Tuesday, October 24, 2006

My Blog Is Alive!

Another long gap between posts, but not for want of trying. For at least three days I have been unable to view my blog for some reason, and neither have some of my friends - but now it lives once more! Hooray!

My reading experiment (reading more than one book at once) is...interesting. In a way I suppose it has worked, but in another sense, it hasn't worked, or not like I expected it would. I was having a hard time with The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, so I decided to see what I made of reading multiple books and picked up Aminatta Forna's Ancestor Stones with the intention of reading both books simultaneously, alternting between the two. What actually happened was that I got so absorbed in Ancestor Stones that I abandoned The Beautyful Ones utterly until today, when I finished Forna's novel. Immediately after completeing Ancestor Stones, in an overspill of remnant enthusiasm I was inspired to pick up and read a few pages more of The Beautyful Ones, which is still hard to read (very depressing, quite bleak, full of gritty imagery and everything is very colourless). I usually like to concentrate on one novel at a time, but with The Beautyful Ones, if I hadn't broken it up with something rich in imagery which provoked lots of peaceful rumination and wasn't too depressing, I might have given up altogether. As it is, I still find it hard to progress through but am determined not to give up on it. I have more books to read from African countries before I move on again, so more time to practice simultaneously reading multiple books! I'm not sure I'll be converted though; once I get sucked into a novel, I simply can't pick anything else up until I've devoured it completely.

4 comments:

equiano said...

You may like to try Ayi Kwei Armah's THE HEALERS instead, a little less bleak. I like the sound of your reading project. Let me know if you need any advice :)

(I came to you via Of Books and Bicycles)

Stefanie said...

Blogger was having problems over the weekend. I try not to complain considering it's free and all, but sometimes it gets a bit much.

Glad the multiple books sort of worked. At least you can get back to the Beautyful Ones and not feel quite so down about it.

Rebecca H. said...

I read multiple books at once, but I can't read multiple novels, or least not unless one of them's Proust! :) I can read one slow-paced novel and one fast-paced, but not two fast-paced ones, or I'll get too involved in one and leave the other behind.

Anonymous said...

Ah, finally. Have been trying to access your blog yesterday, but nothing shows up. Glad it's back.

Found out about your blog only recently, but I admire your reading mission. I could never bring myself to read quite so widely.

And your earlier post about Chinese Literature makes me want to go read more Chinese books.