It has been a very heavy quarter of reading over at trinket shelf HQ. This semester I took a class called Exploring the Novel, which entailed reading a full and historically or technically significant novel every week - like these were novels. So most of the books in this bookshelf are from that class, simply because I didn’t have the time to read anything else. I did listen to a few audiobooks on the side, and finished the quarter off with a delicious palette cleanser after I finished all the assigned reading for the semester, but this was mostly a Capital N Novel quarter for me.
Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) - This starts with a sort of exhausting explanation of law and proprietary law in England at the time which was pretty boring, but once I got into it I really enjoyed it! The Dashwood sisters are excellent foils for each other in the eternal struggle of how to balance sense and sensibility. Willoughby if I catch you in the streets I’m gonna jump you, you pathetic, snivelling bitch!
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) - LOVED this one, the writing is so flowery and there are so many beautiful sentences to really sink your teeth into. The titular Madame Bovary is such an excellent and complex character - she’s kind of Mother when it comes to awful female protagonists and I love her for that. The perspective shifts in this are really fascinating as well and make for such a compelling read of not only Bovary but the whole community she lives in.
Be Ready When the Luck Happens (Ina Garten) - this is a perfect and ideal audiobook experience. Ina narrates it herself and it’s so conversational - feels like you’re sitting around the table with her gabbing about her incredible and impressive life story. She is so brilliant! If they did Make-a-Wish for adults and I ever found myself in that situation, my wish would be to attend an Ina Garten dinner party.
All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy) - Listen, I know that Cormac McCarthy is (allegedly) one of America’s greatest novelists! I know! But his stripped down style of run-on sentences and no punctuation made me genuinely want to scratch my own skin off at a certain point. Yes, the story is excellent, but this was my first McCarthy and probably my last. I respect it but it’s just not for me. To his credit, at one point one of the characters says, “I don’t know, I ain’t a horse” and that has become something I can’t stop saying to myself in a Southern drawl when I’m alone, because it’s very funny. I am certain that was not his intention.
O Pioneers! (Willa Cather) - I hadn’t read any Cather before but I loved this book. Lowkey a rise and fall of a midwest princess except she sort of rises again at the very end, but that’s really debatable. Follows a Swedish immigrant family living in Nebraska in the late 1800s and the eldest daughter who girlbosses her way into agricultural and financial success for her family. I especially loved the spiritual relationship some of the characters have with the land in this book and the way that guides them.
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) - Virginia Woolf you’re crazy!!! This is a book I would’ve struggled with if I wasn’t reading it for class. There are so many layers and little technical things that Woolf does here that I feel it’s best to discuss with other smart people in order to get the most out of it, but it really pays off if you make it through. You could write a full essay just on Woolf’s use of parentheses and brackets in this book! The relationships here, especially the ones between the magnetic Mrs. Ramsay and everyone else, are so rich and textured.
Middlemarch (George Eliot) - Middlemarch was a dark shadow looming over me for the first half of the semester - it’s long and dense and daunting. And then after I got like 100 pages into it I realized that it was basically just the Victorian novel version of Desperate Housewives (I already wrote about this so I won’t expand here, but just know that I’m right) and then got very into it. Lots of soap opera-esque interpersonal drama!
Death and Nightingales (Eugene McCabe) - Such a page turner, set in the late 19th century in the Irish countryside with lots of sectarian conflict that brings about lots of interpersonal conflict - namely betrayal and revenge. It is bleak but surprisingly thrilling.
The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros) - I read this in high school and was surprised to see it on the reading list for a master’s class, but it really is such a rich text and the structure that Cisneros uses is so excellent in the way it captures childhood memories and the wider community they occur within. There are so many awful and wonderful meditations on the messy transition between childhood and womanhood in here.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood (Karina Longworth) - I’ve been getting into old Hollywood movies recently and realized I knew very little about the studio system, so I looked for a book on it and stumbled on this one. It was excellent! Taught me so much not only about the studio system but about the drama of its major players - mainly, of course, Howard Hughes and the many women he courted and exploited. I listened to this as an audiobook, which admittedly wasn’t my favorite because the narration was pretty robotic, but it was so interesting that I was able to look past it. I’m working on a longer piece about this book and Scorcese’s The Aviator, which is also about Hughes, so keep an eye out for that xx.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles) - I’m gonna be real with you, I could not get into this one. It’s a semi-satirical take on the Victorian novel with a lot of authorial input, and I’m not sure what exactly it was that I didn’t like but it just really wasn’t doing it for me. Not even saying it was a bad book, just did not capture my attention in the slightest.
Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - The last novel assigned for my class this semester and it felt like dessert after so many dense books. Absolutely delicious! The characterization in this is so fantastic, the characters really leap off the page. The structure of the shifting POVs and the inclusion of blog posts makes it really engaging. My professor described it as a “modernized Middlemarch” because of the way it documents the now-globalized mundanities of life and I think that’s so true.
Sunrise on the Reaping (Suzanne Collins) - After such an intense semester of reading I was really struggling to get into a book - for the first time in god knows how long, I didn’t read anything for 10 days! I couldn’t! Every time I picked up a book I only had the stamina for like, three pages. I needed something to get me out of the slump and luckily Sunrise on the Reaping had just come out. I hadn’t read a Hunger Games book since Mockingjay came out in 2010 but I was a huge fan in middle school, so it was very nostalgic to go back to it. I devoured this in like two days, it was so delicious and cracked my heart open. I’m typically not a prequel person because I hate that all of it feels like winks and easter eggs, but I think Collins managed to add a lot of depth to the original trilogy in this one. I was fucking weeping at certain points though, why the fuck did she do that!!!!! I’m anti-adults reading only YA fiction but if you’re going to read YA fiction it should be something like this.
So that’s that! Most of these were books or authors that I’d always been meaning to read, so it was great to have a reason to read them and a space to discuss them. I got so much more out of these books after hearing my fantastic professor and insightful classmates talk about them. Now that I’m officially done with classes, I’m on to the dissertation portion of my master’s, which is so crazy but also will hopefully bring time for lighter reading.
I am in the middle of Americanah now! Really enjoying it
And someone gave me ina garten’s book and I am not very familiar with her but this is compelling me to read it