What are you reading the week of Sunday, March 29, 2015? [View all]

Hello, all!

Well, last week when I posted the weekly reading thread, I had just started on Smilla's Sense of Snow (I love that title!) and was thoroughly enjoying it. However, after about halfway in it started to get exceedingly weird and hard to follow. By the end I was, "WTF???". So, ultimately I can't really give it a fulsome recommendation. Maybe someone else would be able to get through the second part and enjoy it, it just didn't work for me. Oh well. I do still really love the character, Smilla, she was a wonderful creation no matter how weird the plot ended up.

As a palate cleanser, before taking on Moby Dick, I ordered and quickly got another old book that I had read many years ago, Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. It's a slim but fascinating novel, written in a dreamy, hypnotic style. It's Jean Rhys' imagined backstory for the "mad wife" who was locked in the attic in Jane Eyre. I loved it just as much the second time through as I did the first time, and it was still just as heartbreaking. If you've read Jane Eyre, then I think you would find Wide Sargasso Sea fascinating as well. Jean Rhys own life story is very interesting, too. I intend to read her earlier works if I can get them.

So, now I'm on good old Moby Dick. Not very far into it yet, it takes a lot of concentration to get through Melville's dense prose, and I guess my attention span isn't as sharp as it was when I was younger. Still, I have thoroughly enjoyed the first few chapters - there's some extraordinarily dry humor sprinkled here and there that set me laughing out loud several times. Still, setting the goal to read the whole thing again seems very like a quest - my own chase for the White Whale.

If I should lose heart, I have another old book on standby, At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen. This is a book I've meant to read for years and years, ever since I saw the fabulous, but little known, movie of the same name that came out in 1991. Among the actors in the movie: John Lithgow, Kathy Bates, Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn, Tom Berenger, and Tom Waits (woot!). I highly recommend the movie, if you can find it. And as I already know that Peter Matthiessen is a wonderful writer, I'm betting that I'll love the book, too.

So, what are you reading this week?