I usually review every book I read, but over the past few months there have been a few books that I didn’t feel like writing a full review about. It felt kind of weird to not write about them at all, so that’s why today I’m doing a couple of mini-reviews!
The Night is Darkening Round Me by Emily Brontë ★★★★
This is one of the 80 Little Black Classics by Penguin, and features a bunch of Emily Brontës poems. Wuthering Heights is my all time favourite novel, so when I came across this little booklet in a London book store I had to buy it. I’m not a huge poetry fan, but I do appreciate it from time to time, and these poems were absolutely beautiful. Most of them were rather gloomy, but I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Ms Brontë. It was wonderful to be submerged into this fascinating woman’s mind for a little while once again.
I had to read this book for one of my courses, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t a novel but instead a collection of short stories. While the first story had me quite interested with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and how marines deal with that, I felt like I didn’t need to read 12 stories about this. The stories were depressing and made me quite angry, not with the soldiers per se, but more with the system, which is obviously flawed. Perhaps it’s different reading this as an American, but to me, a definite outsider, it wasn’t enjoyable or enriching.
Timbuktu by Paul Auster ★★★★
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is one of my favourite books, and I wrote my BA thesis on it, so I’m really enjoying reading more of his books. Timbuktu is only the second book I’ve read of him, and it’s more of a novella than a novel, but I highly enjoyed it. It’s written from the perspective of a dog, which is very refreshing, yet it still maintained a wonderfully intelligent and philosophical style that I recognised from The New York Trilogy. I read this to take a bit of a break from all of my course work, and it definitely fulfilled its purpose. I can’t wait to read the rest of Auster’s work that’s waiting on my shelves.
The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda ★★★★
This is another one of those books I had to read for my literature course. The novel is set in a South African village, the inhabitants of which are divided because of events that happened generations ago. The novel features two expertly intertwined stories: the one happening in the ‘present’ and the story of mythic proportions that happened in the past.It was fascinating to read about a culture that is completely foreign to me, even more so because of the fact that it is actually written by a South African, who therefore knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t merely offer a Western perspective.
Have you read any of these novels? What did you think of them? Let me know in the comments!
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