#summary of mrs dalloway novel | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jessamine-rose · 1 year

Note

Hello there ^^ have you posted the list of books you're reading before by curiosity? If not would you mind sharing? I'm curious, if that's ok with you!

For those who haven’t seen this post, one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to finish my reading list. I picked 32 books/ stories from recs, classics, and titles which interested me. This is listed in ascending order, with my faovrites italicized (｀・ω・´)

I hope this satisfies your curiosity, Anonie!! I enjoyed most of the stories, and I’m excited that this resolution is almost complete. Pls excuse my ramblings bc I couldn’t help adding some subjective comments for each story :>

Edit:: Resolution accomplished!! The final three book reviews have been added~

♡ The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck

It’s the only playwriting script on my list, and I can only imagine how visually exciting the stage performance must be. I learned about this story from @/mcdonaldsnumberone :3

♡ The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen

This ended up on my list bc of Scaramouche. Need I say more??

♡ A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott

Aahhh this was so exciting to read. After rooting for the heroine’s liberation, I am both sad and awed by the ending. You can thank @/bye-bye-sunbird for this amazing rec (◍•ᴗ•◍)

♡ Poetic Fragments of Sappho (translated by Julia Dubnoff)

The emotions, the imagery, the references to Greek mythology *sobs* Sappho’s poetry is so intimate and beautiful, and I will be the first to cry if more fragments are discovered one day.

♡ We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

I appreciated the story more after reading the literary analyses. It’s pretty good.

♡ Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

I was curious about Murakami’s work due to his popularity. I liked his writing style in Document 1, but I couldn’t properly appreciate the story bc of the male-gazey parts.

♡ The Hand of the Enemy by Kerima Polotan

Polotan’s writing style is *chef’s kiss.* I think she did a good job at explaining “the political is personal” through her characters.

♡ The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

I’m not personally into Lovecraft’s writing style so I think I’ll stick to the summaries. It was nice to learn more about cosmic horror through the source material.

♡ Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The book isn’t my type, so I have no comments.

♡ Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

There are so many quotes which made me squeal as a yandere writer, and I can always appreciate a wlw vampire story. It inspired me to write for Yandere! Vampire Pantalone ( ´ཀ` )

♡ Heartless by Marissa Meyer

I love the whimsical writing style and Alice in Wonderland references. The food descriptions are so wonderfully written.

♡ Love and Olives by Jenna Evans Welch

My new favorite book by the author. Generally, I love how she writes about family, romance, and tourism. It helps that this specific story has connections to Greek mythology ✧˖°

♡ Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

A good satirical take on Gothic novels!! It was easy for me to fall in love with Austen’s writing and the character of Henry Tilney.

♡ Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

I don’t plan to read the sequels, but I did enjoy Anne’s sense of imagination.

♡ The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

This book isn’t my type so I don’t have much to say about it ^^;

♡ Spells for Lost Things by Jenna Evans Welch

Another wonderful story by the author. I love the magic and mystery in it.

♡ My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

After falling in love with Rebecca, I had to check this out and now the author’s other works are in my next reading list. Simply put, I adored this.

♡ Creepover: It Spells Z-O-M-B-I-E! by P.J. Night

I read this out of nostalgia for the series and was utterly disappointed. It lacks many of the traits which made the other Creepover books so enjoyable to my younger self -.-

♡ The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

Honestly, what can I say?? Just read the story and see for yourself ૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა

♡ The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

Another story which I can’t rlly comment on since the writing style isn’t my type.

♡ The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal

The horror and aesthetics is so artfully written, and Silas is an excellent example of an utterly despicable antagonist. I couldn’t stop reading until I reached the end.

♡ Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal

The freakshow/ circus setting offers a different morbid aesthetic. I can’t wait to read Macneal’s future works >:3

♡ You’ve Reached Sam by Dustin Thao

A good story about grief. It has a brilliant detail about how Sam’s calls affect the heroine’s communication with other people. I do think the story would’ve been better if it were longer.

♡ And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

An excellent murder mystery which made me go “?!! :0” when the culprit was revealed.

