11 Dec 2010

Willa Wants to Read... Mediterranean Masterpieces!


I will be starting a new string of posts called Willa Wants to Read... and basically these posts will be about my very extensive To-Be-Read list. I have a long list - we are talking pages and pages of titles writing in times new roman size 12. I am hoping that blogging about some of these titles will make it a little bit easier for me to decide which ones to start with.. Hopefully. Do you know that feeling you get when you have to make a choice but have a lot to choice from? Like way way to much to choose from? That is how I feel when I try to decide which books from my TBR to read. I know it will take me years to get through all of them so how do I decide which ones I want to read now?
Hopefully these posts will be a helping hand.

Willa Wants to Read... mediterranean masterpieces!

"The Leopard" by Guiseppe di Lampedusa
Lampedusa's The Leopard is a classic - a novel that has also been made into a movie masterpiece. It is set in an Italy where the winds of change are blowing. It is set in Sicily just before Garibaldi began his work to unite Italy and the main character is an elderly aristocratic gentleman who must faces that times are changing and that his values may not have a place in the new world.

"If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi
This novel describes the years that the Italian-Jewish author spent in German concentration camp Auschwitz during WWII. The novel is famed for being a masterpiece in literature and for dealing with the exceedingly difficult subject in an honest way in a gripping prose.

"In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust
This colossal literary masterpiece totals 3200 pages! That is a lot, more than a lot really. It is seven volumes and I think that I will (at some point) start out slowly with the first one and see how it goes. I quote from amazon.com:
"As it forms the self-contained story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy and is relatively short, it is generally considered a good introduction to the work and is often a set text in French schools."

What's on your TBR?

2 comments:

  1. Hey, I've read them all. So: yes, yes, and yes!

    That description of Swann's Way is actually only of the second half of the book, so if you're reading a long passage about a little boy not being able to sleep because his mother hasn't come up to kiss him good night, don't worry, it's the same book.

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  2. Hope these posts help you choose a good read in this interesting pile of books...
    Thanks for visiting me over at My Yatra diary. Glad to meet you:)

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