Not reading this particular text, but we’re working through Ruth in Hebrew—just reading it out of the BHS. Lovely and surprisingly readable for a beginner.

I might finish it, but I have half of Bleak House to catch up on, and the rest of Middlemarch and then Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and I don’t think LAS is going in my final paper, and it’s fun but not brilliant, so….no.

I need to finish this! Maybe over winter break. It’s dense but it earns the insane overwrought high-flown style. (Unlike, oh, say, God of Small Things, which is such a damn ripoff of this. Sigh.)

Rather underwhelming so far. It reads like something out of a how-to kit. Write your own postcolonial feminist child-narrator novel without any original thought at all! The world will go CRAZY for it. Apparently.

—alright, I’ve finished it now, and while it gets a lot better and is worth reading, it’s DRASTICALLY overwritten. Four adjectives are not four times as good as one, REALLY.

I am translating it out of the Greek, and it’s my first actual text, so it is SLOW GOING. But delicious!

I need to finish this, when I have time. Sometime after school ends. Part one was delightful and that’s not even the part with all the Utopia-related stuff.

It’s well-written enough, certainly very important in the (post)colonial canon, but it just…lacks life. It reads like a parable disguised as a realist narrative; no matter how individual the details, the story never gets out from under the message.

edit: Okay, now I’ve finished it, and…I do not substantially alter my assessment. I don’t like books where the protagonist is a giant asshole all the way until five minutes before he dies.