Kevin Eigelbach > Recent Status Updates

Have not read the books that this is the prequel of. Had no desire to. Read this one to my wife in the car. Not the kind of novel I would have

First novel I've read by the author of the autobiographical My Struggle. After reading several novels where the authors almost seem to go out of their way to write in a convoluted style, it's refreshing to read an author who uses paragraphs, who doesn't write sentences that I have to reread to understand. And yet, he addresses some profound thoughts in his simple style. Enjoying this one greatly.

Reading this to my wife in the car. It's a long one, longer even than War and Peace, but absorbing. It's sort of a slice-of-life story about several Indian families living just after independence and the partition of India and Pakistan. Lots of humor, lots of interesting characters. Not much action, but somehow Seth makes even the smallest, mundane events as interesting as a battle.

Picked this one up at a book give-away by our local bookstore (too much inventory). They accept donated books and sell them to benefit the poor. Anyway, I have seen the French movie based on the book and it was wonderful. Reading it to my wife, Eileen, as we drive places together. It's about a priest who tries to make a difference among his parishioners, but largely fails. But he succeeds in something better.

I'm reading this to my wife and we're loving it. Charlotte's a genius from a hick town who becomes a freshman at a sophisticated university. Very naive, a virgin, she feels like a fish out of water. She's also a very moral person who's appalled at the lack of morals she sees around her. It's a tribute to Wolfe's skills as a storyteller that I find myself worrying about Charlotte and what's going to happen to her.

This book gives me hope that one day, I also might win the Booker Prize. It's an intensely frustrating read. The story makes abrupt jumps into the past and back to the present; the author uses lots of sentence fragments; she makes up phonetic spellings for words; she lists lots of irrelevant details. It's really rather dull. If I had not invested so much time in it, I don't think I'd keep reading. Very disappointing.

This is a tough read, mainly because you see all the awful things we've done in the name of fighting the "War on Terror."