#review
We tend to think of grief and mourning as maladies of the mind, but the loss can grow and expand until it feels like more like a presence than an absence. In the poem “Death Barged In,” Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno describes her pain as a mysterious figure in a Russian greatcoat who barges in, slams the door, and now makes all her decisions for her:
Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck,
From now on,
you write about me.
I read A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Last Night I Sang To The Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz back to back on a whim, only to find out that they have much more in common than just the word ‘monster’ in the title. Both are by incredibly talented young adult authors, both are about troubled families, and in both books, the loss these protagonists so desperately refuse to acknowledge takes on the physical form of a monster, looming over them.
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BOOK REVIEW: Go Set a Watchman (2015) by Harper Lee
I felt bad buying this book.
I felt bad reading it.
And now I feel bad writing about it.
I have avoided Go Set a Watchman as long as I possibly could; every time I saw it in a bookstore, I frowned and looked the other way. I didn’t want to be a part of it. In the end, I did give in. “You’re a literature blogger,” I told myself, “you can’t not talk about this book. You have a responsibility, this is one of things will you have to write about eventually.” So I took a deep breath and bit the bullet. I carried Go Set a Watchman around with me for a week, and every time I took it out, one of my friends or colleagues would point at the cover and say: “I’m so curious! Is it any good?” I have avoided giving a definite answer. “I don’t know yet, I’m only on page six.” “Too soon to say, I’m only halfway through.” Now that I’ve finished it, I can’t get away with this anymore; I have to have an opinion.
My opinion is that this book makes me sad – for so many reasons.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Once and Future King (1958) by T.H. White
This summer, my parents and I went on holiday to Cornwall and visited Tintagel Castle, which was supposedly the place where King Arthur was conceived. It’s a popular tourist attraction, surrounded by gift shops where you can buy your kids a toy Excalibur or Merlin’s pointy hat. Since I love to buy books in the place where they are set or were written, I decided to buy a copy of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (and a beautiful hardcover edition of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca).
I knew that it told the story of King Arthur, that it was on every single list of best fantasy books, and that my sister-in-law, who is an avid fan of Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, and Terry Goodkind, had been begging me to read it for years. I figured that it would be an epic fantasy story with lots of drama and violence – which it is. It is also nothing like that at all.
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BOOK REVIEW: Kiss Kiss (1960) by Roald Dahl
If you thought that Roald Dahl’s children’s books were deliciously gruesome (and they are), wait until you see what he has in store for the adults. In Kiss Kiss, Dahl combines horror and comedy to give us eleven memorable short stories. He obviously delights in making his readers feel as uneasy as possible right before pulling the rug out from under them, grinning at the shocked look on our faces. As a teacher, I get to experience some of this joy myself. I am currently teaching this collection to a group of sixteen-year-old students, and every week, I get to watch them as they slowly realise what is going on in each story. One by one, they all suddenly turn to me and go: “Ooohhhhhhh! Oh God, that’s terrible!”
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BOOK REVIEW: The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath
“Sylvia Plath – interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.”
Annie Hall (1977)
That quote is the perfect illustration of why it can be difficult to say that you love Sylvia Plath, especially for young women; her name and the title of her novel have become synonymous with a whole set of implications neither Plath nor the reader ever asked for.
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BOOK REVIEW: Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
This book tells the story of a middle class white man in his early thirties working as a lecturer on medieval literature who thinks he deserves a better job and a prettier girlfriend, but spends most of his time complaining and drinking instead of actually working for either of these things. Most of the novel is spent making silly faces, lying, avoiding his responsibilities, and playing immature pranks on the people he loathes. In the end, he gets his rewards without making much of an effort and walks off into the sunset, having learned nothing at all.
Yeah.
Lucky Jim has not aged well.
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BOOK REVIEW: Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
InWide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys tells the story of a young Creole woman, Antoinette Cosway, growing up on the island of Jamaica. However, you probably know her as Jane Eyre‘s Bertha Mason, the iconic “mad woman in the attic.” We follow Antoinette as she tries to navigate racial tensions, her ultimately doomed marriage to Rochester, and the many problems in her family. In Jane Eyre, Bertha is a furious spectre, barely more than a grunting animal trying to scratch our heroine’s eyes out. Wide Sargasso Sea, on the other hand, gives Antoinette a voice, her own story to tell, and even her own name (I’ll come back to this).
