Reading Wednesday

[yuuago]

Been a while since I did one of these. :V

Just finished: The Rain in Portugal by Billy Collins. This one is poetry. I've never encountered this guy's work before, but I found this volume really solid. Honestly, I don't enjoy most poetry that I pick up at random off the library shelf, but I did like this. He has a way with words and images and small moments.

Also just finished: Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Saw this on the 'featured' shelf at the library; decided to finally read it. I didn't read this novel in school, so it's nice to finally understand what all the references to it are on about. I knew there was going to be murder, but I wasn't expecting quite as much; I was a little surprised. As for a read, it's all right, but I think I'd have liked it better as a kid - I loved all those "stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere" kind of stories.

Reading next: Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan. I expected this to be a straightforward history book, but now that I take a closer look, it's described as a "political travelogue". A lot of what the local library has on this region seems to be that sort of thing. Apparently this one caused quite a stir at the time it was published. At this point I'm basically scraping through what little the library has that covers Romania and Bulgaria - after that I'll move on to less immediately-available material.

Comments

[slashmarks]

Just an FYI, you want to be very careful with Balkan histories - even at the academic level a lot of them are nationalist bunk, to the point of certain major historical events being outright forgeries (a good example is the accepted idea in Bulgaria that certain areas were Islamicized by a campaign by the Ottoman army in the late seventeenth century forcing conversions, which never happened and was based on nineteenth century forged documents) and even Western writers can be misinformed by that. I unfortunately can't give you much specific advice except that if something feels off it probably is, and be very, very attentive to what sources are being cited and whether an author sounds prejudiced.

[yuuago]

Suspected as much. Thanks for confirming. Generally I've been approaching things assuming that at least part of it is going to be BS. (Though sometimes, figuring out which part is the bullshit can be tricky.)

[ireneultramarine]

Read Lord of the Flies for a high school English class. Hated the book when I had to read it, tho in hindsight, it was more of a combination of 1. my English teacher at the time sucked ass and 2. I had very high expectations for the book because of its "classic" status. Personally, I expected wayyy more gore than was actually there in the book thanks to internet misinformation, but still, the bloodshed was probably a little Too Much for what is supposedly children's literature DDD:

[yuuago]

English teachers sucking is a huge factor in why I ended up despising a lot of the stuff we read. Sometimes I've felt differently after re-reading things years later (helps that I don't usually remember the details).

The level of graphic in Flies was higher than I expected!