Playing Catch Up

I'm currently reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle for the Chunkster Challenge. I'm only a couple chapters into it so far. I'll admit that I was a little surprised at the chapter told from the dog's point of view. I usually don't have any problem with the surreal or magical realism in books, but for some reason this didn't really work as well for me. Don't get me wrong, I do like the writing. I just hope that the majority of the book anyway is told from a human perspective. A coworker told me to stick with it that it is worth it.

I've finished a couple books that I haven't reviewed yet. One is Grendel by John Gardner. I recently read Beowulf and loved it. So, I thought I would read this while Beowulf was still fresh in my mind. Grendel is the monster from Beowulf, and this is his side of the story. I was really disappointed in this one. I usually stop reading a book after about 50 pages if I don't like it. This one is really short and I was still kind of on the fence at that point so I continued. But, it never got any better. It was actually kind of hard to understand at times. Believe it or not, there's a lot of deep philosophical stuff in the book. I just really didn't like it all that much.

I also finished The Reader, which I liked much better. I'll do a proper review of it on Monday. Hopefully, I'll be further along with Edgar by Monday, as well. I'm not sure how much time I'll have over the weekend because I'll be getting ready for my son's 21st birthday party on the 24th. Since they've gotten older, we usually just go out to dinner with all of our family and have cake and presents. This year, he wants to do it at our house, which means I have a whole lot of cleaning and cooking to do! I can't believe he'll actually be 21, but he's still my baby. :)