Book reviews

For the sake of keeping this blog dedicated to our homeschooling journey, and this section of the blog dedicated to resources used on that quest, I have removed all of my personal book reviews to my Blogger site Finding Time for Proust. Calvin's reviews will remain here, as well as any reviews I have written for resources we've used or books we've read together or for the purpose of homeschooling. If you are looking for my personal book reviews, or the reviews that I write for Book List, I hope you will join me at Finding Time for Proust.

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, by Alexander McCall Smith (review)

I'm not really the right person the review this book—it's not really my type—but I picked it up for a little light reading break from Proust, and light reading it really was. Really a collection of three different stories, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is absurdist humor of a dry English variety. What it lacks in depth it fails to make up in other arenas, except for maybe the relatively happy, if sappy, ending. I don't think I'll be trying any more of his books, but if I'm looking for another one-night read I just might.And I hear that if I'd picked it up as an audio track I'd be listening to Hugh Laurie as the reader, and that might have been funnier.

Book 24 on my way to 52

Day, by Elie Wiesel (review)

I have now completed my tour through the trilogy that is not a trilogy. Day is the third of Elie Wiesel's books that are named with vague time references. As far as I can tell these books are lumped together because a) they are all written by the same auther, b) they are all about the same subject matter, and c) they do follow life chronologically even if they are not all about the same person growing older. Day is about a middle aged man (?) who has just been in a serious accident and is recovering. It is the symbolic final chapter in what is a loose story of life after concentration camps—the chapter in which our hero (who is different in every book) is struggling for a final time with his images and view of life and death. The accident itself brings this struggle to a head by almost, but not quite, ending his life, and then bringing him into contact with his antithesis: a doctor who loves life completely and without caveat. While I was not a big fan of Dawn, I was able to enjoy Day a little more, if enjoy is the right word for such a dark book.

Book 23 on my way to 52

Dawn, by Elie Wiesel (review)

I have seen this book referred to as part of a trilogy, including Night, Dawn, and Day (also sometimes titled The Accident). Night, which I've already read and reviewed, is a memoir, so imagine my surprise at finding that the second book in the "trilogy" is a fiction. That was my first disappointment. The book spans just one night in time as the young man waits for morning, when he will have to kill a British officer in the name of the fight to free Palestine from British rule. During this time he is visited and spoken to by the ghosts of many people from his past. The story might have been fine—the struggle of a young man to come to terms with the sum of his existence—but for the use of trite symbolism and meaningless poetic text. Wiesel's clipped, contemporary writing style is what saved this from being a complete loss for me.

Book number 22 on my way to 52.