I’ve been trying to stay on track with my goal of reading more this year (one of my two goals for the year). The anthology used for the freshman composition classes at my school contains a selection from Elie Wiesel‘s Night:
I liked it enough to put it on the syllabus this term, though I’ve always shied away from teaching anything related to the Holocaust. I thought I’d give it a fair shake and read the whole thing, as it’s a fairly short book. I finished it a few days ago. And, while I grew a little tired of Weisel’s stylistic over-reliance on fragments and rhetorical questions, I did like it and felt it was worth my time to read it. (And don’t worry, my snobbish brethren: That Oprah’s Book Club logo is just a sticker. You can remove it.)
Of Holocaust narratives, the three that I hear most often mentioned are the aforementioned, Night, Primo Levi‘s Survival in Auschwitz, and, of course, The Diary of Anne Frank. I may check out some of Levi’s work, as I”ve heard good things about it. I also would like to finish an interesting book I started years ago called Reading the Holocaust.
But I’m done with history and high seriousness for the moment. I’m about half-way through Richard Russo‘s very funny Empire Falls and I’m trying to focus on that until I finish it up:
BTW, until I get the comment spam issue worked out, I’m going to be mirroring my posts here at a blogger/blogspot blog I just set up. This way, you’ll be able to comment if you like. So, at the bottom of each post, I’ll include links to the blogger version of the post and its comments link.