Justin's Book Review

Reading is awesome. I've always loved getting lost in a book. Now that school is out, I'm catching up on all the reading I've been wanting to do over the past year. Right now I'm working on the classics – American, French, English, Russian, anything I can get my hands on. So far, I've burned through the following books:

The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
It's nothing like the movie, but this is a great book. Mohicans a classic piece of Romantic literature, with manly men, noble savages, a helpless girl, a spirited woman, a rugged wilderness, and a villain with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Some of the things Cooper has to say about the Native Americans could come across as racist, but by 19th Century standards he would have actually been pretty progressive. Again, it was an awesome read, and at the end I found myself wanting to read the rest of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Maybe I will one of these days.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Victor Hugo
Did they really try to turn this into a cartoon for kids? Hunchback is a great book, but it's a fairly dark story. Fate (which Hugo says is the theme of the book) has placed all the characters between two extremes, and none can find happiness. Quasimodo is caught between man and animal, Dom Frollo between celibacy and love, and Esmerelda between beauty and class status. Without revealing too much, the book is pretty tragic, though it didn't end up being as much of a downer as I thought it might be. Still, though, I'd still recommend it as a great read. I enjoyed it.

Beowulf (I'm still reading this one)
Unknown Author
This is the oldest written story in the English language (or some semblance of it. The original version doesn't look like Greek to me, but it's close.) It's epic and thus pretty unbelievable – at one point, Beowulf talks about swimming through the ocean for seven days in a suit of mail and carrying a sword – but that's what epic poems are like. The kid in me thinks it's actually pretty cool. The poem doesn't rhyme in modern English, and the version I'm reading is still set in prose, but it's pretty fast reading once you get a few pages in. If you're looking for a novel, you might try something else, but if you want the coolest bedtime story ever, give Beowulf a read.