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A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
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Esther Waters by George Moore
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler
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Member: mcglocklin
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About me23 year old English grad. Two main loves in life are books and basketball.
About my libraryHeavy on the classics. I'm still young, so I have not finished laying the foundation of classics for contemporary work. I will get to the new stuff eventually. Too bad you can only read one book at a time...
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Real namePeter McLaughlin
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Member sinceApr 23, 2007
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but obviously you dont...sorry
posted by mudbogginkid16 at 5:39 am (EST) on May 22, 2007
posted by mudbogginkid16 at 1:49 pm (EST) on May 4, 2007
posted by -Mr-Dustin- at 10:04 pm (EST) on May 2, 2007
1. I wasn't much impressed with it as literary criticism. The comments on Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen & James (the main authors discussed), seemed somewhat forced in the narrative and not particularly illuminating.
2. Consistent with 1), I see the lit crit as primarily present so the book could have the title it does: essentially a marketing ploy. Sexy title for what is really the memoir of an Iranian English lit teacher about life in Iran after the fundamentalist takeover in 1979. Having said that, I cheerfully admit I probably would never have picked up the book without that "hook."
3. And as a memoir of life in Islamic fundamentalist Iran, as it affected those who were not fundamentalists, I found it quite interesting. We get far too little from the inside perspective of life in today's Middle East. This book is both perceptive and moving on that subject. It's particularly poignant for its feminist perspective. Needless to say, the intellectual and emotional needs of would-be independent women get very short shrift from the fundamentalists.
Previously, I've read fairly widely on Soviet-type regimes. There were many echoes of that kind of rigidity, represssion, and pettiness in the book's incidents of fundamentalist repression in Iran. That's along with some distinctly Islamic twists, of course.
Hope these remarks are helpful.
posted by pechmerle at 2:45 am (EST) on Apr 25, 2007
posted by sapiens at 5:22 pm (EST) on Apr 24, 2007