The 305 Greatest Books - #201: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The book can be found on the BBC Book List.

Although I have never heard of this book, or the author before, I found out the author, Dodie Smith, had also written The Hundred and One Dalmatians, from which the Disney movie was based on. So I thought, ok, this could be good. The premise is that a family had moved into a long abandoned castle and were severely down on their luck. The book is written from the first person perspective of Cassandra Mortmain in the guise of diary entries. Her family all live within this castle, James, her father who is a world famous author having written one breakthrough novel but hasn't been able to write anything since. Her step-mother, Topaz, is a model who hasn't had much luck since the castle is far away from London and there isn't much work without travel. Her sister Rose, who really is useless. She apparently has a brother who is hardly mentioned, and a foster ward, Stephen, who is in love with Cassandra. And while I had assumed the book would be about this castle and perhaps their refurbishment of it, that is not in the least what the book was about. It is about their relationship with their new American landlords, who recently inherited the property, upon which the castle sits. While this book would be considered a character study, it is a rather boring one. I truly didn't care about most of the characters. And I felt no desire to go back to the book upon putting it down. I didn't hate the book, I just felt no desire to read it. It was meh. Even as the story ends on a "cliffhanger", you can see where the story is likely to go and be fine with the resolution. The writing is nice and the narrator does do a good job of keeping the listener informed but there is nothing compelling about the book. Overall it's ok. Nothing to write home about though.  

The 306 Greatest Books #118 - The Wealth of Nations

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

I think the best response for this book is what I had said about it when I started reading. I asked if it was possible for a book to be so very interesting yet so very boring at the same time. Now after finishing all 620 pages of it, I am reaffirmed of that opinion. The book is very long, longer than the 620 pages should have felt. And it was a drudge to get through. Many times he would talk about the price of one thing or another and how it has changed. This all being in British units, but the antiquated British units are no longer used, so I had a tendency to gloss over those parts. When it got interesting, I found myself invested in the narrative, more like a history textbook than a literary novel. What was really interesting was that this book seemed to be written over several years during the American Revolution. It was really amazing to watch how different America's impact on this book was depending on the date at which he was writing each section, from before the war until well into it. In the end though, the book felt more like a textbook or a scientific article than a story, which is fine, but he repeated himself so often that I feel this book could have been half the length and gotten across the same amount of material. I have heard that this is required reading for many in business school and I feel sorry for you. It may be a cornerstone of our economic system but it is tiresome to read through. This is very similar to how I felt The Origin of Species is to paleontologists, an important, long, slowly paced, bore.