This marks the first time I have ever read Wuthering Heights without needing it to be Jane Eyre. And I hope Wuthering Heights appreciates that I made sacrifices in order to read it with eyes and mind uncontaminated by my frantic, abiding, decades-long love of Jane Eyre. That Mia Wasikowska movie came out and I went to see it and afterwards I really, really wanted to read Jane Eyre, and it just so happens I have a beautiful copy of Jane Eyre with gorgeous woodcut illustrations, which Legal Sister got for me and then wiped down every page with a…
59 CommentsReading the End Posts
It is never fair to finish up a book you liked a lot/loved (in this case, The Secret History — despite my best intentions of early bed, I stayed up past until midnight to finish it this past rereading time), and turn straight away to a book you haven’t read before that sounds vaguely similar. You’re going to compare them, and even though your rational mind knows that they are not in competition, one of them is going to lose out. However, there were a few things working to shield The White Devil from the inevitable failure when compared to…
17 CommentsYou know Chandler from Friends? You know how in Friends, somebody would say something stupid, and Matthew Perry would do that thing where he would fling his whole body into one large, frantic gesture of utter incredulity? That is how I felt all the way through How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Exactly like that. I kept flinging the book across the room (really satisfying, by the way! A nice thing about ARCs is you can dog ear pages and throw them across the room or even rip out pages if you want, and it doesn’t matter because they belong to you,…
31 CommentsMiscellanea: Colum McCann and Colm Toibin are the same person in my head. I now feel pleased with myself for finally reading something by Colm Toibin. Also, I find it impossible not to write Colum McCann’s name as Column. Why I read the end: I realized halfway through the book that nothing in it had interested me enough to make me read the end. I still didn’t care enough to read the end, but I did because I didn’t want to be untrue to my byline. Also because I felt like as a new New Yorker, I should love a…
29 CommentsHistorically — which is to say, before blogging — I have been a huge rereader, devoting a solid fifty percent of my reading time to books I have read before. These days, I reread far less often, and far fewer books, for a variety of reasons. 1. Ease of access, home. I have bitched and moaned about leaving Louisiana more than any girl with the level of job satisfaction I currently experience has a right to bitch and moan about anything. But if I may complain just a tiny bit more without making you hate me, being separated from my…
60 CommentsThe beginning: Strangers at the Feast (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is about a family getting together for Thanksgiving dinner. Scholar Ginny has rebounded from a bad relationship by semi-legally adopting an Indian orphan called Priya, and she wants to bring her family together to meet Priya. The family is Ginny’s brother Doug, who has lost significant money since the housing crisis, and his wife Denise, and Doug and Ginny’s parents, old-school matriarch Eleanor and Gavin, a Vietnam veteran who missed out on his dreams as he worked to provide for his family. In a plotline across town, two…
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