I had a bumpy start with Villette, insofar as I instantly loathed everybody. I’m not trying to get on Lucy Snowe’s case, but her youth seems to have prepared her exceptionally well for becoming the kind of mean governess who hits you with a ruler for saying you think Richard the Lionheart was bad at governing a nation. She is so judgey right off the top. Here are Lucy Snowe’s assessment of all the characters in the first three chapters, in GIF format. Polly: Polly’s father: Graham: The effect of this is to make me dislike all those characters (well…
24 CommentsReading the End Posts
Okay, okay, I know I’m on my hibiscus right now, but I have these links and I’ve been rounding them up all fortnight. I don’t want to deprive you. Just enjoy these links, and then be off with you, for my hibiscus continues. This is a fabulous slide show, compiled by the incomparable Linda Holmes of NPR, of the costumes in the Miss Universe costume show. I like the yellow one that is yellow because I love yellow. The Daily Dot wants us to figure out how to write about transgender people, already. Trevor Noah! More Trevor Noah, right? He starts off…
13 CommentsHi everyone! This is a quick notification that I’ll be doing adventures in the month of February, which will keep me away(ish) from blogging this month. The podcast should still be coming out on schedule, and I’ll still be visiting your blogs as often as I can, but generally it’ll be quiet around here. Get at me on Twitter or by email (readingtheend AT gmail DOT com) if something particularly amazing happens that requires my attention. Like if the fourth Raven Cycle book gets a title other than Raven Cycle IV: Children with Large Bank Accounts Finally Get What’s Coming to Them. FAQS: Q: What kind…
25 CommentsThis week, we’re doing a round-up of some superlatives from 2014 and reviewing the first book in Elena Ferrante’s famed Neapolitan series (mm, can’t see that name without thinking of ice cream). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 34 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much). Credits Producer: Captain Hammer Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes…
9 CommentsI had to read How It Went Down in sections. It’s about a black teenager who is shot by a white man, and all the different characters — the witnesses, the families, friends — tell their perspectives of what happened on the day of Tariq’s death and in the aftermath of it. If any other author in the world had written this book, I wouldn’t have read it. But I trust Kekla Magoon from her wonderful, wrenching The Rock and the River, which is about teenage brothers and their participation (or lack of it) in the Black Panther Party. I read the first third in December, and then the…
30 CommentsThis has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.” The excerpt I read from Being Mortal in the New Yorker dealt with the astonishing rarity…
31 CommentsBeautiful Darkness (Drawn and Quarterly) opens as a girl called Aurora has tea with a boy she has a crush on. (They met at the ball the other night.) Then — in seconds — they find themselves struggling to survive in the woods. They are all very wee, and the woods are normal-sized. They also appear to have emerged from the decomposing corpse of a little girl. Possibly — the book isn’t explicit about this — all of the tiny people are aspects of the dead girl’s personality, now set free to roam freely and tinily around the woods. If that synopsis seems unwarrantedly weird, don’t blame me. Apply…
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