Re: What Are You Reading?-#3
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. It's unabridged and intense. My favorite character is Javert because he's just awesome. I know he's the bad guy, but he's so dedicated. Also I laughed so hard when I read the scene where Fantine thinks that he's letting her go instead of Monsieur Madeleine. It's my favorite scene so far I think.
I'm reading Les Miserables. I've always wanted to read it and it took me buying an iPod Touch to do it. It's one of the books you can get free with the bookshelf app. I've actually not read much since college. I was an English major. That pretty much killed my love of reading. Hopefully this will get me back on track.
it's one of my favouritest books of all time, it's just fantastic, so complex and tragic but with bits of real humour too, and so much empathy for people's lives. i hope you both enjoy it.
my favourite character is eponine (even in the musical, before i ever read the book she was my favourite but she's even better in the book) - i always feel so sad for her, she tries so hard to make something better of herself but everyone else just gets in the way. i love the thenardiers too, so mean and nasty, i do like a good villain.
det higgins i see what you mean about javert - he is a great counterpoint to valjean, but he's a bit too dedicated for me, his principles are admirable but you have to have some flexibility, right?
perfectanomaly i know what you mean about reading - i did politics, philosophy & history and all three subjects are so book-based, reading just became a chore, i'd always loved it but after that it was just too much like work. i'm back into it now, mostly, but not like i was before that degree, it's kind of sad really!
i'm reading steinbeck - again! this time it's
cup of gold which is one of his less well known ones - it's about a young (well, 15) welsh boy (it really surprised me when i started it and realised he was writing about wales!) who goes off to the indies to be a buccaneer, so far, so good
while i was away i read a few books - the ones that stood out were
steinbeck (shock!)
the moon is down - it's about a small capital city that gets occupied by an invading force, and how the people of the city react to that. it's never made explicit that it's about the nazis, but it was written in 1942 and the occupiers are frequently described as "efficient" which i think is a pretty clear hint. it quickly became required reading for many clandestine resistance movements, being published on underground presses etc, and citizens of many of the occupied nations of ww2 have said it was absolutely spot on in its depiction, and after the war it was one of the first books to be officially published in many of those nations, with huge print runs that sold out fast. oddly though, america thought it was too lenient towards the "occupiers" and made them too human (newsflash: the nazis
were human, that's what made them so frightening!). anyway, aside from the history lesson (!) it really was very good indeed. maybe i'm biased as i'd read anything that man wrote, but having studied occupied france, to me it definitely seemed to ring true in many ways. i really liked it a lot.
kathryn stockett's
the help - it's about black maids working for white women in 50s mississippi - oddly it was written by a white woman but from the perspective of 3 different characters, only one of whom was white. i liked it tho, it was funny in parts and tragic and kind of depressing in parts but also quite uplifting as well. definitely worth checking out.
hillary jordan's
mudbound - another one about the south in the 50s (well, late 40s really), but from a different point of view, i didn't know what to expect from it but i really liked it. it started pretty dark and got darker as it went on. definitely not one for anyone that likes happy endings! in fact the ending was pretty horrific (in a good way, if that makes sense) but it was very well written and quite gripping.
