The Agony and The Ecstasy

A biographical novel of Michelangelo.

I finished this a few days ago. Picked it out in the Sunway Library one day during one of my many breaks from studying. It was a good read.. I liked that I learnt though reading it in a way that wasn't boring, about Michelangelo and his works, about Florence and history.

I read it between chapters of my P1/P2/P3 and it was so interesting that it always made me unsleepy after the breaks I took by reading it, and at one point halfway through the book I wished that it would never end; knowing that impossible though I considered reading it again from the start once I was done with it the first time.

I didn't. Hahaha. 3/4s through it I got impatient and rushed through the rest of it. Hehe am so excited about Italy now.. I'll be able to look at the art knowing how much skill and effort went into producing them and be able to tell Michelangelo's works!

Something about what it's about from Amazon.com because I'm too lazy to say hehe

"Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo's David, New American Library releases a special edition of Irving Stone's classic biographical novel-in which both the artist and the man are brought to life in full. A masterpiece in its own right, this novel offers a compelling portrait of Michelangelo's dangerous, impassioned loves, and the God-driven fury from which he wrested the greatest art the world has ever known."

After that I tried reading this:
but it was so weird that I didn't get through the first 20 pages and I returned it.

From Amazon,

"This brief, pitiless novel advances such a narrow, bleak vision of the human race that one wonders why its author, who apparently finds everything pointless, saw the point in writing it. In oddly punctuated, repetitive prose reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's but lacking Stein's energetic compassion, Jelinek's (Lust and The Piano Teacher) latest doesn't have much good to say about love or marriage or sex or babies. And for Paula and Brigette, these are the only escapes from a life--if one can call it a life--of sewing bras in a factory in the mountains of Austria. It's hard to imagine even the pretense of love in a marriage to a drunken lout like Erich, the rotting apple of his sad, miserable parents' eye, or to fat and stupid Heinz. What shallow, covetous creatures women are, is what Jelinek seems to say. It doesn't matter if they don't enjoy sex; they don't deserve it, and anyway, someday we'll all be dead."

I've moved on to this:
It's alright so far. I like Martin Dressler.

From Amazon:

"Martin Dressler is a turn-of-the-century New York City entrepreneur who begins in his father's cigar store but dreams of a bigger empire. That dream shapes into a series of large hotels. At first, Dressler's seems the archetypal American success story, but he does not quite grasp the future. The Manhattan of fabled skyline is about to take shape just over the horizon, but Dressler cannot see it. So the story becomes another kind of fable, as Dressler contemplates having "dreamed the wrong dream.""

Hehe I wish Andrew had more fantasy books for me..