If you have ever taken any class that touched on postcolonialism in literature in your life, you know this title. Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the ultimate must-read titles in the field, a work that other postcolonial rewritings of classic literature are measured by; this is how it’s done. As a fan of both Jane Eyre and reworkings/reimaginings of well-known stories, it is downright embarrassing that I have not read this novel until now. However, when I came across a copy in a second-hand bookstore, I decided that it was finally time to correct this oversight. So did it live up to the hype?
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BOOK REVIEW: Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
The university student is a strange creature, stuck in a curious limbo between adolescence and adulthood. It is said to be a time of great learning: you attend lectures on (hopefully) fascinating subjects, figure out how to pay an electricity bill, and do your own laundry. There is the pursuit of knowledge, the desire to evolve, a search for that elusive wisdom that all proper adults seem to possess… But you’re not an adult yet. Instead, you find yourself having water balloon fights outside the lecture hall and drunkenly debating the finer details of The Samurai Pizza Cats at a party while wearing a penguin suit you don’t remember putting on. This delicate balance between work and play, between newly-found responsibility and having fun, is exactly what Love’s Labour’s Lost is about.
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BOOK REVIEW: Nimona (2015) by Noelle Stevenson
I first became aware of Noelle Stevenson through Tumblr, about five years ago. At the time, she had gained an online following for the comics she drew about movies she’d watched (Thor, The Lord of the Rings, X-Men) and general fandom experiences, like this one. She was funny and relatable, but what kept me coming back were her comments on the depiction of female characters and general misogyny in the comics industry. For example, she drew this comic about her experiences with “self-appointed gatekeepers” who make many would-be comic readers feel unwelcome. Stevenson also started the Hawkey Initiative, where she pointed out the trend of unrealistic and sexist “strong female character” poses in superhero comics and suggested that they could be fixed by replacing the character with Hawkeye doing the same thing. She invited artists to send in their creations, and the results were both hilarious and deeply uncomfortable,
At twenty-five years old, Stevenson is now working as an industry professional, and in 2015 her popular web comicNimona was published by HarperTeen.
I’m very pleased to say that there is not a single boobs-and-butt panel to be found.
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BOOK REVIEW:NW(2012) by Zadie Smith
A couple of chapters into NW, I had a revelation. “Mrs Dalloway! IfOn Beauty was a modern take on Howards End, then this must be Zadie Smith’s spin on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway! I’ve got the ‘hook’ for my review!” One quick Google search later, I sank back into my seat. Turns out the rest of the world had had that same idea when the book first came out in 2012, and that Smith had actually discussed Woolf as a direct influence on her book:
I was just trying to find a way to be adventurous and do something new in the writing while still holding on to the things that I can do well, […] So [Virginia Woolf is] just a good example of a forward-thinking and yet consistently humane writer, and just a great female modernist. An old inspiration returned to me at the right moment.
Well. So much for my spark of brilliance.
…Anyway.
Major plot spoiler towards the end of the review.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Night Circus (2011) by Erin Morgenstern
Now that National Novel Writing Month has officially kicked off, I thought it might be nice to take a look at a novel that started out as a NaNoWriMo project and later became an international bestseller. In 2011 Erin Morgenstern wrote in her NaNo pep talk:
The circus was my variation on the wise and ancient NaNo wisdom: when in doubt, just add ninjas. I had this plodding, Edward Gorey-esque thing with mysterious figures in fur coats being mysterious and doing very little else. I got tremendously bored with it because nothing was happening so I sent the otherwise boring characters to a circus. And it worked. I ended up tossing that beginning and focusing purely on the circus. An imaginary location I created out of desperation expanded and changed and became its own story over many non-November months of revisions and more revisions and now it is all grown-up and book-shaped and published and bestselling. And it all started with NaNoWriMo.
Brilliant. Bring on the metaphorical ninjas!
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BOOK REVIEW: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther is one of those novels that I have encountered a number of times in my assigned reading for university, but had never actually read myself. When I finally decided to fill in this gap in my literary knowledge, I knew that the protagonist was basically the quintessential Romantic hero – emotional, artistic, and, of course, desperately in love with a girl he can never have – which meant that this could only end in tears (and probably death).
