book – Page 27

Quote of the Day

August 21, 2015yggdrasille

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray is one of my favourite novels, and its last paragraph is one of my favourite conclusions to a book.

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

The very last sentence is memorable enough on its own, as it reminds the reader of the theatricality of the whole thing, but what sticks in my mind is how sad the ending actually is. That despite the fact that merely a few pages before we got our supposedly happy ending, complete with the dramatic last-minute dash and declaration of love from our heroine to the man who had hopelessly loved her for years. I love the BBC adaptation with Natasha Little as Becky Sharp (unlike the Reese Witherspoon version, it didn’t sugarcoat the fact that Becky is a horrible person), but I think it loses a lot by skipping over the sadness of the hero no longer caring for his most-cherished prize.

The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg – Book Review

August 18, 2015September 16, 2022yggdrasille

I don’t know if it can be called a subgenre, but there’s certainly a kind of scenario that often appears in fiction: a bunch of people with disparate personalities and lives, who share some kind of common past, reunite for an occasion that ends up changing their lives, with revelations and much soul-searching along the way. This book was about a group of former classmates who attend their fortieth high school reunion.

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin – Book Review

August 10, 2015September 16, 2022yggdrasille

This was the only Ira Levin novel I haven’t read yet, so while I was excited to finally get my hands on it, it’s always a bit sad to come to a point where you’ve read all the books by one of your favourite authors, and there are no more to follow, ever. He’s not Harper Lee exactly in terms of output, but I wish Levin wrote more than seven novels in his lifetime. Or make that six, because while Son of Rosemary wasn’t all bad the ending made me wish I’ve never read it; truly a book to fling against the wall while screaming in rage.

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin – Book Review

August 6, 2015July 1, 2023yggdrasille

Back in my teens, I read the Russian translation of this book so many times the whole sections of dialogue and descriptions kept popping up in my brain as I was reading it in English. It was fun to revisit in its original language, particularly as the Russian translation couldn’t really capture the 1950s expressions and quirks.

Books I’ve read lately

August 1, 2015March 29, 2019yggdrasille

Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection by Isaac Asimov

I’ve only read one other short stories collection by Asimov before, so this bunch of previously uncollected stories probably wasn’t a great place to start for a relative Asimov beginner. The stories are rather hit-and-miss; there’s a couple which are more like sci-fi jokes culminating with rather unfunny puns; while others are really good, like the first story in the collection called Cal, about a domestic robot who wants to be a writer just like his master.