Her portrait of all the different cats and their personalities felt very real and vivid. The stories are told a bit randomly, but this did not affected my enjoyment of the book in the least. Although it might not be for everyone. I recommend it for people that like cats, or animals in general. I...
This book is a gem, written by the Nobel Prize winning author on the cats in her life, from her childhood in Africa, to her life in England. She gives the reader a true sense of each cat's personality, showing her careful observance of their behaviour and how they interact both with other creatur...
If before this book you wanted to be a writer, if after you finished it you still wanted to be a writer, then all the power to you.What concerns us here is an English white heterosexual female, mother, author, communist. Upper-class, unmarried, unconsciously feminist. Neurotic, classist, homophob...
An interesting shortstory worth reading by all people, mainly because of the femanistic point of view. It is not the best thing I ever read, and even if it is not hard to read it has a deeper meaning to it.I believe the story is a metaphor for the contemporary society. The fact that a woman shoul...
In lots of ways, this is probably a 3 star book. It's not very exciting. Most things that are suggested may happen never happen. But as with the other Lessing book I've read, the quality of the insight is so good that it can't be discounted. Usually I copy my favorite passages from dog-eared ...
Since Goodreads, the world’s largest book club site , honed my appetite for reading books, particularly gave me the ideas of what books I should read, I have been updated with the famous and acclaimed literary writers , not only with the classic but also with the contemporary writers-I have t...
Reading this second volume assuredly requires your stamina, familiarity and sense of humor since its scope/plot is a bit different from its predecessor in which it's divided into normal numerical chapters while this one divided into four main road/street themes, each with its seemingly never-endi...
First read January 2005This book does three ambitious things.1. It takes the Old Testament of the Bible as inspiration for its mythical geo-historical content, but instead of an angry bearded guy in charge, it has a super-advanced utopian-collectivist space-travelling civilization colonising Eart...
At the start Martha Quest is a fifteen year old English girl (though time flows quickly... she’s 19 or 20 at the 40% mark and remains about that age for the rest of the book). At the beginning, it’s about 1935: between the World Wars, Hitler is name-dropped, and Martha lives on a farm in Africa. ...
The Grass is Singing is Doris Lessing's first novel, published in 1950. It is a savage and stark indictment of South Africa's apartheid system. It is set in what was formerly Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and concentrates on Rhodesian white culture with its racist and prejudiced attitudes. The...
A Review…and a Few QuestionsIn June, 1992, Doris Lessing wrote an Op-ed for the NY Times entitled, “Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer.” The questions that Lessing especially does not want to hear are, “What is the story really about? What does it mean?” In other words, we must take her stor...
Un monologo interrotto da pochi dialoghi che descrive la lenta distruzione di un pianeta. Difficile da capire, anche leggendo la post-fazione dell'autrice. Ispirato dalle vicende legate all'esplorazione del polo sud e dalla morte di Scott, dovuta a inefficienze e disorganizzazione nella spedizion...
طالعت هذه الرواية في رفوف المكتبات، إلا أنّ سعرها الغالي كان محفزاً لي لتركها؛ علّـني اتحصل عليها في موقع هنا او مجلدٍ هناك. إلا اني طمعت فيها كثيراً حينما وجدتها في معرض الأيام الثقافي في المنامة، العاصمة البحرينيّة، فاقتنيتها بسعر يختلف بشكل يسير ( 60 ريال! ) في سبتمبر الماضي. والآن، أجدها قد ق...
تجري أحداث الرواية في إحدى المدن ,( لم يكن لها اسما كما لم تُمنح بطلة الرواية اسما )هذه المدينة من المدن التي نالها نصيب من آثار حرب ما ( المكان غير معروف ) وكما يحدث في الحروب غابت عنها الخدمات الضرورية للحياة , الماء , الكهرباء , الطعام , مما نتج عنه رحيل أغلب سكانها بينما سيطرت العصابات التي ت...
I reread this the day Doris Lessing died. It's very short, and every sentence packs a heady concentration of power. This is the novel that introduced me to Lessing. I was lucky enough to be working in a bookstore when it was released; I read a review and immediately used my employee's discount to...
What is amazing about "The Sirian Experiments" [which I ought to point out I read independently from the rest of the series] is the way in which the science fiction works as a sort of political-psychological history of what makes up the human psyche. Through the memoirs of one of the leaders of t...
(American edition is titled The Real Thing)A collection of eighteen short stories and "sketches" -- I suppose the "sketches" are the stories where not as much happens -- all of which take place in London. These are all quite good stories, though perhaps on average not quite as good as some of her...
I have a problem with the word ‘experimental’ because most experiments fail; it’s in their nature. When I use word ‘experiment’ here I mean a test to prove a hypothesis. In the case of a novel the word ‘experimental’ usually means: If I try this and this and this do I still have a novel? And the ...
this is the 2nd story from lessing for moi. her other story...forget the name...just came to me...The Fifth Child...i marked that as a favorite of mine. it is. it is a good story. i hope this is a good story, too. i'm already prejudiced in favor of it. imagine that.begins:at homea woman stood ...
16/5 - I'm a bit scared to start this because it looks deep and complicated and I'm worried I won't understand it. The plot sounds interesting, but the language could be difficult. A bit like what happened with Blood Meridian. Okay, here I go... To be continued...18/5 - I'm not a fan of well ...
'After I left the hotel, through a lobby all excitement and noise – a trade delegation from the Sirian HQ on their planet Motz were just leaving, looking pleased with themselves – I walked straight into the park opposite. Some freely wandering gazelles came to greet me. They originate, as it happ...
Last year I met a little Afghan girl, a refugee with her family in Pakistan. She had lived in a village that had water running through it from the mountains, and it had orchards and fields, and all her family and her relatives where there. Sometimes a plane crossed the sky from one of the larger ...
Doris Lessing tells about when she finally came to London in 1949, the town of her dreams, after WW2 to live there and how little it met up to her expectations from the beginning. All the streets looked the same. Later on she learned to like London. ...
So ends Lessing's Bildungsroman par excellance. This near-700 page breeze block of a book takes Martha from her early 30s to old age, and is set in post-war London. Lessing compelled my attention before even beginning, with a dervish teaching story and a quote from The Edge of the Sea Each of the...
