nomadreader

Dear Friends Who Think I Should Read More Classics, You'll be pleased to hear the first book I read in 2018 was a classic. You will be disappointed to hear I did not like it. At all. I admit, I was a little disappointed too. I had been meaning to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  for years. It sounded like a classic I actually would  like. It's very short (132 pages). It's written by a woman. It's about girls coming of age. What could go wrong? I found it annoyingly dated and quite dull. I can understand why it would have been a powerful, moving novel when it was written. At that time, a character like Miss Jean Brodie might have been a revelation. In 2018, she's not. Or at least, she's not to me, because I'm drawn to portrayals of complicated women in fiction. I know it's not fair to blame the book for being of its time. I'm not blaming the book or Muriel Spark. This reading experience perfectly illustrates why I don't typically read class...

translated by William Weaver  The backstory: Invisible Cities  is one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die . It's also Mr. Nomadreader's favorite book of all time and one of the first two selections for The "Darling, but..." Book Club. The basics: Invisible Cities  is mostly a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes the cities he's seen on his journey to and from Venice and the Mongol Empire. My thoughts: There's a lot of pressure when you read your favorite person's favorite book. Mr. Nomadreader and I have been discussing this book for years, as it's themes of cities and travel come up so frequently in our lives. Yet when we started watching "Marco Polo" on Netflix this winter, and I kept pausing to ask questions because I didn't know enough about that historical period to be able to follow (my world history pre-1900 is embarrassingly bad), I discovered that the plot of Invisible Cities  i...

Translated from the Spanish by Carol and Thomas Christensen. The backstory:  Like Water for Chocolate , Laura Esquivel's first novel, is one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die . The basics: Told in monthly installments interspersed with recipes, Like Water for Chocolate , is the story of the De la Garza family in the Mexican revolution and filled with magical realism of love and cooking. The narrator is the great-niece of Tita, and the novel's focus is the life of Tita, the family's youngest daughter. My thoughts: I first read Like Water for Chocolate  in high school and utterly adored it. Re-reading it fifteen years later, I still enjoyed it, but the magical realism of love's positive and negative effects lacked the dramatic resonance it held for me as a teenager. It is the tradition of Tita's family that the youngest daughter may not marry and must spend her life serving her mother. Tita is enraged, angry and in utter agony when she learns her fate wil...

The backstory:   Watchmen  is on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die . My thoughts:  When I sat down to finally read Watchmen , I knew very little about the actual plot. In the first few pages, I had little idea what was going, but soon I began to understand how the characters and scenes fit together. I read a fair number of graphic novels, but Watchmen  made me slow down my reading in a way no other graphic novel has. There is so much detail in each box, and the shifting of perspective is cinematic and intricately detailed. I was also impressed with the character development. Between each chapter, there was a multimedia section to offer context. There were excerpts from an autobiography of one of the characters, news articles and other 'found objects.' I was fascinated by this unexpected mix of materials, and it brought a richness to the characters that continued into the graphic novel sections. As someone married to a comic book fan, I caught numerous...