley bio go to my blog: http://accomplishments.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/book-review-kind-of/

The History of Love is one of those books that whenever you have a single spare moment, you want to pick it up and read it. One of these books only come along every so often for me, and it is a wonderful feeling to have that. Interestingly, it has some parallels to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is a book written by her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. It is interesting because they had written their respective books before they even knew each other. It is about a book called The History of Love and a little girl's journey to discover the man who wrote it. The book switches between the lives of said little girl, Alma Singer and said author of the book, Leo Gursky. It is incredibly moving and I would recommend it to anyone.

I found it hard to get into 'Gertrude', but when I did, I really found that I loved and finished it in a couple of days. Our hero is Kuhn, a composer who speaks of the events of his life after the fact. I was fascinated by the character Muoth, just because he was so moody and unpredictable. It had a lot of philosophical musings which I thought rang true and gave me a few things to think about. He tells us of his relationships with various people and mainly, Gertrude. I've already bought another of his books, Steppenwolf , which I am excited to read.

As of right now, I am reading Moab is My Washpot, an autobiography by Stephen Fry and next will be the autobiography of Janet Frame, the NZ poet and writer. Good reading times ahead.

No comments:

Post a Comment