What I'm reading this week

Hey, gang! I'm sorry for the distinct lack of posts lately. The end of the term is coming up, and I have been at the grind. I thought I'd update you, though, on what I've been reading of late.

Last Friday I finished The French Lieutenant's Woman, an amazing novel by John Fowles about love and duty and identity and stuff in Victorian times. Wow, that was a vastly inaccurate description of what the novel really is. It is set in Victorian times and, in some ways, it's a critique of Victorian life, but it is also (in a way) set in the 1960s and is also a critique of that time. That still doesn't make sense, so you're going to have to take my word for it and read it.

Yesterday and today I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce's semi-autographical novel about young Stephen Dedalus is wrought with existential dread, religious crises, and aesthetic theories. Woot. Not always a page-turner, but worth having in your arsenal of literary knowledge. Plus, isn't Joyce cute and goofy looking in this picture?

And right now, I am about 15 pages into Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I plan to finish by Thursday. We'll see how that goes. From what I'm told, it's one of those "masterpieces of world literature" you always hear about. At the moment, it seems to be a story about a pedophile (please pronounce that with a long e at the beginning). But I'm going to continue reading it because, well, it's an assignment for class. And again, it's probably one of those books I should have read if I want to call myself a literary individual.

Ta!