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Karl Ove Knausgaard – Fatherhood | Review

Title: Fatherhood

Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 124

Rating: 2.5/5

After enjoying Babies in this series of Vintage Mini Moderns, I was kind of expecting to enjoy this one. Not the case, though. I think the issue is that Babies covered pregnancy and birth, which was interesting to learn about, whereas Fatherhood was just all about this dad talking about his kids.

I’m bored enough of people talking about their kids through Facebook, so this book just bored the pants off me. Easily the weakest book in the collection so far, and that’s counting the fact that Aldous Huxley’s Psychedelics turned out to just be the unabridged text of The Doors of Perception. Eh.

Click here to buy Fatherhood.

William Gerhardie – The Polyglots | Review

Title: The Polyglots

Author: William Gerhardie

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 340

Rating: 3*/5

William Gerhardie – The Polyglots

This book was given to me by a friend with good taste and so I was expecting to enjoy it much more than I did. But the truth is that I found it kind of dull and I didn’t actually think much of it. It reminded me of other classics in which it feels as though nothing much really happens. It’s more about the language itself than the actually story line, which was negligible at best, and that was a shame as far as I’m concerned.

Still, it was okay I guess – not exactly gripping, but the writing itself was okay. It was occasionally over-complicated, but it wasn’t exactly torture. There were lines here and there that I really liked and I even shared a quote on my Facebook page, but there were also big chunks of text that slowed me down while I was reading it and didn’t seem to add much value to it all.

The result is a book that’s definitely professional but simply not all that enjoyable, not least because the characters and their setting is so unfamiliar to me. It also didn’t help that I didn’t read the blurb but rather just jumped straight in, which left me feeling somehow behind from the outset. It’s the kind of book that, if you only read it casually, will be difficult for you to wrap your head around. You need to pay a lot of attention to who the characters are and what motivates them.

Overall, then, I wouldn’t call it memorable. It’s not the kind of book that I’d recommend to anyone, purely because there are so many other great books out there and this one is just kind of eh. That said, I’m still glad that I read it because it’s always good to discover new authors, even if you don’t necessarily enjoy them. Gerhardie had potential, but it wasn’t to be. Maybe read something else.