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regeneration novel review

Yes?

#ask #Regeneration #Pat Barker #book review #books #reading #literature

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wow!!! 😻

neil-gaiman

Good bingos.

thenarratologist

I would be upset that someone has just reposted the bingo cards I made, but Neil Gaiman likes the card I made you guys I am dying.

#Neil Gaiman #literary bingo #books #reading #literature #The Narratologist

In this book Du Maurier proves once again that she is the master of building up tension, but sadly loses steam towards the end.

With a new film adaptation (starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin) having hit the screen this year, it seemed like the right time to dive back into my pile of Daphne du Maurier books and pick up My Cousin Rachel. It tells a story of a young man by the name of Philip Ashley in what may or may not be Georgian/early Victorian times (Du Maurier never specifies the time period). His cousin and father figure, Ambrose, travels abroad to recover from an illness, only to unexpectedly marry “cousin Rachel” and pass away shortly afterwards. In his last letter to his nephew, Ambrose implies that Rachel has poisoned him, leaving Philip devastated and out for revenge. However, when she shows up at his door in Cornwall, Philip begins to have doubts:

Did Rachel murder his cousin or is she an innocent woman?

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Hello everyone!

I thought it was high time that I gave you all a little update on how I’m doing and why I’m still pretty absent these days.

As a lot of you know, I’ve been struggling with a pretty bad bout of depression these past two years (good lord), and even though progress is slow, it seems that things are finally starting to look up. I’m finally starting to feel more energetic and optimistic about things, and I cannot even begin to tell you what a relief that is.

I have barely touched my books for months now, which has been such a strange experience for me, but reading had somehow become painful and only made me feel sadder. Maybe I’ll dedicate a blog post to how and why in the future.

But last night, I had a dream about being in a bookstore. In the dream, I felt that rush of excitement, running my fingers over all the books I wanted to read, looking for my favourite authors - and it felt good. Really good. I woke up smiling. Long story short: I just ordered War of the Foxes by Richard Siken and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.

It’ll be okay.

#personal

I know it’s been a while since my last review, but please bear with me!

As I’ve said before, I’m currently struggling with a bout of depression that is proving difficult to shake and makes it hard to be productive in any way.

On the bright side, I’m learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons, so that’s something.

Here’s a picture of Cosette looking disappointed that my dice aren’t edible.

#personal

BOOK REVIEW: Nimona (2015) by Noelle Stevenson

I first became aware of Noelle Stevenson through Tumblr, about five years ago. At the time, she had gained an online following for the comics she drew about movies she’d watched (Thor, The Lord of the Rings, X-Men) and general fandom experiences, like this one. She was funny and relatable, but what kept me coming back were her comments on the depiction of female characters and general misogyny in the comics industry. For example, she drew this comic about her experiences with “self-appointed gatekeepers” who make many would-be comic readers feel unwelcome. Stevenson also started the Hawkey Initiative, where she pointed out the trend of unrealistic and sexist “strong female character” poses in superhero comics and suggested that they could be fixed by replacing the character with Hawkeye doing the same thing. She invited artists to send in their creations, and the results were both hilarious and deeply uncomfortable,

At twenty-five years old, Stevenson is now working as an industry professional, and in 2015 her popular web comic Nimona was published by HarperTeen.

I’m very pleased to say that there is not a single boobs-and-butt panel to be found.

Books I Fully Intend To Read in 2017:

*The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead *The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister *The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall *Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shatterly *The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin *Swing Time, Zadie Smith *Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald *Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi *Sula, Toni Morrison *Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie *A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara *The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, Mary Seacole *The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West *Hag-Seed and/or The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood *Fingersmith, Sarah Waters *Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine *I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Maryse Condé *The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas

I’m so excited!

(And, as always, recommendations are very welcome.)

#personal #The Narratologist #books #reading #literature

Hi! Maybe you've been asked this before but, are you on goodreads?

I don’t mind posting the link again.

Here you go!

#ask #Goodreads #The Narratologist

As some of you may know, I had only one new year’s resolution for 2017: I aim to read no books by or about straight white men this year.

I have two reasons for this: I want to broaden my own horizons as a reader, and I want to draw attention to books and/or authors that the readers of my blog(s) may not have heard of or may have wanted learn more about. I specifically want to focus on writers of colour and the LGBTQ community, and I have already bought a ton of books in preparation for this project.

