Week Thirteen: Literary Speculation

For the subject of Literary Speculation, I attempted to read John Crowley's Little, Big. I say attempted, because honestly I did not finish this work. I found it fairly tough to read and not easy to follow. It may have been that the .pdf quality did not agree with me and this is the kind of story that I would need to sit down with it physically and take my time (which at this point in the semester I am severely lacking) with. Some of the sentences also run on for a long time, which makes them fairly difficult to read. I was also confused a bit on the formatting, since the chapters appear to be incredibly small but the time passing between them is not.

Little, Big is a generational fantasy about a family that interacts and travels dimensions around the mysterious fairies. The family lives in a mysterious house, called the Drinkwater that boarders the fae dimension. The magic plays a more subtle part in this story, and it mainly focuses on the relationships of the family members and the dystopian world they live in. 

Overall, the themes and mood of this story are very exciting and mysterious. Stories about dimensional travel and worlds beyond our own are very exciting tales. The author does an incredible job trying to explain a difficult concept and how it relates to the everyday person. It's also a very interesting take on tradition and exploring family bonds.

As good as the themes of this novel are, I just can't bring myself to finish it. While the concepts are cool, the windy long paragraphs are not. Time skips and jumps around without a way to measure it (in this sense, its very realistic). It was very hard for me to understand what was really going on in this story because of all the layers of meaning. Personally, I would rather read something more relatable and exciting than something that I have to force myself to understand. Either way, this novel has its good sides and bad sides. You just have to read it for yourself to figure out where you stand.