little black journal

In an effort to read a more well-rounded body of literature, I decided a few months ago that one out of every four or five books I read will come from the Modern Library’s List of the 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the 20th Century. Thus, I decided earlier this month that it was time to tackle some James Joyce. Yikes. A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man was a difficult read. Even painful, at times. It started off alright, but I got lost somewhere in the midst of one of his 8-page philosophical stream-of-consciousness tangents and never regained my footing again. I had to read some sentences 20 times. Seriously. So I must ask myself the question: am I reading primarily for pleasure, or primarily for literary well-roundedness? Is it possible to do both? Probably. One thing is for sure: the next book I pick of the list will not be Ulysses.

Difficulty aside, I appreciate the simple premise of the novel: it is the story of a boy becoming a man, learning to think for himself, to form his own opinions on religion and nationality and art.  I just wish this simple premise had been expressed in slightly simpler terms…

Finally wrapped Le Petit Prince up last night.  This was my first real attempt at reading a substantial piece of literature in French (yes, some consider this to be a children’s book, but there are parts of the book that go 4 or 5 pages without any pictures, so I’m going to call it “substantial literature”).  I went through the book in two rounds:  Round #1 consisted of a sentence-by-sentence translation, where I wrote down any words or phrases I didn’t know and looked them up in my French dictionary (by the end of the book, I had a list of nearly 500 words…).  For round #2, I read the book out loud to myself, to work on my verbal skills a little and review the vocab I listed in the first round.  90 pages later, I was tongue-tied and mentally exhausted, but pretty proud of myself for getting through it.  And it actually turned out to be a great little story about the joys of imagination that we often miss out on as adults.  The illustrations were simple but whimsical and fun – I love the image below (the little prince imagines that baobab trees will engulf his planet if he doesn’t stay on top of his gardening).  Two thumbs up – I like to think that I will read this to our future children someday…