So there you have it.

No Straight White Dudes In 2017.

Let’s go.

#personal #The Narratologist

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Getting ready for the holidays!

P.S. Again, my apologies for my absence of late (depression and such). but hopefully things will look up again soon. Bear with me!

thenarratologist

Same goes for this blog.

Happy holidays in advance!

fiightingdreamers

Hey, so Gone Home is free for the weekend because it’s creator felt like it’s something people could use right now. It’s a wonderfully done lgbt+ game that is probably less than 3 hours total, so if you wanna give it a try go for it!!!

thenarratologist

Some of you may remember that I put this game on my Video games For Literature Lovers list - and now you can play it for free!

#personal #Gone Home #The Narratologist

BOOK REVIEW: NW (2012) by Zadie Smith

A couple of chapters into NW, I had a revelation. “Mrs Dalloway! If On Beauty was a modern take on Howards End, then this must be Zadie Smith’s spin on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway! I’ve got the ‘hook’ for my review!” One quick Google search later, I sank back into my seat. Turns out the rest of the world had had that same idea when the book first came out in 2012, and that Smith had actually discussed Woolf as a direct influence on her book:

I was just trying to find a way to be adventurous and do something new in the writing while still holding on to the things that I can do well, [...] So [Virginia Woolf is] just a good example of a forward-thinking and yet consistently humane writer, and just a great female modernist. An old inspiration returned to me at the right moment.

Well. So much for my spark of brilliance.

…Anyway.

Major plot spoiler towards the end of the review.

Reading List: Tricksters

The trickster is an archetype that appeared in the myths of many different cultures and is still popular with many writers today. These characters are rule-breakers and agents of chaos; they are often animals (e.g. foxes, crows, coyotes), travellers, or even shapeshifters able to cross boundaries between worlds. For this reason they sometimes function as a guide or messenger, like the Greek god Hermes). Characteristically, the trickster is clever and creative. They generally lie to obtain sex, food, or just to get out of something they don’t want to do, using their wit to outsmart of the Man/the Establishment/the gods/what have you.

Since they are so unpredictable and paradoxical, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what the perfect definition of a trickster is. As Lewis Hyde puts it in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art:

[The] best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found – sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.

BOOK REVIEW: The Night Circus (2011) by Erin Morgenstern

Now that National Novel Writing Month has officially kicked off, I thought it might be nice to take a look at a novel that started out as a NaNoWriMo project and later became an international bestseller. In 2011 Erin Morgenstern wrote in her NaNo pep talk:

The circus was my variation on the wise and ancient NaNo wisdom: when in doubt, just add ninjas. I had this plodding, Edward Gorey-esque thing with mysterious figures in fur coats being mysterious and doing very little else. I got tremendously bored with it because nothing was happening so I sent the otherwise boring characters to a circus. And it worked. I ended up tossing that beginning and focusing purely on the circus. An imaginary location I created out of desperation expanded and changed and became its own story over many non-November months of revisions and more revisions and now it is all grown-up and book-shaped and published and bestselling. And it all started with NaNoWriMo.

Brilliant. Bring on the metaphorical ninjas!

BOOK REVIEW: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Sorrows of Young Werther is one of those novels that I have encountered a number of times in my assigned reading for university, but had never actually read myself. When I finally decided to fill in this gap in my literary knowledge, I knew that the protagonist was basically the quintessential Romantic hero – emotional, artistic, and, of course, desperately in love with a girl he can never have – which meant that this could only end in tears (and probably death).

Werther did not disappoint in that regard… But maybe I kind of wanted it to.

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To all of you who are starting NaNoWriMo tomorrow: best of luck!

I’m properly participating for the first time this year, and I am very excited to get started on my story. Will I actually be able to finish it? Who knows - but hopefully it’ll be a fun journey either way.

thenarratologist

For this blog, that means that I probably won’t post any reviews for a bit - unless inspiration strikes, of course.

#personal #writing #NaNoWriMo

LITERATURE BINGO:

Leo Tolstoy.

#Leo Tolstoy #War and Peace #Anna Karenina #Literature Bingo #The Narratologist #books #reading #literature

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