Another Study Blog @literameera - Tumblr Blog

bad fruit - ella king

#bad fruit #ella king #how could you leave the abuser when no one could love you like them. when theyve ruined you for everyone else

bad fruit - ella king

#bad fruit #ella king #in her head is a child that needs protecting and she tried but that child grew into a woman that hurts her #and now shes a woman that needs protecting but what about the child in the shed?#can we go back to the source and save that first child that needed saving and save all the subsuquent children?#she never stopped being the child in the shed

papayajuan2019

love from a person that will die one day

#joan didion

'Crisis' Reinhart Koselleck [translation: Michaela W. Richter]

In honour of the rapture today

#my post #crisis #english literature #reinhart Koselleck

and to think. life is only going to get worse for mariam

#my post #a thousand splendid suns khaled hosseini

started a thousand splendid suns today and my hand started shaking

#a thousand splendid suns #khaled hosseini

hedgehog-moss

You mentioned on your sister blog that one of your favorite genres is peaceful post-apocalypse. What would you recommend from this genre?

Unfortunately I don’t know many such books; recently I’ve read two and it got me wondering what it was about these kinds of books that I liked. They are peaceful in the sense that the post-apocalypse angst is minimal and internal (“I’m the last human on Earth and it makes me feel some kind of way”), with very little external conflict, no zombies or bleak urban hellscapes or possibly dangerous other humans to worry about. My small, in-progress list of such books is:

Andrew Krivak’s The Bear (I found the ending so lovely)

Lily Brooks-Dalton Good Morning, Midnight

Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population (not technically post-apocalypse, but the old lady protagonist is the last remaining person on her planet so I’m counting it. Plus I loved it)

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (nonfiction—counting it as post-apocalypse as well even though the reflection alternates between ‘what if humans disappeared’ and ‘what if humans had never been there’)

Jan Henrik Nielsen’s Høsten (I thought it was so-so—I don’t think there’s an English translation yet)

(The post-apocalypse book I’m currently reading is Thomas von Steinaecker’s Die Verteidigung des Paradieses (no English translation either)—I don’t dislike it but it doesn’t qualify as peaceful)

Gwendoline Courreges’s Earthbound (or at least parts of it)

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall—I didn’t like it but several people I know loved it.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou—this manga about a robot-woman who runs a countryside café in a mostly-depopulated post-apocalyptic world is what I want out of this genre… It’s peacefully melancholy; there is a real sense that things are coming to an end, but in such a way as to let people continue to savour their little daily joys and routines while the world quietly goes to sleep. That’s what was missing from The Wall, for me—it had a lot of “daily routines” but very little joy.

I think I’m looking for books that feel like reading the last few pages of the novel of humanity, in a way that is bittersweet but not depressing (1, 2 and 9 would qualify)—books with an undertone of “the rest of the living world will go on beautifully without us” but that aren’t overly misanthropic, just, humanity happened and did some regrettable things and some awe-inspiring things and now for the world it is the end of this chapter and the beginning of another and that’s okay. My ideal apocalyptic / post-apocalypse novel would be one that talks about the twilight of humanity in the spirit of these posts; with some clemency, and quiet warmth.

#masters #to read

sarah/akira parallels in when we were orphans

#when we were orphans - kazuo ishiguro

the cyborg manifesto - donna haraway

#my post

my first year of university i had bought a copy of seamus heaney's poems secondhand and the person who had it before had annotated some poems, and they were much more intelligent than I could be. but the poems i read and would have to annotate i would add my analysis around theirs (in a different colour to not mix us up) and would sometimes try to add to their points and that experience with dialogue endeared me to seamus heaneys work much more than the actual poems themselves could.

#my post

this author goes to therapy and not that there's anything wrong with that but every character in this book also goes to therapy.

#my post #rejection tony tulathimutte

the year of magical thinking is not a book I could really critique or review because of how personal of a narrative it is. what can i say? i think the way didion expressed her grief after the sudden death of her hushand is uncompelling (for the record that's not what i think at all) but one thing i can say is, in citing the literature of grief that came before her, i enjoyed how she solidified her place in the canon. the book was very much: freud, klein and lewis said this, and didion says this. i think it reaffirmed this idea throughout that grief is simultaneously an incredibly personal and unique thing while also something most everyone in the world has gone through. in her establishing of a canon she uses her personal experiences to become a definitive voice on the topic / theme. is this anything?

#my post #literature #the year of magical thinking joan didion #trying a new thing where i say at least one thing about every book ive read in my.journal but its so far away im outting it here instead heh

literameera

reading the year of magical thinking (likely thing for woman who wrote her dissertation on grief to be doing)

literameera

actually incredibly relevant to have done my dissertation on grief because most every source she cites is something I've read. 'given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare' brother dont i know it !

