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Oct. 17th, 2005 06:39 pmOkay, so there actually were topics other than baseball about which I wanted to post, but they were forgotten in the excitement of seeing the White Sox make the World Series. I still can't quite wrap my mind around that, but here's what I've been reading lately:
I finished The Namesake over the weekend, and I found it rather a let-down. Lahiri's writing is just as pretty and her descriptions of food just as mouthwatering as they were in Interpreter of Maladies, but her characterization has not improved and neither has her ability to (for lack of a better phrase) "write outside the box." The plot of the book was just what one would expect from this sort of immigrant narrative, and Gogol's emotional development from spoiled, whiny teenager to slightly-less-whiny thirtysomething was disappointingly obvious. When I read Interpreter of Maladies, I felt that there were a few stories that showed Lahiri's full potential as a writer, but I decided that most of the stories didn't live up to that potential. Now that I've read The Namesake, I wonder if perhaps Lahiri is writing just at the level of her potential, and it was only in those few stories that she managed to transcend her own limitations. I'm not sure I'll read any more of her books.
After finishing The Namesake, I started Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. I've been meaning to read Greene for ages, and I'm enjoying this quite a bit so far. I want to get started on some of the reading about secrets and repression that I need to do, but not having any of those books sitting on my shelf is proving to be an obstacle. Must get to the library.
In other reading news, Time magazine recently issued a list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. The list is rather predictable and I'm not sure why they picked 1923--seems rather arbitrary to me--but since I love lists of all kinds I thought I'd post it.
( I've bolded the titles I've read )
I finished The Namesake over the weekend, and I found it rather a let-down. Lahiri's writing is just as pretty and her descriptions of food just as mouthwatering as they were in Interpreter of Maladies, but her characterization has not improved and neither has her ability to (for lack of a better phrase) "write outside the box." The plot of the book was just what one would expect from this sort of immigrant narrative, and Gogol's emotional development from spoiled, whiny teenager to slightly-less-whiny thirtysomething was disappointingly obvious. When I read Interpreter of Maladies, I felt that there were a few stories that showed Lahiri's full potential as a writer, but I decided that most of the stories didn't live up to that potential. Now that I've read The Namesake, I wonder if perhaps Lahiri is writing just at the level of her potential, and it was only in those few stories that she managed to transcend her own limitations. I'm not sure I'll read any more of her books.
After finishing The Namesake, I started Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. I've been meaning to read Greene for ages, and I'm enjoying this quite a bit so far. I want to get started on some of the reading about secrets and repression that I need to do, but not having any of those books sitting on my shelf is proving to be an obstacle. Must get to the library.
In other reading news, Time magazine recently issued a list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. The list is rather predictable and I'm not sure why they picked 1923--seems rather arbitrary to me--but since I love lists of all kinds I thought I'd post it.
( I've bolded the titles I've read )
