Wednesday, January 21, 2009

to read or not to read

many more books exist than could possibly be read by any single human being during a lifetime. i wish that every book i chose to spend time reading turned out to be interesting and beneficial to my being, but that's, unfortunately, not the case. i choose books mostly based on recommendations from family and friends, book reviews, and sifting thru the "classics" that i feel i *should* try to read at some point.

the guardian is currently featuring a series called 1000 novels everyone must read. i went thru the first installment, the love category, in last weekend's paper. of the novels i had read, i mostly agreed with their inclusion in the list, but not all. i also excitedly added quite a few books to my to-read list!

anyway, even if i dont ever get around to reading all the novels listed, i really enjoyed reading the brief plot descriptions the guardian included in the list. there were many authors i'd heard of and titles i recognized, but i had no idea what the books were about or in what style the authors wrote! an enlightening experience reading that list. enjoy!

2 comments:

Steve Jeffery said...

I've just started having a serious second go at a book I'm afraid I put down for easier fare after a challenging first chapter, The Puttermesser Papers. I'm glad I've come back to it as it seems to be picking up pace and becoming less tortuous to navigate grammatically. One of the ideas that did tickle me was the central character's imagined paradisical afterlife where one might have the leisure and opportunity to read any book every written while nibbling on an unending supply of fudge. I might like a more varied menu, but an eternity to catch up on my reading I think I could live with, so to speak.

Steve Jeffery said...

The review at Amazon.co.uk is a bit more informative.