23
Sep
2009
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Imagine this: you are a well-educated, upper-middle class. rising professional, who has never broken the law, and you have been put on trial for…something. You don’t know what it is, because nobody will tell you. Your education is no help because while the courts in which you are tried are legal, they operate outside of the realm of normal jurisprudence.
16
Apr
2009
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I consider myself fortunate in both reading this book as a teenager and not for school. While some literature is arguably best studied closely, often in a classroom setting with lectures, secondary sources, and lit crit (Shakespeare comes to mind here), academia can really suck the life out of some works. Since I have never read Slaughterhouse-Five for school, I don’t know if that is true of it or not, but I’m guessing it is. I think that it would lose its fluidity by being picked apart. At least on a first read.
