First the finishes. Over the weekend I finished two excellent novels. Carmen Laforet's Nada, set in Post-Civil War Spain, is an eloquent evocation of one young woman's coming of age. You can read my thoughts on it at Read This!. This is a reader's advisory blog for the Peabody Institute Library; they kindly asked me to be a guest reviewer this month, so please click on over when you're finished here.
I also finished Margaret Laurence's wonderful The Stone Angel. I am so impressed by this book. I'll post on this later in the week as The Slaves of Golconda will be discussing it. If you've read it, please feel free to join us!
Today I finished reading Russell Banks's The Reserve. I'm sorry to say I did not get on well with this book. It's left me feeling very peevish, and for the last thirty or so pages I could only keep thinking 'I'm nearly finished' and then I can read something else. I will say Banks is a good writer, and he did keep me turning pages, but what a reprehensible lot of characters. They quite literally set my teeth on edge. Even the few I thought I actually could sympathize with let me down in the end. I had a hard time believing these could be real people and that they would do the things these characters did, but then they do say the truth is stranger than fiction, so maybe it is all plausible. Normally I allow lots of wiggle room in books I'm reading in terms of truth stretching, but it just didn't work for me here. Perhaps I'll give some of his earlier works a try, as I've heard he is quite a respected author.
As for the starts, I've decided I need something really different, so next I'll be reading Lisa Klein's Ophelia and Belinda Starling's The Journal of Dora Damage. After the day I've had I deserve two new books! And I've not forgotten about the rest of the list--hopefully I'll get around to a few more of them before they have to go back to the library, as I think for once I have a stack of books that can actually be renewed--it's so nice when there isn't a line of people waiting for me to 'hurry up and finish' whatever library book I happen to have started!