The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. The book can be found on the Norwegian 100 Greatest Book List and My Personal Book List.
The Remnant...
"The Remnant of Dino Jim's Thoughts" is what is left over when you remove all of my geological thoughts and teachings. This is the place for my personal, literary, and Star Wars posts.
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The 305 Greatest Books - #185: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Monday, February 17, 2025
The 305 Greatest Books - #184: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
Spoiler warning: I hated everything about this book. Reading this book has been several years in the waiting. It is one of the last two books I had on the original 100 Greatest Books list I started, the Sybervision Book List (a list from a now defunct company). The book was an attempt at cataloguing the progression of history up to the 1920's when the book was written from a rather Euro-centric point of view, specifically a German point of view. However my problems with this book are almost immediate. I don't know if it was the particular translation, which also was atrocious, or the original text, however I feel it was a mixture of both. This translation, which seems to be the one most commonly around, was by Charles Francis Atkinson also from the 1920's. The text is almost incomprehensible at times. The ideas the author was trying to get across got lost more often than they were found and frequently the author (I assume it was the author) would leave words in their original Greek or other language, of which the reader couldn't even begin to decipher. My favorite parts though (sarcasm) were when the translator felt the need to constantly add his two cents in to the text. Like, shut up, this isn't your book. The topics are also widely all over the place. He jumps around the timeline across centuries within sentences of each other and fails to use the "BC" or "AD" identifier on times more often than not. And a lot of his concepts are downright just wrong. He has an entire chapter about how Darwin was just wrong and although he doesn't mention his alternative, it seems he is in favor of Lamarck but his reasoning is inconsistent. The book reads much like this was a literary essay or textbook where the author was just given access to a series of Encyclopedias, to the point that on nearly every page the translator cites an encyclopedia entry. It's dull, difficult to follow, and at many times it is just inaccurate. However, there were some light points. I did find some of his information intriguing, when I could decipher the text. I appreciated the agnostic approach to religion within the text. And he appeared to have some insight into the evolution of Germany at the time, which he was opposed to. His overall point was the Europe at this time was the pinnacle of society, however it had become stagnated since the Middle Ages in many cases and was slowly going to be overun by Asian society and ideals. So overall, it was terrible. I honestly don't understand how anyone could praise this work, although an abridged version might be much easier to follow and if one only sticks to Volume 1. Then maybe?
Sunday, January 5, 2025
The 305 Greatest Books - #183: The Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca
The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List.
Monday, October 28, 2024
The 305 Greatest Books - #182: Wise Children by Angela Carter
The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Wise Children by Angela Carter. The book can be found on the Observer Book List.
Thursday, September 5, 2024
The 305 Greatest Books - #181: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The book can be found on the BBC and My Book Lists.
I went into Rebecca having high hopes. It is in the top 21 books on the BBC Big Read list and several of my friends commented how fantastic a book it was when I started. So, although I don't like to have expectations going into a book, I definitely had mine. And they were beyond exceeded. Rebecca is a mystery novel, with most of the plot taking place as a flashback in the first person perspective of the central unnamed viewpoint character. Our main character is a servant of a less than ideal person when she meets this mysterious man, Maxim de Winter, whom she falls in love with and ends up marrying over a very short time period. Afterwards she is swept away to his mansion, Manderley, where she is thrust into the world of the aristocratic, complete with a whole host of servants whom now wait on her. The only problem is that there is something that falls over everything that our main character does in the story, and that's the shadow of Maxim's recently dead wife, Rebecca, whom was adored by nearly everyone. I was not prepared for the many twists and turns that the story took. While there is a sense of dread over the entire book, you kept waiting for the next shoe to drop, and each time I was surprised. The only one I caught on to before it happened was the final one as the book came to a close, but even that one had me flipping back to the first few chapters, before the flashback, to see how the story ties into them. This book was just so much fun to read. And while the story did drag a little bit in the middle, I feel that the story, and how the text just flowed off the page, made this by far a fantastic page turner. It is a definite recommend from me.