♡ Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

I subscribed to the author’s YouTube channel, so I was naturally curious about this. I liked the mecha concept and historical references, but I have to agree with some of the negative reviews. The fact that I’m not into scifi also influenced my capacity to enjoy this book.

♡ A Wilderness of Sweets by Gilda Cordero-Fernando

Mere words cannot describe how good and sad this story is ;-;

♡ Grimms’ Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm

All those fairytales + the writing inspiration it gave me……..*rubs hands evilly*

♡ Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao

Again, I can’t say much about this book since I’m not into scifi + I’m not the target audience. I will say that I liked it more than Iron Widow due to the historical trivia, contemporary setting, and creative premise.

♡ Bone China by Laura Purcell

I am officially a fan of the author and I can’t wait to read her other works. More Gothic horror, here we go ٩( ᐛ )و

♡ Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I now understand why @/diodellet and a book heroine cried reading this. Props to the author for the effective changes in writing style!!

♡ Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It’s a good story but honestly not my type. There were times I found it hard to read but that might be due to the long paragraphs :T

♡ Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Another excellent mystery novel!! I like the self-aware protagonist, Knox’s Commandments, and the attention-catching title >:3

#jessamine rambles #asks #anon #shooting stars

12 notes · View notes

grandhotelabyss · 2 years

Photo

Thanks for the question! I tend to agree with the Romantic view that great art always has something odd or excessive about it:

Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportions.”

The quotation is from Poe and is especially meaningful coming from him, since his own philosophy of composition centered on the achievement of calculated effects through perfected forms. But even the story from which I draw the quotation—my favorite: “Ligeia”—is all out of proportion, too verbosely descriptive, too summary in narration, pantingly melodramatic at the end. Not perfect, only great. And that’s a short story!

What novels approach perfection even so? You’re right to point to novellas and short novels, where a limited temporal and spatial setting and a small cast of characters allow for a unity of tone and style in pursuit of a single theme: The Dead and Death in Venice, Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby, Seize the Day and Sula, are all close to perfect, for example.

Some writers can carry this effect of compression into longer forms: Kazuo Ishiguro might be the reigning master here, though even he felt he had to cut loose with The Unconsoled, a willfully baggy and bizarre book. Other authors preceded Ishiguro in deliberately letting go of perfect forms early in their careers to attain a new maturity: for example, the long, loose third novels of both Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, both of which followed two compact and assured short novels. Similarly, as the critic Leo Robson has shown, some 20th-century writers made almost a fetish of slovenly, large forms to throw off the dead hand of Flaubertian or Jamesian modernist perfection-seeking: Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates—and, before them, D. H. Lawrence.

Comparing the perfect short novels to the imperfect but greater long novels of major novelists is instructive here: The Dead in comparison to Ulysses, for example, where Joyce’s virtuosity becomes undeniably excessive, positively wearisome in places, but in search of a bigger quarry—arguably, all of western culture—than in the earlier, shorter work. And the same goes for Mann (Death in Venice vs. The Magic Mountain)—or Melville (Benito Cereno vs. Moby-Dick) or Eliot (Silas Marner vs. Middlemarch) or Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground vs. The Brothers Karamazov).

But we wouldn’t want to confuse literal magnitude with greatness or deny that shorter works can be more appealingly odd than longer. Take Conrad, for example: Heart of Darkness is probably greater and stranger than Nostromo, despite its being a third or a quarter of the length. Or we could just return to the opening example of Poe, progenitor of all whose achievement centers on the short story, often attaining the most shapely forms without spilling a drop of the necessary oddity and excess: Hawthorne, Chekhov, Borges, Kafka, O’Connor.

In summary: perfection is more achievable in short forms, desirable insofar as it amplifies a single theme, but for that very reason sometimes inferior to works of greater complexity and variety, which are often though not always longer.

