See the book to the right of this text? I'm not reading it. I like cats and I like Shakespeare but I didn't like the torturous first 30 pages that I read of this book. I've decided not to afflict myself by forcing my way through shiteous books this year. I've learned my lesson with Timoleon Vieta Come Home - if a book is so crap that I feel like hurting either myself or others when reading it then I will put the book out of its misery instead - whether that means throwing it under the streetcar tracks or, in the case of Raja Rao's The Cat and Shakespeare, afflicting someone else with it by trading it away on www.bookmooch.com.
Question: how is it that books written in the 1970s, no matter whether in the US (say Phillip Roth), the Czech Republic (Milan Kundera), or India (Raja Rao), always portray women in precisely the same way? I'm pretty sure historical conditions differed quite radically in these parts of the world, so why is it that all these writers portray women as kind of needy and sex-crazed on the one hand and mystically representative of WOMAN on the other? It's a bloody annoying trend but at least Kundera is interesting in other (good) ways and approaches these things often with tongue in cheek.
Raja Rao's book made me want to never read again, which is never a good sign. Thus, I decided that even though I'd read only 30 pages of 120, it was still too much to ask for me to finish it. So, I'm increasing the awesomeness of my reading experience this year and mercilessly excising the crappy crap before I waste too much time on it. Cheers!
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