Finally!
There is finally a book over there on the right side because I finally finished a book in 2009. Not that I set out to start off 2009 with the incredibly grim All Quiet on the Western Front. I actually started the year reading Sometimes a Great Notion and The Mists of Avalon, both very long and slow (SAGN in an intense, involved, good way; TMOA in an overwrought, fantasy/romance kind of way). I still have both of them to finish before their covers will pop up on my 2009 list.
All Quiet is the second book I finished this year. I finished Water the Bamboo by Greg Bell two days ago, but there is some kind of gremlin in my LibraryThing widget that prevents the cover from appearing.
I've finished quite a few books this year, but I'm reading DROOD right now and while it's great, it's long and intense, so it will take me a while.
ReplyDeleteWell, at just shy of 800 pages, I imagine DROOD will take a while! I am very interested to know what you think of it, since with my recently revived interest in Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is sitting on my TBR shelf.
ReplyDeleteUPDATE: I am "this close" to finishing Sometimes a Great Notion and good thing too -- book club is tomorrow night.
ReplyDeleteI seem to make no progress with Mists of Avalon. No matter how much I listen to it, it still has the same amount left. What had felt like "real time" now feels like "faerie tyme" -- like when Morgaine goes off to stay with the faerie folk, thinks she is only there three days, and she is really there five years. Good grief.
Surprised you didn't like Sometimes a Great Notion. Spending a few years of college in Eugene, I loved the descriptions of rain. I thought you could actually feel the dampness. This, possibly as I read a good portion of the book at our log cabin at the base of Mt. Rainier. Damp only begins to describe the cold and wetness. The movie, on the other hand sort of ruined it for me. I'd still count the book in my top 10 though.
ReplyDeleteOh, no -- i really LOVE Sometimes a Great Notion. Like I said, it was long and slow, but in a GOOD way. It completely absorbed me. I finished it this morning. It is going in my Top 10 list as well (although I don't know what it will bump).
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely right about the rain and the damp. The book captures Oregon.