I found the stories good (The Plague, The Fall and the short stories). The Myth of Sisophus tough, and the Reflections on the Gillotine interesting. ( )

Contains Myth of Sisiphus etc.

Feb 2011: "The Myth of Sisyphus", 2 of 5. The absurdity of living and the logical necessity of suicide-- should be right up my ally, but I just couldn't get into this. One thing I did feel throughout was that the writing was very clunky and awkward; I'm inclined to point my finger at the translator, but since I cannot go to the original, and I (perhaps without foundation) assume Everyman's is using the translation de rigueur, it might just be clunky and awkward. Whenever my understanding started gaining some momentum, the direction of this essay would just roll right back down to the beginning, and it was always a struggle to get going again. Maybe Camus was just pulling a funny one on stubborn readers like me.

Dec 2009: The Plague, 3.5 of 5. Fun to read in these days of 11-step handwashing posters in public restrooms and other attempts to inflate public obsession/paranoia of colds and flus. ( )

Once overshadowed by Sartre, Camus has proved the more durable of the two most celebrated French writer-philosophers of the last century. This collection of his work makes the reasons for his survival self-evident. In prose of bleak but piercing clarity, Camus cuts to the heart of each story he tells. After The Outsider, The Plague is his most powerful novel, at once an account of heroic attempts to contain an epidemic in Algeria and a parable of the human condition. In The Fall a once-successful Parisian lawyer tells his own tale of decline and self-discovery, Exile and the Kingdom collect together a number of short stories which explore the existentialist predicament from various viewpoints. This volume also contains two important essays - The Myth of Sisyphus and Reflections on the Guillotine - which reflect on the themes developed in the fiction.