anna karenina

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book. Maybe I just needed some meat after all the post-apocolyptic YA fiction I seem to be to be reading lately. I thought it would be laborious to get through, and although some of the Russian issues, especially with Levin, took a little patience, the whole of the book was spectacular! Loved it, loved it, loved it.

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Ella Minnow Pea

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a clever book. A book about letters told in the form of letters. A book full of lipograms and and pangrams, it is clever, clever, clever. It is so clever that it can get a bit tiresome. The letters included are from so many people that it is hard to keep track of who is talking and while the plot lines are understood easily enough, I didn't make any character connections. So while you can't help but be impressed by the vocabulary and linguistic arcobatics used to write the novel, it is awfully hard to care about the plight of the Nollopians. There are some good talking points about blindly obeying authority; setting up "false gods"; and the power of language, and how the loss of words leads to a loss of self. I think Avi's Nothing But the Truth uses the episolary format better, and Stephen Hall's The Raw Shark Texts is an amazing novel about the power of words.

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