Reading Wednesday
Sep. 18th, 2013 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain. This book is very strange, and I can't even tell if I liked it or not. The first third or so was a very beautifully written, evocative portrayal of a young girl from a taluqdar family (that is to say, extremely rich and privileged, basically nobility) in pre-Independence Lucknow. That part was excellent! The second third was about the same girl as a young woman, involved in parties and high society and falling in love in the 30s. That part was also well-written, but didn't seem to connect much to the first part, and instead felt a bit like some sort of alternate world Great Gatsby. The last section is set in the 50s (and I really do not understand why a novel that is supposedly about the changes pre- and post-Independence would entirely skip the 1940s, but whatever) and is oddly written and consisted almost entirely of flashbacks as the main character wandered through her now-abandoned house.
So overall, glad I read it, don't think I'd recommend it.
What are you currently reading?
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle. Ah, this book. For a book that is so objectively good, I keep finding myself putting it off. Sometimes it's the tiniest, offhand things that make me have to set it aside. Look at this sentence I just read last night: "He introduced him to the highest level of politics, bringing White with him to Capital Hill while he lobbied for an ill-fated antilynching bill, and even sending him to Paris as one of the NAACP representations to the 1921 Pan-African Congress." It's not even the point of the sentence, and yet all I can think is HOW CAN A BILL THAT IS ABOUT ANTILYNCHING POSSIBLY BE "ILL-FATED" WTF IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE. And then I have to stop reading.
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. I have literally only read five pages of this so far, so I don't have a lot of feelings on it yet.
Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain. This book is very strange, and I can't even tell if I liked it or not. The first third or so was a very beautifully written, evocative portrayal of a young girl from a taluqdar family (that is to say, extremely rich and privileged, basically nobility) in pre-Independence Lucknow. That part was excellent! The second third was about the same girl as a young woman, involved in parties and high society and falling in love in the 30s. That part was also well-written, but didn't seem to connect much to the first part, and instead felt a bit like some sort of alternate world Great Gatsby. The last section is set in the 50s (and I really do not understand why a novel that is supposedly about the changes pre- and post-Independence would entirely skip the 1940s, but whatever) and is oddly written and consisted almost entirely of flashbacks as the main character wandered through her now-abandoned house.
So overall, glad I read it, don't think I'd recommend it.
What are you currently reading?
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle. Ah, this book. For a book that is so objectively good, I keep finding myself putting it off. Sometimes it's the tiniest, offhand things that make me have to set it aside. Look at this sentence I just read last night: "He introduced him to the highest level of politics, bringing White with him to Capital Hill while he lobbied for an ill-fated antilynching bill, and even sending him to Paris as one of the NAACP representations to the 1921 Pan-African Congress." It's not even the point of the sentence, and yet all I can think is HOW CAN A BILL THAT IS ABOUT ANTILYNCHING POSSIBLY BE "ILL-FATED" WTF IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE. And then I have to stop reading.
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore. I have literally only read five pages of this so far, so I don't have a lot of feelings on it yet.
