What've You Been Reading?

[sweet_sparrow]

I don't have a whole lot of time right now as it's Crunch Time with the semester's end and several nasty deadlines - for this week! - looming over me (so my apologies if replies are incredibly slow and/or just fall to the wayside altogether in advance). Please can someone have a talk with Time and have it freeze it until I get/feel caught up on stuff? *whinge*

I've managed to get a neat amount of reading done this month - about 15 books in all and a slew of short stories I haven't bothered to keep track of. The most notable reading of the month is no doubt the two thirds of N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy that are out so far: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, both of which I really enjoyed.

Disappointments of the month were Emma by Jane Austen and Sabriel by Garth Nix, neither of which I finished. I may try them again at a later date.

What about you? What's your reading month been like? What stood out in any way?

Comments

[hyperbole]

In terms of leisurely reading, I finished off Pratchett's The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic (the film edition with both in the same volume), then read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry until Sunday night, and now I've started on The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde).

I'm a Modern European Languages student so literature makes up two thirds of my studies this year. In November I read Javier Marías's All Souls (which I'm preparing to write an essay on in the next few days, ew), a few chapters of Feridun Zaimoglu's Kanak Sprak ('pologies about not even attempting the diacritics in his name - they are numerous and the book is currently out of sight), Ibsen's A Doll's House (for the second time: in English now, I've read it in Swedish before), Hauptmann's Lonely Lives, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard. This marks the end of this semester and finishing the last novel a week and a half ago was SUCH a relief. I now have a week or so to work on essays and exams, read my own books, and knit, and then it's time to start with next semester's eighteen works. *breathes*

[sweet_sparrow]

Oooh! How'd you find them? I remember really liking the Wilde. (Though Pratchett took me forever to get into. *sigh*)

That sounds like a wonderfully diverse set of books to read, though. ^-^ I'm an English student myself, so I don't get that much diversity in my course work.

[hyperbole]

I study four different literature courses, so there's room for a lot of variation. :) There's French lit (1400-1900 including mediaeval poetry, neoclassical theatre, romance/realism novels, and...not quite sure what to group the last ones as; we haven't done them yet), German lit (less theme-ified and very widely varying), Prose Fiction in Comparative Perspective (1820 and onwards, also varied), and Introduction to European Theatre (starting with neoclassical theatre and moving non-chronologically until 1970 or so). It's fun!

As for what I thought of them, I mostly enjoyed all of them except Kanak Sprak. The Pratchett was fun for the first two thirds but then it got a bit old; there's only so much silliness one can take at a time. The Picture of Dorian Gray is likeable so far!

[sweet_sparrow]

Oooh, nice! That sounds like a fascinating set of courses. ^-^ I kind of feel like I should make an obligatory clamour for your courses to include some Dutch texts, but it's really the Flemish authors you'd want if you wanted any of them at all. (Yeah... I'm not very enamoured by Dutch writers. Though I'm determined to read Max Havelaar at some point.)

Pratchett does get more serious as the series goes on, if it helps, though it retains the humour. I can only read Discworld in small doses myself. (Like, uhm, one or two a year.) So I totally understand about the silliness being a bit much read consecutively. (*pokes spelling* My brain does not remember how to spell... Or perhaps it does and just doesn't remember it's spelled right.)