#literature #literary criticism #fiction #creative writing

2 notes · View notes

novelsmini · 7 months

Text

Mrs dolloway novel full info

"Mrs. Dalloway" is a novel written by British author Virginia Woolf. It was first published in 1925 and is considered one of Woolf's most significant works. Here is some full information about the novel:

**Title:** Mrs. Dalloway

**Author:** Virginia Woolf

**Publication Year:** 1925

**Genre:** Modernist Fiction, Stream of Consciousness

**Plot Summary:**

"Mrs. Dalloway" is a novel that takes place in a single day in the life of the titular character, Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Englishwoman living in post-World War I London. The story is notable for its use of stream-of-consciousness narrative style, where the thoughts and inner experiences of the characters are prominently featured.

Throughout the day, Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party she will host that evening. The narrative follows her as she goes about her day, interacting with various characters and reflecting on her life, her past, and the people around her. Meanwhile, the novel also introduces the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran who is suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. His storyline runs parallel to Clarissa's and serves as a contrast to her privileged but constrained existence.

The novel explores themes of social class, mental illness, the passage of time, and the inner lives of its characters. It is often celebrated for its innovative narrative style and its profound exploration of the complexities of human consciousness and society.

**Significance:**

"Mrs. Dalloway" is considered a classic of modernist literature and is highly regarded for its experimental narrative techniques and its insights into the human psyche. Virginia Woolf's use of stream-of-consciousness writing is seen as groundbreaking and influential in the development of 20th-century literature. The novel is often studied in literature courses and is recognized as one of Woolf's most important works.

"Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf features several key characters, each with their own distinctive traits and complexities. Here are some of the main characters in the novel:

1. **Clarissa Dalloway:** The novel's central character, Clarissa Dalloway, is an upper-class Englishwoman in her fifties. She is the hostess of the party that serves as a focal point of the novel. Clarissa is introspective and reflective, often contemplating her past and her choices in life. Her character is a portrayal of the constraints and expectations placed on women in her social class during the early 20th century.

2. **Septimus Warren Smith:** Septimus is a war veteran who fought in World War I and is suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. His character provides a contrast to Clarissa's privileged life. He represents the impact of war on the human psyche and the difficulty of reintegration into society.

3. **Peter Walsh:** Peter is an old friend of Clarissa's and a former suitor. He has recently returned to London from India and is a source of conflict and reflection for Clarissa as she remembers their shared history.

4. **Sally Seton:** Sally is a friend of Clarissa's from her youth. She represents a more free-spirited and unconventional lifestyle, and her character serves as a contrast to Clarissa's more conventional choices.

5. **Richard Dalloway:** Richard is Clarissa's husband. He is a member of the British Parliament and is portrayed as a stable and sensible figure, which contrasts with Clarissa's inner turmoil and introspection.

6. **Lucrezia Warren Smith:** Lucrezia is Septimus' Italian-born wife, who is deeply concerned about her husband's deteriorating mental state. She is a character who cares for Septimus and is an important part of his storyline.

7. **Miss Kilman:** Miss Kilman is a devoutly religious and fanatical woman who becomes involved in the lives of the Dalloway family, particularly Elizabeth Dalloway. Her character represents a clash of values with the more secular, upper-class world of Clarissa and her daughter.

These characters interact and intersect over the course of a single day in the novel, each contributing to the exploration of various themes and the portrayal of the inner lives and social dynamics of the characters in post-World War I London.

If you have specific questions or need more information about the novel, please feel free to ask,and click here -

#novel #books #readers

1 note · View note

cinema-tv-etc · 10 months

Photo

A Lifetime of Lessons in “Mrs. Dalloway”

By Jenny Offill December 29, 2020

In 1916, Virginia Woolf wrote about a peculiarity that runs through all real works of art. The books of certain writers (she was speaking of Charlotte Brontë at the time) seem to shape-shift with each reading. The plot might become comfortingly familiar, but the emotional revelations within it change. Scenes once passed over as unimportant begin to prickle with new meaning, as if time itself had been the missing ingredient for understanding them. Woolf went on to describe the works she returned to again and again:

At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.

For me, “Mrs. Dalloway” is such a book, one to which I have mapped the twists and turns of my own autobiography over the years. Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering. Instead, some forgotten facet of the story comes to light, and the feeling is always that of having blurred past something that was right in front of me.