Wertherdid not disappoint in that regard… But maybe I kind of wanted it to.
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BOOK REVIEW: Where Am I Now? (2016) by Mara Wilson
When I was a little girl, Matilda was my hero. I read the book until it started to fall apart, I had listened to the audio book so many times that I could recite entire paragraphs with the exact intonation the narrator used, and I would watch the movie any time I caught it on TV. Mara Wilson, the girl who played Matilda, was not as scruffy as I had always imagined the character to look when I read the book (too sweet, especially with that ribbon in her perfectly combed hair), but I still sighed with relief every time she got her happy ending.
(I also cried a lot when I listened to the West End cast recording of the Matilda musical for the first time, but that’s a story for another time.)
Years later, Mara Wilson rushed back into my world. She had a hilarious cameo on The Nostalgia Critic’s review of A Simple Wish, became a recurring guest star on Welcome to Night Valeasthe Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, and before I knew it I was scrolling through her Facebook feed, laughing at her posts. She’s funny! I’m so glad she’s funny! I found myself wondering why she had disappeared from the public eye all those years ago. One minute she was a star, and the next she was gone. What happened?
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BOOK REVIEW: Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (2015) by Max Porter
“Grief is the thing with feathers,” eh? I see what you did there.
Read me, he said.
Just because the title grabbed me? I don’t think so. Have you seen my list of books to read? Who wrote you?
Max Porter.
I’ve never heard that name before.
I’m his first book.
Crow is an immaculate conception, a virgin birth (not that Max Porter is a virgin, although he might be, you never know).
I’ve never heard of you and I have no idea what you are. I bought three books this week that I want to read – forget it.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
I can’t. I am crushed by the weight of all the books I haven’t read. Go away.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Knock. Knock.
No.
But I’m really short. Look at me. You could finish me this afternoon if you wanted to.
Stop.
Rat-a-tat-tat. BANG. BANG.
FINE. (I throw my twenty-euro bill on the counter like it has personally offended me.)
No need for that kind of violence.
Shut up.
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It’s here! Me vs #goatcheesecrustedchicken (are you ready for it?) | #homechefmeal#review#foodreview#help
LIKE ME ON FACEBOOK-FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM
// also try foods with me get a 30$ discount on your first order
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Eh guys,
I’ve been quite silent on this blog recently. The reason is… I’m launching an exciting new projet! ^^
JoysDick is a videogame website dedicated to sex games with reviews, news, forums, cheats, walkthrought, etc.
It’s like IGNorGamespot but for porn games.
I published the first article of JoysDick a few minutes ago. Take a look at the review of Behind the Dune, an erotic tribute to Frank Herbert Dune’s universe by David Goujard.
https://joysdick.com/behind-the-dune-review/
If you guys think this is a fun idea and I should continue, please help me by reposting this:)
You can also follow JoysDick on Twitter and Facebook. It’s @JoysDickdotcom for both.
Doodles
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-dMgWeaQkI Review video of the Reiie Merc Wireless Activity Tracker, Sleep Monitor and Calories Counter.
Read more at http://www.facebook.com/978181465543993/posts/1208285045866966
very belated review for romwe! i’m currently in munich at my sister’s apartment and this review is long overdue. but once again i chose this one because i have been looking for suitable stuff to wear to uni :>
sorry about my wrinkly top, really. but i rarely even use an iron sooooo––– anyway, the material of this cardigan is pretty thick and is more like a dark gray than a black. it has small little white hairs sticking out throughout the fabric which gives it a very unique look but makes it a little scratchy at the beginning (you have to wash it a few times so it goes away)
i was actually pretty surprised at how warm this cardigan keeps! it’s almost like a winter coat and i sweat to death while shooting this. this will definitely go into my suitcase to england!
again, i’m sorry about this wrinkly top oMG
OUTFIT
TOP: VERO MODA
CARDIGAN:ROMWE – $24.99
DENIM: WRANGLER
BOOTS: H&M
lastly, a huge thanks goes out to romwe again! you guys saved my uni wardrobe :’)
xx,
tam
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