What are you reading the week of Sunday, March 22, 2015? [View all]
Good morning, everyone!
I'm doing this post in a hurry again, not because I'm still sick but because I'm on my way out the door to go spend the day with my dad, who lives about 90 miles away, down in St. Paul.
Anyway, after I finished The Sea Runners, I didn't have anything to read for a couple days (the horror!). I was finally able to pick up some books I had on hold at the library on Thursday. The first one I read was The Girl Who Came Home by Hazel Gaynor, from 2012. Sadly, it was not as good as I hoped. It's a fictional story about a young Irish girl who was a survivor of the Titanic - the story itself was interesting enough, but the writing was so pedestrian and banal and cliche-ridden, it was a struggle to finish it. It was a textbook example of a violation of the first rule of writing; show it, don't tell it. Too bad.
I'm having a much better time reading my next book in line: Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg, a Danish author. It's an older book, first published in 1992 with the English translation out in 1993. I'd been coming across references to this book for some time and finally decided to give it a try. So far, it's been utterly absorbing. I'm on page 166 of 453, so I'll be with this one for awhile.
On deck after Smilla I have some other even older books, including Moby Dick, which kept crossing my mind while reading The Sea Runners. It's been around 45 years or so since I last read Moby Dick - I read it 4 times between junior high and college - and it's always been in my mind that I would read it again someday. It will be interesting to see how it feels to go there again after all these years.
That's it, I've got to get out the door...
What are you reading this week?
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