Reading progress
I've been trying to stay on track with my goal of reading more this year (one of my two goals for the year). The anthology used for the freshman composition classes at my school contains a selection from Elie Wiesel's Night:
I liked it enough to put it on the syllabus this term, though I've always shied away from teaching anything related to the Holocaust. I thought I'd give it a fair shake and read the whole thing, as it's a fairly short book. I finished it a few days ago. And, while I grew a little tired of Weisel's stylistic over-reliance on fragments and rhetorical questions, I did like it and felt it was worth my time to read it. (And don't worry, my snobbish brethren: That Oprah's Book Club logo is just a sticker. You can remove it.)
Of Holocaust narratives, the three that I hear most often mentioned are the aforementioned, Night, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, and, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank. I may check out some of Levi's work, as I"ve heard good things about it. I also would like to finish an interesting book I started years ago called Reading the Holocaust
But I'm done with history and high seriousness for the moment. I'm about half-way through Richard Russo's very funny Empire Falls and I'm trying to focus on that until I finish it up:
I liked it enough to put it on the syllabus this term, though I've always shied away from teaching anything related to the Holocaust. I thought I'd give it a fair shake and read the whole thing, as it's a fairly short book. I finished it a few days ago. And, while I grew a little tired of Weisel's stylistic over-reliance on fragments and rhetorical questions, I did like it and felt it was worth my time to read it. (And don't worry, my snobbish brethren: That Oprah's Book Club logo is just a sticker. You can remove it.)
Of Holocaust narratives, the three that I hear most often mentioned are the aforementioned, Night, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, and, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank. I may check out some of Levi's work, as I"ve heard good things about it. I also would like to finish an interesting book I started years ago called Reading the Holocaust
But I'm done with history and high seriousness for the moment. I'm about half-way through Richard Russo's very funny Empire Falls and I'm trying to focus on that until I finish it up:
posted by Wheat at 6:24 AM
2 Comments:
You say "brethren" — plural — but that Oprah crack was really aimed at me, right?
I loved Empire Falls, by the way. ("Jimmy Minty! God, you were a stupid kid…") Glad you're enjoying it.
You know, I'm of three minds about The Oprah. On the one hand, I have a gut-level, irrational dislike of the woman. There are more rational things to dislike about her: 1) she has a magazine named after herself which features her own face on the cover of very issue, 2) she gives far too many new-age gurus and pop-psychologists an uncritical forum where they can hawk their wares, 3) she sometimes likes to present herself as a guru full of advice for the masses on how to live the good life.
But, on the other hand, she gives ass loads of money to charity, she encourages her audience to read books (and, generally, good ones), most of her how-to-live-the-good-life advice is not untrue, though most anyone else could express it with greater eloquence.
I've always meant to do a blog post about her, but I've never managed it. I've never managed to fit all her contradictions into a whole that's more than the sum of its parts: the truth of Oprah, if you will.
So, in short, I was relieved to find that the logo wasn't integrated into the book cover design. I felt like a bit of a poseur scratching it off, but scratch it off I did--in the parking lot, on the way home from the Barnes and Noble....
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