German cover: Strange translation choice abounds here – I read this as “Thoughts about Christa T,” but the novel does discuss the word “Sehnsucht” a few times as well. So who knows! (Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Nachdenken-Uber-Christa-T-German/dp/3630610315) An odd little book from an East German writer, this book feels in some ways similar to Elena Ferrante, especially the earlier novels from the Neapolitan Novels, as well as novels by Magda Szabo. It’s a curious book for numerous reasons. One, it’s a book that appears on David Bowie’s 100 books […]
Rennie can see what she is now: she’s an object of negotiation.
(Photo:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/160728.Bodily_Harm) There’s a blurb on the back of my copy from Marilyn French, a more or less contemporary of Margaret Atwood’s, who says of this book “Romance and adventure by a female Graham Greene at his peak” and at first I thought it was dismissive in a strange way, but then I started reading, and thought — well, I’ll be damned. So it does share a lot of similarities with Graham Greene in a few key ways, or more with a certain set of Graham […]
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
I vaguely remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee in school, but I’m glad I decided to reread it when I saw it on my 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 List. I can’t remember how old I was when I first picked it up, but as I reread this book I realized that I’d forgotten many of the details of the story. In addition, my perspective has changed dramatically. When I first read the book, I wholly identified with Scout. There […]
Kayla understood this as a fundamental difference between men and women: men could leave, women had to stay
This is an odd book for me because it’s actually a book that is less than the sum of its parts. So the plot here is that there is an incident at summer camp in the 1990s and four girls were involved, alongside an older camp “counselor” or more so an older woman working in the capacity as a counselor. We receive scant information about this incident in the early parts of the novel, but we are instead told that Nita “saved” them all, whatever […]