The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
Fiction
1995 Penguin Books (first published in 1993)
Finished in October 1997
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)
Publisher's Blurb:
The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.
My Original Notes (1997):
Fair to mediocre. I didn't care for the author's style. Not a very engrossing plot.
My Current Thoughts:
I only just recently read another book by Shields (A Celibate Season), which I liked quite well. I don't have any desire to go back and read this earlier work, though.
I remember knowing about this one and I'm pretty sure I might have read one of her books way back. Can't remember.
ReplyDeleteKay, if it weren't for my reading journals, I wouldn't remember that I read so many of the books that I've shared on this Friday feature. :)
DeleteI agree that the plot is not engrossing, to say the least, but even though I didn't finish it I can still remember ghe beginning with the woman stirring currants into dough. Isn't that weird?! (Of me, I mean.)
ReplyDeleteSo nice to see you visiting here again, Meredith!! No, I don't think it's weird to have that memory of the book. Sometimes it's the little things (or images) that stay with us. Hope you're enjoying your summer and getting in a lot of bike rides. xo
DeleteI remember reading this one with a book group and I loved it but I don't think I remember anything about it! Maybe I loved it due to the discussion we had, which is sometimes the case! :)
ReplyDeleteIliana, it seems to be the consensus that this one wasn't very memorable!
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