Novellas

Trish at Hey Lady! has a challenge starting soon (or in my case, already begun) that inspires us to read novellas.   You can read her explanation and challenge description by clicking here.

A novella is defined as a piece of literature that is longer than a short story and not long enough to be considered a novel.

Uh huh.  THAT cleared it all up for you, didn’t it.    My favorite definition is here:   A short novel.  

Now, I am excited about this.    For one reason, short books are faster to get through and gets me closer to my goal of reading (and maybe exceeding) 33 books in 2008.   So, when I failed to remember the title of the book I told PlanetBooks I want to read and knowing that my library didn’t have it even if I did know author/title – I had looked it up earlier and it’s not even available to request – I embarked on a different tactic.

I wandered up and down the fiction section LOOKING FOR SHORT BOOKS.   And checking number of pages.   It was REALLY fun to book-search in this manner!   Who’d a-thunk it!?  I now present to you the books I came home with, in no particular order:

Everyman by Philip Roth (182 pages and my first Roth book, I think…)

I Sent A Letter To My Love by Bernice Rubens (197 pages)

House of Meetings by Martin Amis  (242 pages)

Garden State by Rick Moody (212 pages)

Battle of Cowpens by Kenneth Roberts (104 pages)

Yep, found quite a few in the “R” section.   Truth be told, I ordered the Amis book online.   I had narrowed a search to ‘novella’ and this was the ONLY title to present that was in stock at my library…  

A few fun excerpts from the back of House of Meetings says that it is ‘… more than a love story’ and ‘an impressively full and frightening look into Stalin’s slave labour camps…’   Gulp.   What am I getting myself into?!   Maybe some Russia-reading with get me back to Anna Karenina.

I pulled the Roth book because of the power of his name.    I selected the Rubens book because the inside cover remarks start off eerily similar to the new movie out with Christine Ricci and her pig nose (Penelope?)   Garden State might be the source for the movie of same title but I’m not sure.   And the Cowpens is historical fiction.    I like historical fiction.

I just finished the Roth book and think I will jump into the Roberts one right now!  due to page count…