This quarter's list is a tad shorter than usual because one of the books was a tad longer. Dickens! Getting paid by the installment and just keeping on going and going and going. I thought it would never end. The only reason I read as many other books as I did is because the rest were shorter.
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| Broome County Public Library |
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son. 1848. I blame this on Michael. He decided to start the year with a Dickens and I wanted to be one of the cool kids too, so I also started the year with a Dickens. Thanks goodness the library no longer charges late fees, or I'd owe them a fortune. It took forever because I could only read a few (dense) pages at a time. Parts of it were genius and incredible for their time. The brutal indictment of marriage and conventional treatments of women. The skewering of ambitious men. The absolute psycho-sexual mind games of Dombey's side kick. There were lines that made me laugh. And then there were lines where I thought, Dickens old chap, you've already said this five different ways in the past two paragraphs, we get it. Oddly enough, this hasn't put me off the man. I'm thinking Nicholas Nickleby for next January, maybe.
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| Some second hand book store or another. It has been sitting on the shelf waiting for me for a while. |
Willa Cather, The Professor's House. 1925. A nice little palate cleanser. Second favorite Cather after Death Comes for the Archbishop. Just a fascinating personality study with a whole crazy other story dropped into the middle of it, because Cather can do anything she wants.
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| Chaucer's Books, Santa Barbara |
Helen Oyeyemi,
Mr. Fox, 2011. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on here. I could tell it was very clever but I wasn't captivated the way I wanted to be.
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Michael brought this into the house and said I might like it and it has been sitting on The Pile for over a year
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Deborah Levy,
Things I Don't Want to Know: On Reading. 2018. I didn't know anything about Deborah Levy before I picked this up. It is memoir, but not the kind I expected - that "on writing" subtitle was slightly misleading. Well, maybe not entirely misleading, the book is about writing, but she arrives at the topic sideways and you've almost forgotten about that part of the title by the time you get there with her. Very clever and also captivating.
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| Broome County Public Library |
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. 2011. I read this for class and I liked it less than most of my classmates, so I kept my mouth shut during the discussion. The first couple of chapters were intriguing and pulled me along, fascinated, as Otsuka played with the form and told a dynamic story. Then her POV started to wear on me and the story became relentless - you know where it is headed and it is not one of the high points of American history. And I'm apparently pretty conventional after all, because I just wanted a character to follow. But, you know, respect for throwing down something different.
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| Broome County Public Library |
Jhumpa Lahiri,
The Namesake. 2003. I read this for class and I'd read it before but only remembered two things about it. I didn't realize it was groundbreaking until a fellow student talked about it as something that had laid the way for other immigrant stories. I guess I just forgot how long ago 2003 was. The book was better than I remembered, perhaps because I was reading it through the lens of class discussions about writers' use of time, point of view, tension, stakes, etc, and I could see how well constructed it was. Solidly satisfying read.
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