#the year of magical thinking joan didion

reading the year of magical thinking (likely thing for woman who wrote her dissertation on grief to be doing)

#my post

literameera

i know a reoccurring comment people will say about reading lolita is that you have to be a vigilant reader because hh is so charismatic and manipulative it's easy to fall for ehat he's saying but I think the opposite and you have to be intentionally stupid and deliberately obtuse to think he even actually properly cares for and loves dolores. i understand being confused maybe regarding if she did come onto him initially and believing him when he tells the reader the order of events. but all you have to do is read the words on the page to think this guy sucks, like without the being a pedophile thing, he sucks ! he's cruel and manipulative and abusive and cowardly and he ends a 12 year old girls whole life just to rape her. if you're a fully capable person reading this book and falling for it? you might be stupid?

trueishcolours

One thing I find very odd is how I almost never see anybody discussing HH's first wife! He doesn't even attempt to cloak his abuse of her in his narration, which gives you a baseline for how little worth he assigns to any woman or girl who isn't useful to him as a sex object. This makes it easier to understand that when he says flowery, superficially romantic things about Dolores, it's not because he's changed as a person since he was married to his first wife. The underlying contempt for women and girls is still there; it's just that Dolores is a pleasing object to him and his first wife was a worthless one.

It also gives the lie to his claims that paedophilia is a curse or affliction that he didn't choose and which is motivating all his other crimes. Paedophilia wasn't a factor in his relationship with his first wife (except that he resented her for being a grown woman and not the little girl of his fantasies) and he chose to abuse her anyway, almost as an afterthought. Just as he then chose to abuse Dolores. He wasn't 'driven to distraction,' it was already his standard behaviour.

Anyway I agree with OP; Nabokov gives us the whole first marriage episode to help establish HH as a villain.

literameera

the thing that really sticks out to me is how often he talks about lusting after other young girls. he makes dolores pleasure him while he watches children play in the park, he watches a school play and comments on which girls he liked the most, he let's dolores invite her friends to the house but Only the good looking girls, he uses her as bait and then punishes her when she assumes that role. after she leaves he still goes to parks to watch the children, he picks up an adult, but still very young, companion just for sex and to mistreat her. at one point he thinks about impregnating dolores so he could rape their child, and grandchild. like you can't believe he truly loves this girl because at every turn he reveals how disposable she really is. any girl could have been lolita, she was the only one unfortunate enough to actually be.

#i read the beginning of this godforsaken book so long ago i can barely remember his first marriage 😭 but i recall she has a man come to the #house who she leaves with and he thinks i cant fight them hed beat me up or smth? correct me if im misremembering #and its like. oh? disgustingly pathetic wretched little man. only taking victims you know you could ba #beat. its like what orson welles said about woody allen lol the mix of timidity and arrogance 'He acts shy #but he's not. He's scared.#He hates himself #and he loves himself #a very tense situation.#' like orson welles got it so right man and hes talking about an entirely different pedophile

i know a reoccurring comment people will say about reading lolita is that you have to be a vigilant reader because hh is so charismatic and manipulative it's easy to fall for ehat he's saying but I think the opposite and you have to be intentionally stupid and deliberately obtuse to think he even actually properly cares for and loves dolores. i understand being confused maybe regarding if she did come onto him initially and believing him when he tells the reader the order of events. but all you have to do is read the words on the page to think this guy sucks, like without the being a pedophile thing, he sucks ! he's cruel and manipulative and abusive and cowardly and he ends a 12 year old girls whole life just to rape her. if you're a fully capable person reading this book and falling for it? you might be stupid?

#i mention in one post that i know some groomers will read lolita to their victims in order to groom them #and alhamdulillah ive never been in that position so i dont feel it would be right for me to say anything but i hope anyone who has been in #a situation like that knows that 'fully capable person' excluded them in that specific instance #im talking about the general perception of lolita as a book you have to be careful while reading in case u fall for it yaknow #like. not really. hh isnt as clever as he thinks he is and the only reason he was able to manipulate dolores is because hes her legal #guardian she had no one else and she was 12 #lolita vladimir nabokov #my post

i kind of pride myself on being able to write a good dating profile (for other people) and ill joke that i can because of my degree so you can imagine how ELATED I was when I was listening to rejection by tony tulathimutte and got to the part about the male feminists dating profile

this is genuinely perfectly written, completely believable and aggravating in every imaginable way. a masterclass in what NOT to do in a dating profile

#my post #currently reading #rejection tony tulathimutte

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Another Study Blog