the pencil reads

On daryl sng's recommendation, I picked up two books by Saul Bellow from the library this weekend, The Actual (a novella) and Henderson the Rain King. Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award three times. Whoa.. My only regret is that I left Henderson the Rain King in the backseat of my friend's car and so my reading has been put on hold.

Very. Thought. Provoking. The Actual is by no means one of Bellow's canonical works but it made me hungry for more. It is written in the first-person and yet it had such a fluidity of prose that other minor characters were enlivened as well. The idea of Amy Wustrin being so ingrained in Harry Trellman's consciousness is intriguing. It may be more true of life than I like to admit. As Henderson's inner tormenting voice said (before I misplaced the book), "I want! I want! I want!"

Yay Siren! Thanks for the tip. I realised why blogger was generating the intriguing "not-a-real-namespace" domain. It was because the html Amazon created failed to put the webpage in the img src= tag. If you add the webpage in front of the image name in the img src= tag, that should do the trick. Yeah baby. :)

So I read two books over the weekend, on Siren's book recommendations.

The Nanny Diaries just didn't cut it for me. It was funny at some points, but the characters were uninspiring. The main character is a push-over, and the rest of them were 2D cardboard cutouts. And I didn't like the picture of the authors on the back flap. All in all, it was okay for an afternoon's entertainment, but Bridget Jones' Diary beats it hands down.

This book is harder to place. I suppose I ought to have read the first and second books of the trilogy before reading the third, but the third was the only one available at the library. I can't tell if the author means to use exaggeration and hyperbole, or if the storyline is far-fetched, but I think I will read the first two in the series before I decide.