Friday, August 23, 2013
Summer Reading....
Also, I'm being all intellectual at the moment with my reading material. Well you're forced to do that sort of thing now and again when you have a bookshop even if just for appearances sake! I'm currently reading (well starting to read at any rate) Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse which seems quite appropriate in a way because a couple of weeks ago whilst in Cornwall I could see Godrevy Lighthouse, which is the lighthouse in question, most of the time in the distance and actually walked up onto the cliff tops to with a hundred yards of it. Quite spectacular views they are as well I can tell you. I'll report back on the goings on in the Ramsay family (in the book) when I've got further into it. If they're anything like the author and her fruity friends I reckon I'm in for a right old shocker.
Before this book I read Franz Kafka's famous Metamorphosis which, at only fifty odd pages, is more of a short story than a book but what a weird old carry on that was. I won't ruin it for you but this young bloke wakes up one morning and he's only gone and turned into a great big beetle. It takes him a little time to adjust and his family, not surprisingly, are a tad upset by the whole episode in Gregor Semsa's life. He dies of course after a few weeks or is it months and only finds true happiness right at the end.
I might try a James Patterson next or maybe a Danielle Steele. Having never read either author I really should....
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3 comments:
It will be interesting to learn what you think of "To the Lighthouse". I haven't read anything by Virginia Woolf, although I have read "All Passion Spent" by her friend, and some say lover, Vita Sackville-West.
Kafka, of course, gave his name to the term Kafkaesque, which is used to describe something, (particularly an event) having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality. "The Trial" - the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader, encapsulates this perfectly.
Poor old Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse, at Rodmell, near Lewes, and Franz Kafka only made it to 41, before dying from tuberculosis. It's well worth a trip to Prague, and wandering around the old streets near the castle, to get a feel for the author and his works.
I studied To the Lighthouse for A Level many years ago and hated it the first time I read it. Now it is one of my favourite books - definitely worth persevering, if you don't like it first time round.
I studied To the Lighthouse for A Level many years ago and hated it the first time I read it. Now it is one of my favourite books - definitely worth persevering, if you don't like it first time round.
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