Reading List

I've been trying to read for pleasure at times during the past couple of years. I have so many books on my shelves that have been waiting for me to find the time to tackle them. Two weeks ago, I started Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. J actually looked at me funny when I brought it to class during the midterms and tried to read a bit of it while the students were writing. Turns out he had read it in high school, so that means I'm already behind someone almost half my age in terms of my reading lists. I'll never catch up at this rate.

I finished it last Tuesday while my car was getting an oil change and brake job. It was an interesting book, but I think it probably is better suited to a high school level reader in terms of its plot. Not to say that it isn't a worthy work of literature, but the ending is one that would more likely guarantee a discussion in a high school English class. A college class would probably be a bit too jaded to be surprised.

Lest you think my pleasure reading is taken up solely by works of so-called "great literature," my current book is John Grisham's A Time to Kill. I picked up Grisham's The Firm during my first week at USC back in 1990. (They were selling "real" books in the college bookstore, not just textbooks. What a strange concept that seemed to me at the time.) Grisham went to my alma mater in Mississippi, and I had met him there not too long after he signed his first movie deal for the rights to The Firm (which would star Tom Cruise and feature a horribly butchered, completely implausible ending). A Time to Kill was his first book, and it too would later become a film (starring Matthew McConaughey in his first major role, as the crusading lawyer even Grisham admits he wanted to be but never was). It has all of the failings of a first novel--too much exposition, too much love of the odd characteristics of the central figures, too much "telling" instead of "showing"--yet there is something compulsively readable about it.

This is an incredibly long novel, 500+ pages in paperback, and I'm only about 170 pages in so far. I only get to read for pleasure while doing laundry on Fridays these days, so it might take a while to get through this one. I remember it took several months to make it through Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, but that was worth the journey. I don't think A Time to Kill is anywhere near as good a book as Allan Gurganus's epic (700+ pages), but so far I am enjoying it immensely. It is a pleasure to be able to read a book without having to think about how you would write a paper on it or how you would assign it to a class for discussion.