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December Reading Challenge: Vinegar Girl
This post on Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is going to be a little lame, since the novel is a rewritten, modern version of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew which I have never read (but have SparkNoted!). I will read Shakespeare’s play as soon as I can and perhaps come back to Vinegar Girl and talk about it more with its originator, but for now, if you’ve stuck around, here are my thoughts on Vinegar Girl as its own novel.
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December Reading Challenge: The Scent of Pine
Lara Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine is an indulgent novel, with the past and present intermingling in beautiful and haunting ways; lust and love and desire bringing insecurities and reality into the light. And I love that it primarily takes place in a cabin in the woods in Maine. There’s something enchanting and deep about the Maine woods that novelists and writers and general people find alluring; I won’t deny it, the woods of The Pine Tree State are quite magical. Anyway, moving on to the book. Lena and Ben meet at an academic conference and after spending a night together, Lena decides to accompany Ben on an overnight trip to his…
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December Reading Challenge: Swimming Home
Tom McCarthy wrote an insightful introduction to Deborah Levy’s novel, Swimming Home, in 2011. In it he says that Levy’s “fiction seemed less concerned about the stories it narrated than about the interzone (to borrow Burrough’s term) it set up in which desire and speculation, fantasy and symbols circulated.”
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December Reading Challenge: An Introduction
Well, here we are. The last month of the year, and Goodreads won’t stop pestering me about finishing my reading goal that I barely remember setting earlier in 2016. Because of this pestering (I use this word adoringly), and because I didn’t restrain myself in the library, this month I am setting out to read four books (listed below in no particular order). The first two are modern re-tellings of classic literature. The first you have probably heard of: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld. I have high expectations for this take on Pride And Prejudice, and look forward to exploring other “Austen Project” novels later on. The second modern re-telling is Vinegar Girl by Anne…
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November Reading Challenge: After Dark
After losing my mind over What They Do In The Dark, I am happy to say that After Dark did not lead me doubting myself as a reader, but reinforced my love for reading. This is the first Haruki Murakami novel I have read, and it certainly won’t be my last. I can’t believe the beauty I’ve been missing.
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November Reading Challenge: What They Do in the Dark
So the lady wasn’t a real person at all. The surprise of this suited Pauline. Maybe most people weren’t real, just pretending to be. It helped when you knew that, that they might be ghosts, like you. Unless that meant the people you only had a chance of meeting as ghosts, like Joanne, were less likely to be ghosts themselves. I finished reading What They Do in the Dark around the time the Supermoon arrived, and I’m saying this because I believe Amanda Coe’s novel contributed to the nightmares I had during that week. The novel is not horrifying in terms of the supernatural or serial murders (both themes of my nightmares),…
A blog about books and miscellany
