ha, I'm a massive bookworm

Anyways I finished Flowers for Algernon, brilliant book that is, only took me two days to read, its actually quite sad, its unlike me to think that of a book, I can find them depressing but sad isn't a word I usually use to describe a book.

4/5 from me

I started this yesterday



La Bete humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.
I'm only 30 or 40 pages in and you can see why it was a wee bit on the contraversial side, he don't half give his missus a kicking at the start of the book.

I think this is going to take me a while to read its not exactly easy going, my next book was going to be another one from the 1890's but I think I'm going to need a break from that era after this one so I'll probably go with the 4th Salander book, can't remember what its called now, something like the girl who tickled the donkeys bollocks or something like that