Chapter Eighteen: Tender is the Night

As a prelude to re-reading The Great Gatsby before seeing the movie, I decided to check out this other F. Scott Fitzgerald classic that I've never read, mostly because I had heard it was set largely in France and had it strongly recommended by a fellow French major.  I'm definitely glad I decided to read it!  Of course, the little bits and pieces in French were fun for me, but I really enjoyed the style of the writing as well.  Most of all, I appreciated how Fitzgerald unrolls the telling of the story and how this affected and changed my perceptions of the novel's major characters.

Chapter Seventeen: Sophie's World

So I decided to class it up a bit and re-read Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, translated into English from Norwegian.  It's either a novel masquerading as a history of philosophy or a history of philosophy masquerading as a novel... it's hard to tell which, but that's not a bad thing!  I felt like I was learning something as I read (even if I've already forgotten most of the philosophy mentioned!) and there was enough plot interspersed with the philosophy lessons to hold my interest.  Things do get rather funky, plot-wise, toward the very end of the book, so I found it a bit hard to follow right at the end, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.