This is because “Mrs. Dalloway” is a remarkably expansive and an irreducibly strange book. Nothing you might read in a plot summary prepares you for the multitudes it contains. In fact, on the surface, it sounds suspiciously dull. The novel depicts a single day in June from the perspective of a number of characters. The year is 1923. The Great War is over, but the memory of its unprecedented destruction still hangs over England. In a posh part of London, a middle-aged woman plans a party. She goes out to get flowers. A man she almost married drops by for a visit. She is snubbed by an acquaintance. She remembers an alluring girl she once kissed. Later, guests pour into her house for the party. In the midst of all this, she hears news of a stranger’s violent death. In between these modest plot points, Clarissa Dalloway wanders around London, lies down for a rest, and takes note of Big Ben striking out the hours again and again.

But, wait, I am leaving out everything. Let me go back to the beginning.

The first time I read Virginia Woolf, it was for extraliterary reasons. I knew she had gone mad. I wanted to know how, exactly. Some dark wing was crossing over me that fall. The middle register of experience had abruptly fallen away. I didn’t need to sleep anymore, it seemed. My brain buzzed and whirred in terrifying ways. Everything seemed connected to everything else, but in ways I didn’t dare try to explain. I was seventeen, I think, eighteen maybe. I worked an early shift at a bakery, and I’d ride there on my bike before dawn, the whoosh of the darkness soft and creaturely around me. Why are you crying for no reason? I’d think, brushing my hands across my face.

I suspected I should tell someone about the buzzing and the whirring and the crying, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. Instead, I went to the university library one night and checked out books I thought might contain clues about what was in store for me. “Mrs. Dalloway” was one of them. Before I sat down to read it properly, I opened it at random, and this sentence was given occultly to me: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

I could feel my loneliness recede slightly as I read the words.

I backtracked to the first introduction of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked soldier, loosely tethered to the world, into whom Woolf had poured many of her own experiences of madness. In the first scene, he is standing on the same street as Mrs. Dalloway. They do not know each other (they will never meet), but, in this one moment, they are briefly connected, both startled by the sound of a car backfiring. Here is our first glimpse of him:

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

The world has raised its whip; where will it descend? Yes, this. Exactly this, I thought. I started the book over from the beginning and found that the darkness gathering around Septimus was woven into other narrative threads, ones I was less interested in. All these old people talking about houses and parties and hats—what did they have to do with me? I skimmed over these other stories, noting here and there the stunning beauty of the language, then raced ahead to find more Septimus sections. His thoughts, blazingly sad, seemed beautiful to me. I wrapped myself in an old blanket and read through the night, hoping it wouldn’t end badly for him.

I didn’t return to “Mrs. Dalloway” again until I was in my thirties, when I was on a different kind of quest. I was a wife and the mother of a young child, and, after years of living alone, I found myself suddenly, startlingly mired in the domestic. My days at home with my daughter were full of emotion yet anecdote-less. I wanted to write a novel about this feeling, which was one of want amid plenty, but I worried it would not make a good book, that it would be too trivial. I’d had an idea before my daughter was born that I would keep a diary during the early years. I imagined it structured like a kind of ledger. On one side it would read “In the House” and, on the other, “In the World.”

A poet friend of mine had stamps made up with these phrases imprinted on them and gave them to me just after my daughter was born. But after only a month, I abandoned the idea. I hated to see the blank space where my impressions of life in the world should have been. It was February, blizzarding, and I stayed shut inside most days with the baby. But still I kept wondering how to do it, how to tear down this screen between House and World. What would a philosophical novel set in a domestic sphere look like? Stupidly, I did not think of “Mrs. Dalloway,” which I remembered narrowly as a book about madness. But then, one day, I reread Woolf’s essay “Modern Novels,” from 1919. It is a manifesto of sorts, and I found it spoke directly to me. (Six years later, she would put many of these ideas into play when she wrote “Mrs. Dalloway.”)

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

I loved this idea of recording the atoms as they fell, of registering each one, however small a moment it appeared to be. Woolf’s insight seemed sneakily mystical to me. Many mystic traditions teach that the distinctions between the mundane and the sublime are more porous than we imagine: if one is truly awake, these differences cease to be apparent.

