Review: Siddhartha

Summary: I loved the beautiful, lyrical writing, but the plot was too focused on the divine for my taste.

I picked this book up based on a glowing recommendation from a friend.  It’s the story of a young man in ancient India on a spiritual quest to find  enlightenment. He tries dedicating his life to various pursuits, from contemplation to love, from self-deprivation to hedonism. Even encountering Gautama Buddha fails to bring him peace until after he’s discovered more of life himself.

War and Peace Read-Along Week 1

Since I read and loved Anna Karenina, I’ve been wanting to give War and Peace a try. Although I was nervous it was going to be mostly about battles and not have any characters I could love as much as Anna, this read-along hosted by Hanna at Booking in Heels gave me the push I needed to give it a chance. So far, like everyone else, I’m enjoying this far more than I expected. Even more surprisingly, Tolstoy is reminding me of Austen in a great way. This might be me projecting my own amusement at the way the characters behave, but I feel like Tolstoy is laughing behind his hand at their antics too which is a feeling I often get when reading Austen.

Classics Mini-Reviews

Title: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Source: library
Rating: ★★★☆☆

With Lolita, as with many classics, I’m definitely glad I read this just for the experience of reading it. Nabokov has a very unique writing style and Lolita is certainly a unique book. It’s also a book I’m happy to be able to discuss from experience. It was well written and I’m not at all surprised at it’s continued popularity. That said, I don’t know that I enjoyed reading it. The main sensation I experienced while reading this book was a desire to go take a bath, it was just that disturbing. I think it’s worth giving it a try to see if you love Nabokov’s one-of-kind writing style, but it’s (obviously) not a book to pick up if you’re just looking for something fun.

Northanger Abbey (The Austen Project)

Title: Northanger Abbey
Author: Val McDermid
Source: from publisher for review
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Review Summary: Like the original, this book doesn’t have much of a plot or a proactive protagonist, but I liked that it was more atmospheric than the original and strongly disliked the changes to the ending.

The plot for this book is identical to the original Northanger Abbey. In fact, the book is basically just the original, modernized sentence by sentence. Surprisingly, I really liked that about it. I didn’t love the original book. I probably wouldn’t re-read the first book. Yet something about a retelling that just changes the setting while staying otherwise true to the source material appeals to me. This does, of course, mean that the plot was still largely nonexistent. Unlike Joanna Trollope’s writing in the Sense and Sensibility retelling for the Austen project, Val McDermid’s writing didn’t match how I imagine Austen would write if she were alive today. However, she did keep the writing tricks I liked the most from Austen’s writing in Northanger Abbey. This included her humorous under-selling of the heroine, her occasional breaking of the fourth wall, and her impassioned speeches in defense of the novel.

Jane Austen Mini-Reviews

Title: Northanger Abbey
Author: Jane Austen
Source: free from Amazon
Rating: ★★★☆☆

This may make me a disgrace to Jane Austen fandom, but Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice have always been fairly interchangeable in my mind. They’re just so similar! So, even though I love them both dearly, I was initially very excited to start this book and find something a bit different. As always, I adored Austen’s writing style and her pointed humor. In this book, she very deliberately breaks the tropes of the Gothic novel, with funny asides about the genre along the way. Her points are made clearly enough that I could tell what she was making fun of in Gothic novels, even though I’ve read very few myself. However, as I got further into the book, it soon became clear that there was essentially no plot and the main character isn’t very bright. Although she does grow a bit, she has very little agency. Nearly all of the difficulties she faces are in her head or at least blown all out of proportion. I didn’t really feel that this silly main protagonist deserved the intelligent, funny, kind love interest. In typical Austen fashion though, everything just works itself out in the last few pages. This doesn’t typically bother me, but in this case, there wasn’t enough action by the main character preceding the speedy resolution. Only Austen’s wonderful writing saved this for me.

Love For Books Read-athon

As always for longer read-athons, I’m just going to try to read a bit more than usual. This week, I’d particularly like to read and review When Beauty Slept and The Bombers and the Bombed since they come out on Thursday. I’m also hoping to fit in something just purely for fun without a review deadline. Perhaps The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress or The Year of Living Biblically. I’m also looking forward to the mini-challenge! I’ll be tracking my reading progress throughout the week here.