School Required Reading Reviews: Pride & Prejudice / A Thousand Splendid Suns / The Death of Ivan Ilych

Okay, so…

These are really late. But, I wanted to post them anyways.

Enjoy!

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Original Release Date:

Published October 10th 2000 by Modern Library (first published 1813)

Date I Read The Book:

July 2017

My Star Rating:

4 Stars

Chronology:

Standalone

Official Summary:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s witty comedy of manners—one of the most popular novels of all time—that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the “most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author’s works,” and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as “irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”

My Review: (Vague Spoilers)

Pride And Prejudice Book Tag

This was one of my AP Lit summer reading books, though I would have read it at some point even if it weren’t required because I’ve read and loved so many retellings I felt I had to read the original at some point. I did feel knowing the story lessened my enjoyment at some points, because certain sections drag out in descriptions that sort of make my eyes glaze over, but I did truly enjoy it for most of the book. I prefer Emma though.

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Original Release Date:

Published May 22nd 2007 by Riverhead

Date I Read The Book:

July 2017

My Star Rating:

4 Stars

Chronology:

Standalone

Official Summary:

At once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them – in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul – they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

My Review: (Vague Spoilers)

This was one of our summer reading books for AP Lit this past year. Its well written, with amazingly real characters. I think its historically accurate, but I’m can’t be entirely certain. I am going to say its horribly depressing and I couldn’t really handle reading it for extended periods. If you like to cry when you read, you’ll enjoy this immensely.

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Original Release Date:

1886

Date I Read The Book:

November 2017

My Star Rating:

3 Stars

Chronology:

Novella

Official Summary:

Hailed as one of the world’s supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy’s life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.
A thoroughly absorbing and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.

My Review: (Vague Spoilers)

I only just recently finished reading this in class for AP Lit. Maybe I’m a little traumatized because we had to write a three grade essay and stuff, but I didn’t like this very much. It was okay, I didn’t mind reading it, I just didn’t particularly want to. Its entirely about death and despair, and in my constant state of anxiety of college right now, I was not in a state where I could enjoy this. I can see why others might though, and I know its of great literary significance.