litandroses

[litandroses]

a little late, but March 2nd is global shutdown day for Palestine (info here). So if you wanna spend it reading and educating yourself here are free zines and books:

and more literature here:

#free palestine

[litandroses]

ARC Review: The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

Rating: Unrated

Release date: June 27, 2023

Couldn’t give a proper rating for this, it took me so long to get through it for some reason; I didn’t even think it was a bad read.

To start, style and tone of this book was enjoyable for me. I liked how the focus was heavy on Rachel and James as bffs and their shenanigans as twenty - somethings, told from the perspective of an older Rachel. There was something really grounding when she recounts an event and admits how embarrassed she was. I mean, I don’t think we get a lot of narrators (or I may not be reading enough) that admit when they’ve been wrong and/or what they’ve done wrong. In this case, I liked Rachel’s honesty. In a way, telling it all without filters (not hiding that they were all really messy).

This is also one of those books wherein I genuinely wanted every character to be OK. They’re not perfect and it’s one of the aspects that made things feel more real in this book. When they mess up, I was just like “well, that really does happen” and I say that as a twenty - something myself. And as a twenty - something, Rachel and James looking for opportunities, trying to build connections for their career, not knowing where to start, seemingly having no direction was so on point for me actually. Giving a plus for all that.

Aside from all those babble, the ending was not what I expected but I was very glad it went the way it did.

An arc was granted in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the arc!

#the rachel incident #caroline o’donoghue #literary fiction #litfic #reviews #book recs #recs #book recommendations #litblr #literature #bookblr #book blog

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You have some awesome posts- which poetry books would you recommend to a beginner? Something old preferably, that isnt too hard to find but that you enjoy?:)

thank you, dear!

for a beginner, I'd say:

Collected Poems of Edna St Vincent Millay

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara

Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva

anything by Rainer Maria Rilke

anything by Kahlil Gibran

and some more recent ones

Crush by Richard Siken

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

and honestly anything by Mary Oliver and Louise Glück

#poetry #recs #book rec #book recs

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— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things: A Novel

#literature #quotes #arundhati roy

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when kafka said ‘you wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it’ and when brontë said ‘if you ever looked at me with what I know is in you, I would be your slave’ and when Sartre said ‘if I’ve got to suffer it may as well be at your hands’

#literature #quotes

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Victoria Chang, from Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief; “Dear Teacher,”

[Text ID: “The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on a horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including deeply into myself.”]

#prose #literature #victoria chang

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richard siken, in pithead chapel

#poetry #richard siken #lit

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🌼 poems (and a love letter) that helped me live through july 🌼

One Or Two Things, Mary Oliver

Kitchen Song, Laura Kasischke

The Breathing, Denise Levertov

Trapped, Charles Bukowski

Precognition, Margaret Atwood

Rain, John Burnside

Looking, Walking, Being, Denise Levertov

At Joan's, Frank O'Hara

You, Carol Ann Duffy

Time, Louise Gluck

Effort at Speech Between Two People, Muriel Rukeyser

Still, A. R. Ammons

Sonnet XL, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sonnet XLIII, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Listen, W. S. Merwin

A Thin Line, Ryuichi Tamura (translated by Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura)

Driveway, Richard Siken

The Sentence, Anna Akhmatova

Wanting to Die, Anne Sexton

Eating Together, Kim Addonizio

The Look, Sara Teasdale

The Starry Night, Anne Sexton

Hammond B3 Organ Cistern, Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946

#poetry #recs

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whenever i think about this i.

#quotes #olivia laing #crudo

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what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds

I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.

I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)

The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)

The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)

A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )

Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)

The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)

Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems

The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.

But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:

anything by Sara Teasdale

Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver

Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti

Collected Poems by Langston Hughes

Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima

Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr

Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee

A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)

Crush by Richard Siken

Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail

Selected Poems by Walt Whitman

View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska

Collected Poems by Vasko Popa

Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)

Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,

Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef

As for individual poems:

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"

"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith

"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib

"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise

"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth

"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros

"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky

“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda

"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost

"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail

"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider

“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes

“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin

“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón

“The Flea” by John Donne

"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore

"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland

“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker

"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside

“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio

“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver

"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin

“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott

“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney

“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen

“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska

"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy

“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris

"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass

"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer

"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings

"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski

"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje

"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis

"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)

"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz

"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye

"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman

"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel

"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah

"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller

"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May

"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong

"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou

I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:

Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver

"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca

"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger

In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky

"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan

#poetry #recs #book recs

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Maggie Nelson, Bluets

#quotes #lit

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Maggie Nelson, Bluets

#quotes #lit

[litandroses]

ARC Review: Maddalena and the Dark by Julia Fine

Rating: Unsure

Release date: June 13, 2023

The setting, the prose, they were all very enticing in the first half of the book. I read on hoping to be given more context, for things to be less vague but I ended the book with not much knowledge of the fantasy elements in this book. All that was clear was the need to give the thing in the water what it wants. It was intriguing, the bargain and seeing Maddalena slowly succumb to it, page by page. This was gradual, the relationships between characters on the other hand were not. There was not much interaction between them before they were just seemingly super close and intimate in the next. I didn’t care much for the relationships, though they did play a big part in the story, as well as a big part of my indifference.

