I will not be participating in NaNoWriMo, since I view the whole endeavor as a cheap stunt unlikely to produce anything worth reading, and Alexandre Dumas did it better (three days) anyway, and besides I am lazy. I may occasionally have a NaDruNi, but that's different.
Instead, I will be enjoying National Novel Reading Month, which may actually exist, but hell if I'm going to do research on a thing like that. I will read a novel every day this month. Not Brothers Karamazov, but not the new Tamora Pierce, either. Today I finished My Antonia, which I enjoyed a great deal more than The Awakening, but then I have an irresponsible prejudice against suicide as an ending. Now I'm starting A Passage to India, to be finished tomorrow.
If anybody can think of a way for me to make money off this, or even an iPod Nano, that'd be nice.
Also I think it is extremely chintzy that The Awakening, published in 1899, was included on a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.
5 comments:
I hated The Awwakening. And I felt bad about it because Kate Chopin went to my high school. We even had the Kate Chopin Essay Writing Contest which I never won and felt bad about that until I read her crappy novel.
The Awakening is one of those sappy novels I imagine angsty elitist teenage school girls read to a dim light in their dorm rooms, gaining feminist vindication therein.
That's to say: After all the hoopla it gets, you'd think it be better.
National Reading Month is in March, but there doesn't seem to be a National Novel Reading Month. (You got me curious, so I had to research it. :) )
I think that I came to it at a bad time: a) I had just read Brideshead, which made all other books the literary equivalent of ashes in my mouth; b) I should have encountered it about ten years ago, just like reading Catcher in the Rye when you're not a teen is a huge mistake; c) at the moment I am not a chick.
It held my interest better than, say, Madame Bovary (goodness, but I'm tossing around some great novels casually. I mean no disrespect, nor lack of appreciation for any. Blogging is perhaps not a forum for deep reasoning about things. In fact, I wonder if deep reasoning is inherently incommunicable, and this quality not the root of our modern distrust of study. Anyhoo--), and I may well re-read it, once NaNoReMo is over, but I regard Chopin as "that singular anomaly".
Anna: I invented it. Because I am so smrt.
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