Once I started noticing this idea, I found traces of this collapsing of scale throughout the modernist canon. Robert Walser wrote about how Cézanne’s genius lay in “placing in the same ‘temple’ things both large and small.” And Picasso said, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things.”

But it was in “Mrs. Dalloway” that this radical levelling of high and low found its most thrilling expression for me. I returned to it as a model for the domestic novel that I hoped to write. Woolf’s brilliant soaring sentences were a far cry from my modest, pared-down ones, but the leaps in consciousness, the insistence on the importance of the half-seen, of the subterranean feeling, of the quicksilver joys and sorrows of domestic life was a revelation. This time around, I cared less for Septimus and his grand soliloquies about human nature and death. I knew his story moved deathward at a mighty clip. Instead, I was hungry for signs of life. This time, I lingered over Clarissa’s delight in the incidental things that crossed her path: the laughing girls taking their “absurd woolly dogs” for a run; the aging dowagers in motorcars off on “errands of mystery”; and, on the pond, “the slow-swimming happy ducks.” This time, I was interested in the old people talking about houses and parties (though the hats still left me cold). I started to ask myself, as I pushed my daughter on a swing or bought pork chops or counted out change at the bodega, Wait, what is the exact nature of this moment? Or, in short, What would Virginia Woolf do?

And now, fifteen years later, I find myself wandering through the emotional landscape of this novel again. The novelty is that I am nearly the same age as Mrs. Dalloway, who has “just broken into her fifty-second year.” I find myself marvelling less over the sweeping insights of the novel and more over the intricate delights of its language and form. I keep thinking about the shocking velocity of Woolf’s sentences, how they rocket off into the sky, trailing sparks of emotion behind them. I keep thinking about how beautifully, how gracefully, how ecstatically, even, she makes use of dashes and commas and parentheses to capture the halting stutter-step of feeling being transmuted into thought. But there are still, of course, the uneasier pleasures of reading some biting insight on the page and wondering if it applies to me.

This time, I am pricked by the passage in which Clarissa’s old flame, Peter Walsh, describes how getting older has changed him. He talks about how it is a relief to retreat from the obsessiveness of his youthful passions:

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal.

So much less personal! I will be fifty-two this year, and this phrase needles me. Perhaps this is because I, like Clarissa, have never been good at detachment. I once found my own relationship to entanglements succinctly described in two lines of a Gary Lutz short story. “Are you involved with anyone?” a character is asked. “Everybody,” he answers. To become less personal strikes me as a terrible fate, though Peter Walsh speaks of it calmly, as if it is a pleasant thing. But how could it be pleasant to withdraw from this blooming, buzzing world of people? Woolf seems to imply that this desire for distance grows gradually, almost imperceptibly, as you get older—until, one day, you find yourself noticing the petals of the flowers instead of the person holding the bouquet. I’d like to think she’s wrong about this, that for once her insights do not apply to me. (Then I remember how one paragraph ago I was lingering not on the vivid characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” but on the suppleness of its dashes, the beauty of its commas, the grace of its parentheses.)

This essay was drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Mrs. Dalloway,” which is out in January, from Penguin Classics.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-lifetime-of-lessons-in-mrs-dalloway?utm_source=pocket-newtab

How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters

For Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness—to envision a future she couldn’t see. By Kamran Javadizadeh

Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to “Mrs. Dalloway”

Virginia Woolf understood as well as anyone the long-term effects that viruses could wreak on bodies, and on societies. By Evan Kindley

youtube

#Mrs. Dalloway #Virginia Woolf

0 notes

suburbanlegnd · 3 years

Text

Thank you so much for tagging me bestie @youdrewstars13 ❤️

tag 9 people to know more about their interests, hobbies, etc:

