well, mostly

I finished all but the last 20 or so pages of Blindness last night before book club. I read the last 2 pages, too and we had a great discussion. It was not a really difficult read (though not the simplest either, due to the author's choice to eliminate the use of mundane stuff like names for his characters and "she said" every here and there so we can track the conversation) and contains a wealth of things to talk about (life, death, literal and spiritual blindness, hunger, Lord of the Flies, violence, family, etc).

Turns out the last 20 pages are pivotal and then when I got home and read them, I felt that the church scene and the denouement were overly rushed.

Definitely not my place to criticize a Nobel prize laureate, I know, especially since Saramaga won the Nobel just a couple of years after the book was published, so I am assuming it was what pushed the committee over the edge.

Up next month in this group is The Other by, um, dunno. David something? I'm on the waiting list at the library and might not get it any time soon. In my other book group it's the something or other Moon by Alice Sebold, which is already in transit for me. I didn't read last month's book, Pillars of the Earth, because I kept picking it up and pulling a few muscles and shuddering. I just couldn't do it.

And in other news, a couple of the books I have been DYING to get from the library came in today, so my next read is Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs and then My Lord and Spymaster by, um, someone else, but I read the first Spymaster book by her and really liked it. Joanna Bourne.