Finished: The Trial (Kafka) Well, hmmm. That was one of the weirdest things I've read....and I've already read Kafka's The Metamorphosis, where the man wakes up and has turned into a roach! Can you get any weirder than that? Apparently so, for me anyway. I have no idea why The Trial is on the top 100 list of books. It's actually not on that Modern Library top 100 list, but it's high enough on two other lists, and included on a few that didn't rank books in order, that it appears on my top 100 list to read. ok, so...again, I just don't see it belonging on that list with the other books I've read. As a matter of fact, I'd put The Metamorphosis, which was at least fascinating and page-turning, on that list wayyyyyy before I'd put The Trial.  The Trial is all about Josef K., a bank clerk who wakes up one morning and is confronted by two men in his own apartment and told he is under arrest. They don't take him to jail, but the rest of the story is about how he's on trial for something that no one will tell him the reason for. He visits a very secretive judicial system and can never find anything out. His life deteriorates over the period of a year when, finally, two different men come back at the end and take him out to be killed because he's been "found guilty". K, as he is called throughout the story, is told by every one he comes in contact with during the story that his case is pretty hopeless and he'll most likely be found guilty. It's just a weird, weird, rambling story. And...to make things worse, Josef K. is just not a likable character. He's very haughty and disdainful towards others and treats women very shabbily. He's just not someone I really wanted to root for; not someone I really cared about by the end of the story. I really can't describe it any further. Perhaps I just didn't "get" the book? I know it's supposed to be some comment maybe on the horrible, slow, bureaucratic, inaccessible judicial system maybe? Anyway, blech. I didn't like it at all. It goes on my list of "Overrated Critically Acclaimed Books That Were Torture to Read for One Reason or Another" with Lolita, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Lord of the Flies, Waiting for Godot, Swann's Way and On the Road.