Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Old Book, New Book #28: Maus I & II -> Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer

Maus-I

Maus II

Now, as I mentioned before, I generally don't take time to note the graphic novels that I read here on the blog, but in this case, I thought these books merited a note. Because these aren't just graphic novels, they are Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novels. Basically the author/artist shares his father's story as a Holocaust survivor, along the way also portraying his own experience of dealing with his father and the after effects of his father's experiences during the Holocaust. In high school, and some in junior high, I got a good helping of Holocaust literature ("The Hiding Place", "Number the Stars", "The Devil's Arithmetic") but it's been a while since I've revisited the topic. Definitely a dark time in the history of our world, and we're lucky to have the memories of its survivors preserved in a variety of forms. Anyway, I won't say too much about these, other than to say that it was definitely worth the read, and didn't take too much time to get through both volumes.

Lately, I feel like I've been reading whatever I happened to find at the small library near my work, and the next book on the list is one of those. "Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer" is a publication that contains both of those novellas (short stories?) by Joseph Conrad. I'd heard of Heart of Darkness, but never Secret Sharer. I knew that the former was a "classic" and provided the outline of the film "Apocalypse Now", but that was about it going in. Between the two, the book is only about 160 pages, so hopefully not too long of a read.

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

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