MUSIC

fav genres: I listen to almost all genres, but pop and alternative the most

fav artist: taylor swift

fav song: my tears ricochet

most listened song recently: houseparty by annalisa

song currently stuck in your head: big by rita ora

fave lyrics: "this is me trying" by taylor swift

BOOKS

fav book genre: fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery

fav writer: andrzej sapkowski, virginia woolf

fav book: the witcher, maléfices by maxime chattam, fingersmith by sarah waters

fav book series: the witcher

comfort book: the witcher lol

perfect book to read to read on a rainy day: mrs dalloway

fav characters: geralt or rivia, ciri

TV AND MOVIES

fav tv/movie genre: mystery, action, fantasy, horror, drama

fav movie: joker

comfort movie: the handmaiden

movie you watch every year: Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey

fav tv show: killing eve, dead to me, the marvelous mrs maisel, supergirl, brooklyn 99, the witcher, euphoria, dickinson, orphan black, the 100, atypical, queen's gambit, the haunting, black mirror, the bold type

comfort tv show: dickinson, the bold type

most rewatched tv show: killing eve

ultimate otp: villanelle and eve from killing eve

5 fav characters: villanelle, geralt of rivia, jake peralta, miriam maisel, octavia blake

this was so long, and so fun! Thank you! ❤️

I tag: @your-international-weirdo @in-the-woods-yet @isntiitdelicate @corneliaboulevard @swiftieforevermore1989 @cinnamongay @skarlettsterminator @demonsanddarlin @please-dont-say-you-love-me @feeldaylight @burntostsunday @wishyouwoods @chiara-swiftiedreamer13 @anyone (no pressure of course) ❤️

#tag games #❤️#thank you!

15 notes · View notes

wildeoaths · 4 years

Text

LGBTQ Book & Film Recommendations

Hello! As someone who tries to read widely, it can sometimes be frustrating to find good (well-written, well-made) LGBTQ+ works of literature and film, and mainstream recommendations only go so far. This is my shortlist.

Some caveats: 1) I have only watched/seen some of these, though they have all been well-received.

2) The literature list is primarily focused on adult literary and genre fiction, since that is what I mostly read, and I feel like it’s easier to find queer YA fiction. Cece over at ProblemsOfABookNerd (YT) covers a lot of newer releases and has a YA focus, so you can check her out for more recommendations.

3) There are a ton of good films and good books that either reference or discuss queer theory, LGBTQ history and literary theory. These tend to be more esoteric and academic, and I’m not too familiar with queer theory, so they’ve largely been left off the list. I do agree that they’re important, and reading into LGBTQ-coding is a major practice, but they’re less accessible and I don’t want to make the list too intimidating.

4) I linked to Goodreads and Letterboxd because that’s what I use and I happen to really enjoy the reviews.

Any works that are bolded are popular, or they’re acclaimed and I think they deserve some attention. I’ve done my best to flag potential objections and triggers, but you should definitely do a search of the reviews. DoesTheDogDie is also a good resource. Not all of these will be suitable for younger teenagers; please use your common sense and judgement.

Please feel free to chime in in the replies (not the reblogs) with your recommendations, and I’ll eventually do a reblog with the additions!

BOOKS

> YOUNG ADULT

Don’t @ me asking why your favourite YA novel isn’t on this list. These just happen to be the picks I felt might also appeal to older teens/twentysomethings.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo - poetry.

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender - trans male teen protagonist.

Red, White & Royal Blue

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda

The Gentleman’s Guide To Vice And Virtue

The Raven Boys (and Raven Cycle)

> LITERATURE: GENERAL

This list does skew M/M; more NB, trans and WLW recommendations are welcomed!

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. One of the most acclaimed contemporary LGBTQ novels and you’ve probably heard of it. Will probably make you cry.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. Portrait of a middle-aged gay man.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. M/M affair, British student high society; definitely nostalgic for the aristocracy so be aware of the context.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. It’s somewhat controversial, it’s gay, everyone knows the film at least.

Cronus’ Children / Le Jardin d'Acclimation by Yves Navarre. Winner of the Goncourt prize.

Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran. A young man in the 1970s NYC gay scene. Warning for drugs and sexual references.

Dorian, An Imitation by Will Self. Adaptation of Orscar Wilde’s novel. Warning for sexual content.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. Two wlw in the 1980s. Also made into a film; see below.

