Sunday Salon

I keep re-reading my post about Night Train to Lisbon and it keeps not sounding right. For one thing, it ends way too suddenly and feels very truncated. But at the same time, it was such a dense book that I'm not sure what else I could have written. It's one of those novels you read and there's so much stuff in it that you don't know where to begin describing it. I'm not saying this to criticize Night Train to Lisbon at all, because it really is a wonderful story. I just didn't feel 100% up to the task of exploring and discussing it. Which sucks, because a book like this deserves better.

Now I'm in the middle of Their Eyes Were Watching God. I saw Oprah's made-for-TV movie with Halle Berry awhile ago but don't remember much of it. I'm up to the part where Jody Starks dies. So far, I enjoy it, but I'm kinda bugged by the exaggerated dialect every single black character speaks in. It clashes with the narrator and can be annoying to read, especially since the actual dialogue itself is quite good and very funny at times.

Not quite sure what I'm going to read next. I've got Thomas Mann's Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crate. Probably the Mann. He was a friend of Hermann Hesse, whom I love, so that automatically makes him cool in my book.

Also: I know I promised to put up a photo of my new bookcase I discussed last week, but my mother took the digital camera with her to our vacation house a couple of hours away. And I still haven't figured out how to use it.