Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Off topic: a literary binge (2)

Carrying on from the October post on an out-of-character literary binge, since then, I've completed:





  • Emma - Jane Austin. I found this mildly entertaining


  • Walden - Henry David Thoreau. As much as I can appreciate the quest for simplicity in life, on the whole it came across as a snivelling, opinionated call for universal poverty and a rejection of human progress or dissenting opinion


  • Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka. Entertaining


  • Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. Grim reading and a sad reflection on the time and place it was set in


  • The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Long. Just long. But well worth the read. Unquestionably the highlight of this batch
(These are in addition to other reading material.)

With the exception of Walden, I enjoyed all of these books. I'm not sure what's next for the literary genre, possibly something a bit more contemporary.





3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pretending to be Amazon for a moment, you might also like these.

"The Master and Margarita" - Mikhail Bulgakov

"A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe

JD said...

The Brothers Karamazov

whats that book about?

traineeinvestor said...

@ Anonymous - thanks for the recomendations. I'll look into both books

@JD - The Brothers Karamazov is the story of three brothers and the murder of their father. Dostoyevsky uses the story to raise questions about religious faith and other ethical issues against the background of a time in history when Russia was in the process of modernising itself. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov

Cheers
traineeinvestor