Currently Reading

I've already finished this book, but I'm way behind on posting, so this is to catch up.

I recently read My Ishmael, the "sequel" to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

I won't say too much about this novel, because it shares many of the same ideas as Ishmael. However, I will say that I enjoyed this novel much more than Ishmael. The narrator is Julie, a twelve-year-old girl searching for answers to the same questions Quinn presents in his first novel. Questions like "From whom can I learn about how people ought to live" and "How did the world end up in the state that it's currently in". She works out the beginnings of the answers to these questions through the same means Quinn introduced in Ishmael - through telepathic dialogues with Ishmael, the gorilla.

I found the dialogue and story in this novel much more engaging and interesting than Ishmael's conversations with Alan Lomax in the first novel. Julie is young, but very curious about the world. I like her as the narrator, because I feel that her youth allows her to look at the information Ishmael presents without prejudice, or pre-conceived opinions about his ideas. I also found the book to have a much more hopeful tone, but I think that may be due to the difference in narrators.

I liked this novel so much more than the first. I identified with Julie's sense of not knowing what to think, but having a strong sense of the need for change.

I'm not familiar with the subject matter of Quinn's third novel in the "series", "The Story of B", but maybe it will be even better than My Ishmael. We'll see . . .