| |
|
Continuing in my pursuit of texts that everyone else read during Eng. Lit. classes while I was (inexplicably) doing sciences: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer which is just as rustic and ribald and bluff and suchlike as expected. (Also recently read Wuthering Heights for the first time which was simply fucking wonderful).
Re-reading A Brief History of Time by Prof. Stephen J. Hawking and still don't understand it. Certainly, I can happily mouth descriptions of general relativity, quantum mechanics and their ilk, but underneath, in my brain, it not work. Good fun, though.
Plus, reading a collection of Evelyn Waugh. Completed the marvellously wry and cynical study of class and education in Decline and Fall before finding the racial depictions and attitudes in Black Mischief face-burningly humiliating and painful (sample flavour: one character is humorously nicknamed by her white husband and friends as Black Bitch). Race (while a primary subject matter) isn't the drive of the book; Waugh remains generally misanthropic and his depiction of white characters are equally damning, his black characters span all kinds of personality types and intelligence levels, many of his observations are accurate and cutting and it's very probably correct for the time and location, but still, I found it very hard to read. Bloody hard. I'm giving myself a short rest before reading the much lauded Scoop. |
|
|
