Snow is finished, Finally!

I finally finished reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk. As my regular readers know, last month I was considering giving it up because it was moving so slowly. My stubbornness won out, and I decided not to give up on it. Thanks to Bookbinds, I know that I am not the only person who thought it moved like softly falling snow, but I'm not sure how I feel about the book in the end. I'm not sure that I believe that it was worth my time, which is sad when you think about how many other books I still want to read. I think I will do some reading of blogs and reviews to see how other people reacted to the book. Maybe I will write a more detailed review of the book later.

For now, I will say these three things: 1) In the beginning, I did find some of the descriptions to be quite beautiful, especially the descriptions of the snow. 2) As a wannabe poet, I hated to see poetry portrayed as some kind of effusive burst of creativity as if the poems were handed down by some poetry god--I'm sure there is something more working in this characterization, but it's too late and I'm too tired to articulate it. 3) One sentence near the end of the novel has been added to my collection of the most depressing passages/lines in literature--I think I have blogged about some of these lines before.

The new addition to my collection: "By now it was getting late, so I made my way back to the hotel, plodding slowly through the snow like a traveler without a friend in the world although laden with all its sorrow." I'm not sure how it stacks up against other lines in my collection, especially the one from 1984 or the one from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Maybe I'll post about that later.

Now, it's just after midnight, and I need to go to bed. I hope I can stay awake to read a page or two of my new read, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. Desai and her mother are reading next week in Houston. I won't finish in time for the reading, but I will at least have read some of the book.