Benefits of Being a Nerd

I'm late with this, but here's my April wrap up. This month I read seven books! First I completed Garbriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, which I really enjoyed. Marquez's prose is absolutely gorgeous and I loved the atmosphere that he imbued this novel with.

After that I read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which was unlike anything I have read thus far. Really interesting and easy to engage with. I really enjoyed the use of short, snapshot scenes and time travel.

The third book I read was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I absolutely loved experiencing a small chunk of African culture through this novel and intend to continue reading the remainer of Achebe's African Trilogy and looking in to his other works.

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed my fourth book this month: Siddhartha by Hermann Hess. I anticipated struggling to get through this work, but I found it very easy to read and engaging as a piece of philosophy. Though I appreciated the narrative elements of this novel, I read it primarily as a work of philosophy.

The fifth book I read this month was Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Though I enjoyed the prose of this piece and appreciated the focus on depression, I couldn't help but feel a barrier between myself and the main characters of the novel, who is also the narrator and was, therefore, inseparable from my experience of the narrative. 

I wasn't intending to read James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, but I found myself away from home and without internet for a few days and needed something to read after I finished The Bell Jar. I absolutely loved this novel. So concise, concrete, and visceral. An absolute pleasure to read. 

I actually completed Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, the last book on my April TBR early in May, but I decided to include it here. I really did love elements of the writing in this novel, but overall I found it hard to engage with. For a high action novel, it felt anticlimactic and stilted. 

Overall, I'd say that I had a very successful reading month this April. I hope to be equally successful this month. 

Happy Reading!