Saturday, December 16, 2006

Not Reading Books on a Going Forward Basis

I had almost finished "Jonathan Srange and Mr Norrell" when I made the mistake I always do: I read the ending. And because it didn't end the way I was hoping it was going to end, I stopped reading it.

I'm a suck that way.

Anyways, my dad had received "The DaVinci Code" for his birthday, but had hated it and was more than happy to foist it on me. So I decided I would give TDC a try.

"The DaVinci Code" was a total piece of trash and I got sick of reading it in about three days.

My mom had managed to read TDC and hated every minute of it. To cleanse her palate, she decided to re-read Umberto Eccho's "Foucault's Pendulum". I decided to do the same.

Unlike my mom, though, I never managed to finish reading FP the first time around: I had gotten massively confused halfway through and had stopped reading it. I also thought it was pretentious and wordy. But I was 18 then and pretty stupid, so I decided I would give FP another go.

A few chapters into FP, I decided to go back to "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell". It wasn't because FP was bad or anything; I was actually finding it pretty cool this time around and felt that it wasn't the book that was pretentious, but rather it was the narrator who was pretentious, making it all OK.

No, what made me go back to "Jonathan Strange" was the desire to finish it before my next trip so that I would be able to bring a new book with me in good conscious.

And that is insane.