I complain a lot but I didn’t think this was terrible. I actually liked the ending, no matter how vague. I interpret it in such a way that each girl got what they wanted, in whatever twisted manner. I just wished for more context or explanation.

An arc was granted in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Thanks to Netgalley, Edelweiss, and the publisher for the arc!

#maddalena and the dark #historical fiction #fantasy #ya lit #young adult #reviews #book reviews #book blogger #book blog #julia fine

[litandroses]

ARC Review: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

Rating: 3 ★ of 5

Release date: June 6, 2023

I struggled with this at first. I didn’t expect that many changes in POV, and the narrators connection with each other confused me until halfway through when I began to truly piece together where the story was leading.

The Wind Knows My Name weaves past and present, showing how gravely the past events affects those who no part in it: the children. The book opens by introducing the narrators, their backstories and history as children so as the reader, we would be familiar with the whys and hows of their current state in the present. This wasn’t by any means a light read and the amount of time spent with each character felt equal; one of my favorite aspects of this book. I loved the way Allende handled the themes and the topics here - immigration and the effects of violence and war - highlighted in the different ways the characters think and view things. This was most evident for me in Anita’s chapters and her manner of coping with all she’s been through. I always wished for the best for all POV characters even when I knew the best wasn’t going to happen. Either way, Allende managed to put light in the heaviest moments in the book.

An arc was granted in exchange of an honest review. All opinions are my own. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

#book reviews #reviews #book recommendations #historical fiction #the wind knows my name #isabel allende

[litandroses]

ARC Review: The Postcard by Anne Berest

Rating: 3.5 ★ of 5

Release date: May 16, 2023

Truly could have been a 4 star. It was well-written, and tugged on my heartstrings; read some parts with a lump in my throat. I thought I wouldn’t like this as much as I did because of the dual timeline, but I thought it was handled well here that I didn’t mind. I’m not sure how much or which parts of the book are autofiction or which were filled in by the author. Either way, despite the number of WWII books out there, those aspects played a part in its uniqueness. My favorite parts are the letters/writings from the past, and the more recent emails between mother, daughter, and sister.

What made me knock my rating down a notch was the ending. I expected to be surprised, but wasn’t (I mean, I was able to guess) so I felt a little underwhelmed. For some reason, I thought this would have an open ending although the closure, the finality of it all, was really satisfying. Overall, a really good read and a page-turner, too.

An arc was granted in exchange of an honest review. All opinions are my own. Thanks to Netgalley, Edelweiss, and the publisher for the arc!

#the postcard #anne berest #historical fiction #book recs #recs #book recommendations #reviews #litblr #bookblr #literature #book blog

[litandroses]

book recs masterpost

an ever-updating masterpost of books i've recommended. please check these before you ask for recommendations in case they've been covered —

fiction

"the tragedy still happened, but it was important that the love was there"

japanese literature

korean literature [1], [2]

gothic writing

spooky adult horror gothic

some favourites

marathi books

some ruskin bond

indian fiction [1], [2], historical fiction, stories, [3], [4]

non-fiction

general assorted ones i like

some favourites

about people living through crises

on geopolitics, foreign policy, international affairs

on political philsophy

vaguely sociology

biographies

on economic history

on the silk route

on prisons, convict labour

on afghanistan, soviet invasion, terror

capitalism

on language and linguistics

on the ancient and prehistoric world

just a bunch on india

the indus valley

indian aestheticism, art

gupta empire

sangam literature

on the northeast

india and southeast asia

nur jahan, mughal women | more

islamic conquest and state-making

on kashmir

assorted nonfiction

colonisation and aftereffects

on nationalism

on cities

on mumbai

on bollywood in bombay

on cities

on delhi

on kolkata

essays

history, migration, labour

art, reading, travel, gender, sports

nature, climate, some history

political economy, environmental and urban history, cartography and space

my comfort books

light reading

books that have got me out of my slumps

on art, photography, aesthetics, design [1], [2], [3]

on the environment

just some story and essay collections

#recs #book recs

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Prompt 2 Rec List

Here are some recs for prompt 2 of the Diverse Reading Challenge 2022. Full prompt list is here

Prompt 2 -  A book with an intersex protagonist

Pantomime - Laura Lam

A YA fantasy novel, where the protagonist, after discovering they have magical powers, flees home to join a circus. It has some great imaginative worldbuilding, and the circus setting is very interesting. 

An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon

A sci-fi novel, it is set on a generation ship run by slave labor. It follows an enslaved woman, trying to solve the disappearance of her mother and discovering more than intended. It is a dark, brutal book, but it is is very powerful and thoughtfully explores issues of race, gender, and sexuality. 

Note: The following books I have not personally read but are on my to read list

Cattywampus - Ash Van Otterloo

A middle-grade fantasy, where two young witches from rival families accidently unleash a dangerous hex, and must work together to stop it from destroying the town.

Double Exposure - Bridget Birdsall

A YA book, focusing on an teen girl, who after her secret is revealed must fight for her place on her school’s basketball team. 

None of the Above - I.W. Gregorio

A YA novel, after a teen girl, goes to the doctor she is told she is intersex, and she must deal with the fallout after it is leaked to her school, while discovering her true self. 

#book recommendations #recs #book recs