Two Worth Attention

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Far North by Marcel Theroux

Comments

  1. Steven,

    _The Hunger Games_ is the Feb book selection for the SF Group I belong to. I just finished it yesterday. It's a page-turner and very action-oriented. However, I didn't find the philosophy in the book that one of the blurbs promised me. Perhaps it was too subtle for me to pick up on.

    The Theroux book sounds interesting. I hadn't heard of it or of the author. Thanks for the link.

    ReplyDelete

  2. Dear Fred,

    Hmmm. Philosophy in a YA? I wonder what they were thinking. I see a worldview and a certain way in which there is a kind of thinking that would be comfortable for the YA world (you and me against the mean bad world that grown-ups have made). And there's more and more of this evolving.

    shalom,

    Steven

    ReplyDelete

  3. Steven,

    I wouldn't call it a worldview--more likely just typical adolescent thinking that many never grow out of.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make.

I think we can take …
Read more

Structures--Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf was well known to have little patience with Ulysses.  Joyce Carol Oates, in her book The Faith of a Writer suggests that part of this may have been the jealousy of one genius admiring the aplomb and power of another.  Following is a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary available from Fathom.

"I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
Read more

Lewis Carroll and James Joyce

While talking about my favorite books with my wife, she pointed out the the conjunction of James Joyce and Lewis Carroll was not nearly so unlikely as it might seem with only a moment's consideration.  In fact, it makes a great deal of sense.  The playfulness that I love in Ulysses (and even more in Finnegans Wake) is already present in Carroll as a kind of verbal surrealism.  "It's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards."  But most particularly in the dialogue of Humpty Dumpty and Alice, in which Humpty explains:

from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

Lewis Carroll

`Certainly,' said Alice.


`And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'

`I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "…
Read more