Ploughed through Watership Down in a day and a half (having succumbed to the head cold, I now have time to read). I'd forgotten how much I like this book, as I don't think I've read it since I was 10. Can anyone answer the following questions, though?
1. Why do the mice have cheesy Chef-Boyardee Italian accents?
2. How come Fiver is named "Fiver" if rabbits can't count past four? Why not go with "Little Thousand," if that's what his real name means!?
3. Why doesn't Adams choose to properly develop even one female character?

Am re-reading Diana, one of those soppy English novels set in the interwar period, in which - like in Great Expectations and Brideshead Revisited - a boy with lesser social standing becomes enamoured with an upperclass person and their aristocratic trappings. This seems to be an oppressive motif in post 1800 British literature...and though it makes me impatient, I have to admit a fondness for it...(after all, if you can't read something soppy on occasion, what's the point?)
posted 8:35 PM

Tuesday, September 19, 2000

Links to articles about the Mid-East peace process breaking down again have led me to Arab View, The Internet Home of Arab Opinions. The immediate "what's new" links seem pretty weak to me, though - I can't follow the logical train of thought in "Arabs Are Not Lazy," and I am baffled that Arab View needs to print an article about children with special needs. Of course, I'm at work, so I haven't tackled the international affairs editorials, and I suspect that I'll find those more interesting...
posted 10:07 AM

Monday, September 11, 2000

I'm starting this journal, today to keep track of random thoughts about what I am reading - and, in fact, to keep a list of what I read.

Don't think that my entries will be profound (though they might be, occasionally, if I'm lucky).

For the moment, I'm slogging through Jude the Obscure, which I'm re-reading because a college professor, Dr. Matthews, had the utmost respect for Thomas Hardy. Perhaps this century's new earnestness is getting to me after all, because I'm having a great deal of trouble having sympathy for Jude, who is a man trapped by ambition, his sense of refinement, and class barriers from achieving his dreams....

I don't have any sympathy for any of the women Hardy has invented, and this makes me annoyed with Hardy, rather than the characters. Jude's aunt is hardly a character at all - just a crusty object lesson about how unloved Jude is; his first wife is what some people (not me) would call a tramp, and Sue Brideshead isn't allowed to have any common sense because she's supposed to be so "sensitive."

I'm still reading, though, so I suppose it can't be that bad.
posted 7:37 PM