A List: Between books
B List: Dostoevsky--Brothers Karamazov..........................................................654/940
C List: Lauren Slater--Lying.................................................................................86/221
I just finished a set of plays on the A-List, the last being Hedda Gabler by Ibsen. I'm pretty sure I have read this before, but I didn't have it documented anywhere and I didn't have it starred in my book, so I read it again. I've been trained to like psychological dramas about well brought up and reasonably intelligent but dissatisfied and not completely moral bourgeois Europeans--indeed I formerly imagined myself to be a person of this general type--so I enjoyed reading it well enough. I gather that Ibsen, whose plays are solid pieces of work, came to be considered one of the greats because he was quite a bit in advance of his time in his subject matter and was at the forefront in updating the European theater for the modern era. His plays do have a purpose and a quality of extremity about them though, more than what other writers have. He never rambles, even when he appears to ramble.
The Lauren Slater book is a memoir published in 2000, around which time if I remember correctly memoirs were something of a trend. It is mainly concerned with the author's epilepsy. It is not really a good book, and I may leave it off soon. The author does not any real friends or social life, she does not do anything that is particularly interesting, she does not know anyone who is particularly interesting, or at least if they reveal this side of themselves at all around her she is not able to pick up on it, and her own thoughts are not too great either. So there isn't much for the reader to work with.
I didn't take many pictures last month. The last week of April was school vacation so we went to Boston one day, and Maine a couple of times.
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