This was the first book I read this year way back in January, and I had just had my daughter (she turns one this week!) and it really just gave me a lot of feelings, and I didn’t know how to write them all in a book review, so I put it off to “let it settle” and whoooooops now it’s December! Hi guys! This is a feelings book. It is grim, but it is also optimistic and lovely and hopeful. Kalanthi was 36 and […]
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone
Changing my mind is an essay collection by Zadie Smith. There is a new one out called Free, this is the one she wrote before Free, (back when Obama was still president. This fact will depress you). The collection of essays is a mix between articles, lectures and auto-biographical snippets. As far as essay-collections go this is a pretty mixed bag. It deals both with authors, film, her father, and her blackness. “Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, […]
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
Birthday/cbr10bingo Sylvia Plath was born Oct. 27, 1932. Bingo #2 Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s experience of depression and mental illness, her time in an institution and her slow journey back to wellness. It is also a commentary on the suffocating life of a young woman who wants more than life seems to offer her because of her class and gender. The Bell Jar was published in the UK in 1963, just before Plath committed suicide. The […]
A lovely fairy tale that came at just the right time
I am quite sure I found a review of this book on the CBR site, and it sounded like a lovely warm book to read in what has been a challenging few weeks. It’s a Newberry Award winning young adult book, filled with emotion and magic and love. The book began much like a traditional Brothers Grimm fairytale; a village needs to leave it’s youngest child in the forest on a certain day every year, an offering to an evil witch so that she leaves […]