so, yesterday while she was at our house, joey revealed a deeply personal tidbit of information: she likes boring books with lots of mundane and largely insignificant details. so i made up a list of books i recommend to her:
1. From Dawn to Decadence: Five Hundred Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun
This is a cultural history of the west. It's very long and very detailed. Every few chapters has a "cross section" of history, describing what life was like in a certain city in a certain year. The history professor who assigned it to us told us not to read it but to browse it. i started reading it twice but never yet finished. i plan to read it from front to back someday...
2. Che: A Revolutionary Life by Don Lee Anderson
this is a sympathetic biography of Ernesto Guevara, the Argentinian medical student who became the revolutionary freedom fighter of Cuba. it's not so mundane and detailed as From Dawn to Decadence, but it's still pretty boring.
3. Defiance: The Bielski Partisans by Nechama Tec
this book is exceptionally boring. it's a sociological history of partisan fighters in the forests of Belorussia during the second world war. it's all about the day to day details of forest dwelling partisan clans. the movie was not so boring.
4. The Pilgrim Church by E. H. Broadbent
probably not as detailed as i would suspect you'd like them, The Pilgrim Church is about the history of "brethren assemblies" from pentecost until nowish. it mainly discusses their beliefs and methods of gathering and stuff like that but i'm certain it has enough of the kind of stuff that interests you.
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy is widely recognized as one of the best writers ever. this story, while not at all boring, mostly, is full of little mundane details. it does a really good job of describing its characters day-to-day life without coming straight out and telling us, rather it shows what mundane day to day life looks like. it is extremely well written.
6. The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by Christopher Tolkien
all the details you might have been curious about if you ever read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
7. the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
a lot like Tolstoy, except it's set in cairo, obviously.
what about Heart Of Darkness? it was rather boring.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I hated Heart of Darkness. But I loved Cry the Beloved Country, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and One Chinese Moon. All a little boring, but lovely. While reading them, I realised that the plot could be there or not there and I would still want to read - I just want to learn about places/times I've never visited. I am extremely curious about this world - not geographically, but socially. I'm not generally interested in fictional boring books, i mean ones set in fantasy, unless they give me insight into something real. I love finishing a book and feeling as though I've been somewhere I've never really been.
ReplyDeletePS, thanks Patricio. You have given me a good list. I might be a while getting to it. I have a stack on my nightstand, and I generally get less than an hour of reading time/day.
ReplyDeletei didn't like heart of darkness much either. it was boring, difficult to read, and exceptionally undetailed. it focused too much on its character's increasingly befuddled mind for my liking.
ReplyDeleteapocalypse now, the movie based on heart of darkness was so-so. i'd rather watch it than read the book ... but i'd rather watch something else too.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that Joey and I share taste in books, but this list looks pretty interesting to me, with the exception of #s 2 and 6 (7 - not enough info to tell).
ReplyDeleteHeart of Darkness, however, is a markedly boring and terrible book.
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