Gemini by Michel Tournier. The link will tell you more; seems like a very complex read. TW for troubling twin dynamics.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Another iconic M/M work.

Lost Boi by Sassafras Lowrey. A queer punk reimagining of Peter Pan. Probably one of the more accessible works on this list!

Lie With Me by Philippe Besson. Two teenage boys in 1980s France.

Maurice by E. M. Forster. Landmark work written in 1914. Also made into a film; see below.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. An expansive (and long) novel about the story of Cal, a hermaphrodite, by the author of The Virgin Suicides.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Plays with gender, time and space. Virginia Woolf’s ode to her lover Vita Sackville-West. What more do you want? (also a great film; see below).

Oscar Wilde’s works - The Picture of Dorian Gray would be the place to start. Another member of the classical literary canon.

Saga, vol.1 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. Graphic novel; warning for sexual content.

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinburg. An acclaimed work looking at working-class lesbian life and gender identity in pre-Stonewall America.

The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair. The basis for Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). I am hesitant to recommend this because I have not read this, though I have watched the film; the M/M dynamic and LGBTQ themes do not seem to be the primary focus. Warning for sexual content and incestuous dynamics between the twins.

The Animals At Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey. Plays with gothic elements, set during WW2, F/F elements.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham. References Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Probably a good idea to read Virginia Woolf first.

The Immoralist by André Gide. Translated from French.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline MIller. Drawing from the Iliad, focusing on Achilles and Patroclus. Contemporary fantasy that would be a good pick for younger readers.

The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. Gay life pre-AIDS crisis. Apparently contains a fair amount of sexual content.

What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell. A gay man’s coming of age in the American South.

> LITERATURE: WORLD LITERATURE

American and Western experiences are more prominent in LGBTQ works, just due to the way history and the community have developed, and the difficulties of translation. These are English and translated works that specifically foreground the experiences of non-White people living in (often) non-Western societies. I’m not white or American myself and recommendations in this area are especially welcomed.

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson. The memoirs and essays of a queer black activist, exploring themes of black LGBTQ experiences and masculinity.

A People’s History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian. Female communities and queer female characters in a Bangalore slum. A very new release but already very well received.

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. Coming-of-age in post-WW1 Japan. This one’s interesting, because it’s definitely at least somewhat autobiographical. Mishima can be a tough writer, and you should definitely look into his personality and his life when reading his work.

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi. A family saga told against the backdrop of Iranian history by a queer Iranian woman. Would recommend going into this knowing at least some of the political and historical context.

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones. A coming-of-age story and memoir from a gay, black man in the American South.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Another acclaimed contemporary work about the dynamics of abuse in LGBTQ relationships. Memoir.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Contemporary black British experience, told from the perspectives of 12 diverse narrators.

> POETRY

Crush by Richard Siken. Tumblr loves Richard Siken, worth a read.

Diving Into The Wreck by Adrienne Rich.

He’s So Masc by Chris Tse.

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson. The best presentation of Sappho we’re likely to get.

Lord Byron’s works - Selected Poems may be a good starting point. One of the Romantics and part of the classical literary canon.

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. The explicitly lesbian poems are apparently in the les fleurs du mal section.

> MEMOIR & NONFICTION

And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. An expansive, comprehensive history and exposure of the failures of media and the Reagan administration, written by an investigative journalist. Will probably make you rightfully angry.

How to Survive A Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France. A reminder of the power of community and everyday activism, written by a gay reporter living in NYC during the epidemic.

Indecent Advances: The Hidden History of Murder and Masculinity Before Stonewall by James Polchin. True crime fans, this one’s for you. Sociocultural history constructed from readings of the news and media.

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker. It’s illustrated, it’s written by an academic, it’s an easier introduction to queer theory. I still need to pick up a copy, but it seems like a great jumping-off point with an overview of the academic context.

Real Queer America by Samantha Allen. The stories of LGBTQ people and LGBTQ narratives in the conservative parts of America. A very well received contemporary read.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Gender, pregnancy and queer partnership. I’m not familiar with this but it is quite popular.

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan. LGBTQ history of Brooklyn from the nineteenth century to pre-Stonewall.

