May Reviews

Admittedly, I didn't read quite as much as I usually do or would have wanted to this month, but that's life! Busy at home, busy at work, you know the drill... Here's what I did get through-

I tackled the other two plays in Sophocles' Theban series, getting through Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. I wrote more about how much I have grown to appreciate the trilogy here. 

I read two novels as well, Dave Eggers' Heroes of the Frontier and Eleanor Morse's White Dog Fell From the Sky. The Egger's book is about a divorced mother who has recently lost her dentistry practice and takes her two young kids to Alaska to drive around in an old motorhome. It's a tragi-comic, episodic account of her experiences there, and is well-written, of course (it is Eggers, after all). It just wasn't a good fit reading-wise for me when I read it, so it took me awhile. It probably could have been a shorter and would have been easier to tackle. At times it felt like my journey reading it was as meandering as hers driving, but not in a good way.

 The Morse novel was excellent, a story about a young man named Isaac who escapes South Africa to Botswana only to be accused of being someone he is not. The novel parallels his story with his employer, Alice's, who is having a bit of an early mid-life crisis, and ends up becoming more involved in her gardener's life than she would have ever thought. It was one of those books where I'd sit down to start reading and be surprised at how far I'd gotten and how long I spent when I finally checked the time. It was excellent. 

902 pages