8/31/2005

Jostein Gaarders's SOPHIE'S WORLD


For months now (yes, months), I have been struggling with Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World. For the longest time, I have wanted to read this book, because people say it has a great condensation of Philosophy. I got the book last January 1. And I started reading it right away.

But... it has been disappointing so far. I am now on The Postcards (page 118) . The book is terribly boring, unlike The Solitaire Mystery which I loved, love and will continue to love. This, however, seems more like a textbook. All the info is very helpful, but somehow I got the feeling that Gaarder is not as creative as I thought her to be.

I read this book in the hopes that it would be like Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. Sadly, that is not the case. Both of Dan Brown's books were exciting and provided a good, page-turning plot which also included some bits of information and trivia. This, on the other hand, contains, pages and pages, and more pages of outright Philosophy lessons. ARGH!!!

As of the moment, I am trying not to let my disappointment impede me from reading the book.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am already 3/4 through Sophie's World. Yes, you will be disappointed if you expected Sophie's World to be at par at least with as you said, DVC/A&D. But I love it. It's not the story that really intrigues me but the concepts (BTW the characters are the flattest I have ever encountered in a novel, though I could say Alberto Knox is more interesting than I deemed at first. Sophie.. ah she's really flat along with her mother and her friend Joanna). I love this book for making philosophical concepts understandable and light. It makes me think, and makes me ask. One of my favorite books, definitely. (They say the two-dimensionality was due to the translation, it was originally written in Norweigan)

:)

mdlc said...

hehehe. pati mga mambabasa, produkto na ng mtv generation, 'no? fastfood, fastfiction. pagtiyagaan mo pa nang kaunti, maganda'ng dulo niyan.