When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was getting my Master’s Degree and it was for a class on Body Politics in literature. Then for my second reading, I was working on a PhD and it was for a “Democracy in Literature of the Americas” class. For the first class, Bush was president and for the second time, Obama was brand new to the office. And now, well, it’s Trump. I picked this one up again to read as a companion piece to my review […]
“I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart.”
I borrow the The Tent from Caitlin_D after she complained that she didn’t like it, and possibly just does not like short stories. Caitlin, I am determined to prove you wrong! I love Margaret Atwood, and in fact beside Stephen King, she’s probably the one author whose short stories I actually seek out. “I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I’m watery, I […]
I’ll probably end up being the a-hole who likes the TV show better.
I feel a little bad rating this only three stars, but I rate on enjoyment, and Alias Grace took me two months of slogging to finish. Even though it’s a good book and under different circumstances I might have liked it more (and perhaps I will re-read?), I just was not in the mood for reading it. At all. So, three stars. I mean, seriously, it’s not the book’s fault that most serious fiction makes me anxious right now. Or that all I want to do half the […]
When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth…
It’s hard to track the career of Margaret Atwood. She gets pinned down sometimes as a sci-fi writer, and fairly so, because of The Handmaid’s Tale and the Oryx and Crake/MadAddam trilogy. But I often forget just how good she is at strange, off-center novels that talk about contemporary life. This is a tale modeled after the fairy tale, The Robber Bridegroom, about a thief who lures young women to their doom in his forest lair. In this novel, we start with a funeral in which a group […]