Showing posts with label Margaret Atwood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Margaret Atwood. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

July Books

Here are the books I bought in July. I want to share these so I can hopefully get recommendations from others, since, as a I said in this post, I am always on the hunt for new books. Please let me know if you have any recommendations, or if you've read any of these books, and have any thoughts about them!

I recently read my first Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, and loved it, and went in search for my next Atwood, and picked this up.










I first bought this book because it is from the publisher Persephone Books, an AMAZING independent publisher that mostly publishes forgotten and out-of-print books by women. These are just hard to get a hold of in the States, as Persephone only sells in their books in the UK. You can ship them around the world, but it is expensive, you can buy them Amazon, but I am vehemently opposed to buying books on Amazon, or you can scour used book stores and hope someone has kindly donated their copies, which is how I found this book. It also helps that Monica Dickens is the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. I've already read this book, and loved it. I will be writing up on it.


I've read Carson McCullers' novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I thought was all right. I wanted to give her another try with this collection.










In college, I took a class solely on Vladimir Nabokov's work. So far I have read a ton of short stories and seven of his novels, which were all pretty great, so I want to continue chipping away at his bibliography.








This book is a gift from one of my best friends. She read it, and thought I would love it. I love receiving books as gifts, especially books that I didn't express that I wanted, but books that others think I would enjoy.








Lately, I feel like I've been hearing so much about Jeanette Winterson, and this book in particular seems to have been making the rounds on Booktube, so when I saw a used copy in perfect condition, I had to get it.









Virginia Woolf is one of my absolute favorite authors of all time, so I'm trying to make my way to reading everything she has written. Melymbrosia is interesting because it is an earlier draft of her published novel The Voyage Out. Melymbrosia was heavily edited based Woolf's friends telling her she would receive a lot of backlash because of the book's criticism of the British empire. Why would I not want to read this?





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So I'm still tinkering with ways to format these Monthly Book entries. I might just change them every time I do one, depending on the books, and whether I have something specific to say about why I bought them. I wanted to write about these books a little more because I'm really excited about them, and most are particularly meaningful to me in one way or another. But something I thought I might include is a little tally of the stores I bought them at. I want to do this to promote the amazing independent bookstores I frequent, and to kind of get a sense of where I shop. As much as this blog is for dialogue, I also want to use it to map my interests and ways of reading. Here are my bookstore tallies:

The Strand: |||
bookbook: |||

Monday, July 20, 2015

How Do You Find Books? On Margaret Atwood's THE ROBBER BRIDE

I am always on the hunt for a new book. And with the beauty that is the internet, there are so many interesting ways to find new books, and to think about those new books in different ways. 

One way I find new books is through the blog: http://slaughterhouse90210.tumblr.com. This blog is genius and everyone should read it. The premise of the blog is to pair an image from a TV show with a quote from a book, which in turn represents the mixture of supposed 'low-brow' and 'high-brow' culture. Through the blog, you of course see that the two are not so different, and the pairing is actually quite genius and accessible. I often find with this blog that I can connect to either the image or the text - rarely do I know both, which is honestly really exciting because it means I can now seek out something new that is more likely going to be interesting to me, more likely going to be something I can love. 

That said, I've just finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride. It's my first Atwood, and I absolutely loved it. Without a doubt, part of that love is due to the Slaughterhouse90210 post featuring a quote from the book, along with a scene from Mad Men, one of my all-time favorite TV shows.

I read this post just as I had started to read Slaughterhouse90210, and I was floored. Immediately I loved it because the quote commented so perfectly on the themes of Mad Men, especially since the show still exploited women, despite characters like Joan (pictured), Peggy, and Betty. Also, the quote in general was JUST. SO. PERFECT. You want to talk about patriarchy? Read this quote. Because of the utter perfection that was that blog post, I decided I would need to read this book, that I must experience the novel that could contain such a perfect quote, that could then shed light on one of my favorite TV shows and characters.

The Robber Bride centers around three women - Tony, Charis, and Roz - and their toxic friendship with Zenia, a woman who has laid waste to their romantic relationships whenever she decides to enter back into their lives. As I was reading the book, and got to know the characters more, I wondered when I would finally read the quote, and which character would say it. Now, after having finished the book, the quote clarifies a lot of my thoughts and feelings about the book. In the book, Zenia has a relationship with each of the other three women's significant other, and takes them away from them. What is so affecting about all of this is Tony, Charis, and Roz's desire to get their man back, even though they all had all been with Zenia. These women's desires are fully realized, and are not weak because they want to be with the men they love, but each feel in their own way the power Zenia has to embody a specific image or ideal that is attractive to each man sleeps with. Figuring all of that out, is what is compelling about the novel, and what I think is so great about looking at the novel through the lens of the quote. 

What are some of your favorite ways to find books? Any specific success stories like mine with The Robber Bride?

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Some Favorites...

So it has been QUITE some time. In terms of wanting to build this blog and a readership, I'm not doing so well since I haven't posted since the end of May. But let's leave that all behind, readers (shout out to Katie who might be the only one at this point). Yes, yes, let's leave this past month and a half behind and get to back why we're all here: BOOKS. I figured an easy way to ease into this would be to make a quick post about some of the books I've acquired in the past couple of months - this post would be way too long if I listed all the books I've bought. These that I've picked are ones I am particularly excited to read, and one that I think are just fucking beautiful.

Let me know if you've read any of these, your thoughts, and any suggestions for any books I should look into next.