I am a little disturbed for some reason the last few books I have read have all had Oprah's Book Club Stickers on them. I don't know why that bothers me but it does. She seems to have good taste.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I picked up the novel Night by Elie Weisel from the Goodwill Store.
It was good. It kept me up very late the two nights it took me to read it. It was short- but good. A good reminder for us all about the horrors of the Holocaust, especially in these fucked up times when it seems that denial of the holocaust is permeating the walls of humanity. This would be a good book to read in high school. A friend of mine is actually planning on teaching it next year.
I do have one criticism - albeit a small one but it has bugged me over and over again. In the translation process (I hope) the word "homosexual" is used in a way that should have been "pedophile." The paragraph it was used in was explicitly about guards having sex with children.
It will be awhile I think before I am posting about the feats of reading an entire novel while parenting a toddler. I am once again embarking on the challenge of reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I am 1/10 of the way finished- and I WILL finish this time. Since I have now set aside time to read everyday again- it will happen, but damn that is one long book!
3 comments:
shannon, i have 'night' on hold for us at the library. i requested the audio cd so the older kids and i could listen to it together. do you think it's inappropriate?
and the sex with children has me gagging! before i had kids, i used to read everything i could about the holocaust.
there's another book... i think it's called 'and they played' or something like that. the focus of the book is children in the holocaust, how they even "played" in the lines on the way to the gas chambers. so sad...
how old are your kids again?
the pedophilia statement is not explicit. he just describes that some of the guards were kind to the children but it was not altruistic, for they were "homosexuals."
its an honest book, and IMO if kids are ready to learn about it at all, they need an honest version, not a watered down one.
thanks, shannon. i forgot to come back to this. they're 12 down to 2. i think we will go ahead and read it with the older 2. i don't want my kids to be ignorant.
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