Saturday, November 14, 2009

Eat, Pray, Love [Hebrew]

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Started reading this book at Yifat's place, but only got to page 80 before I had to leave. Then I found that Irit has it too! So I managed to finish it before leaving Israel - it wasn't hard, especially in Hebrew - it's a very flowing book, and a lot of what she says there reminded me of my yoga class.

Ma'aseh Tamar [Hebrew]

By Shlomit Avramson

It was always my dream to write a story about a girl in the old times in Israel, but I never knew anything about how people used to live back then. After reading this book I have some idea. It was interesting to compare the story to the very summarized version in the bible, and to see how everywhere where God is mentioned in the bible, it's actually Ishtar, a kenani goddess, that's mentioned in the book. It made me wonder if the religious people in Israel were outraged by this book, which presents their founding fathers in a not-so-complementing way. My sister said they were, but it didn't last very long, probably because it's the author's first book - she's not known enough yet. Anyway - it was interesting.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

By Franz Kafka

I hold Kafka close to my heart, because he wrote about a person who turned into a bug (which one I'm not sure - sometimes he seems like a roach, but there are some references to a beetle). This specific story I read before, but I somehow remembered it differently. I wonder how much the different translations had to do with it.

Even though I finished the book ages ago, it took me longer than I expected. It's a tiny book, and at the rate I finished the first few stories, I thought that I'd be done in just a few days, but some of the later stories were very slow. I can't claim to understand what he was trying to say. Maybe he was just going through his depressive moods at the time he wrote them...