FILMS

With films it’s difficult because characters are often queercoded and we’re only now seeing films with better rep. This is a shortlist of better-rated films with fairly explicit LGBTQ coding, LGBTQ characters, or made by LGBTQ persons. Bolded films are ones that I think are likely to be more accessible or with wider appeal.

A Single Man (2009) - Colin Firth plays a middle-aged widower.

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013) - A controversial one. Sexual content.

Booksmart (2019) - A pretty well made film about female friendship and being an LGBTQ teen.

Boy Erased (2018) - Warning for conversion therapy.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017) - Young AIDS activists in France.

Brokeback Mountain (2005) - Cowboy gays. This film is pretty famous, do you need more summary? Might make a good triple bill with Idaho and God’s Own Country.

Cabaret (1972) - Liza Minelli. Obvious plug to also look into Vincent Minelli.

Calamity Jane (1953) - There’s a lot that could be said about queer coding in Hollywood golden era studio films, but this is apparently a fun wlw-cowboy westerns-vibes watch. Read the reviews on this one!

Call Me By Your Name (2017) - Please don't debate this film in the notes.

Caravaggio (1986) - Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton are in it. Rather explicit.

Carol (2015) - Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are lesbians in 1950s America.

Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) - Hard to summarise, but one review calls it “lesbian birdman” and it has both Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in it, so consider watching it.

Colette (2018) - About the bi/queer female writer Colette during the belle epoque era. This had Keira Knightley so by all rights Tumblr should love it.

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) - Lesbian love in 1920s/80s? America.

God’s Own Country (2017) - Gay and British.

Happy Together (1997) - By Wong Kar Wai. No further explanation needed.

Heartbeats (2010) - Bi comedy.

Heartstone (2016) - It’s a story about rural Icelandic teenagers.

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015) - Queer teens and religious themes.

Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974) - Early Chantal Akerman. Warning for sexual scenes.

Kill Your Darlings (2013) - Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat poets.

Love, Simon (2018)

Lovesong (2016) - Lesbian and very soft. Korean-American characters.

Love Songs (2007) - French trio relationship. Louis Garrel continues to give off non-straight vibes.

Mädchen In Uniform (1931) - One of the earliest narrative films to explicitly portray homosexuality. A piece of LGBTQ cinematic history.

Maurice (1987) - Adaptation of the novel.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) - Heavy gay coding.

Milk (2008) - Biopic of Harvey Milk, openly gay politician. By the same director who made My Own Private Idaho.

Moonlight (2016) - It won the awards for a reason.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) - Another iconic LGBTQ film. River Phoenix.

Mysterious Skin (2004) - Go into this film aware, please. Young actors, themes of prostitution, child ab*se, r***, and a lot of trauma.

Orlando (1992) - An excellent adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, and in my opinion far more accessible. Watch it for the queer sensibilities and fantastic period pieces.

Pariah (2011) - Excellent coming-of-age film about a black lesbian girl in Brooklyn.

Paris is Burning (1990) - LANDMARK DOCUMENTARY piece of LGBTQ history, documenting the African-American and Latine drag and ballroom roots of the NYC queer community.

Persona (1966) - It’s an Ingmar Bergman film so I would recommend knowing what you’re about to get into, but also I can’t describe it because it’s an Ingmar Bergman film.

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) - Cult classic queercoded boarding school girls.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) - By Celine Sciamma, who’s rapidly establishing herself in the mainstream as a LGBTQ film director. This is a wlw relationship and the queer themes are reflected in the cinematic techniques used. A crowd pleaser.

Pride (2014) - Pride parades with a British sensibility.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955) - Crowd-pleaser with bi coding and James Dean. The OG version of “you’re tearing me apart!”.

Rocketman (2019) - It’s Elton John.

Rent (2005) - Adaptation of the stage musical. Not the best film from a technical standpoint. I recommend the professionally recorded 2008 closing night performance instead.

Rope (1948) - Hitchcock film.

Sorry Angel (2018) - Loving portraits of gay French men.

Talk To Her (2002) - By Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar.

Tangerine (2015) - About trans sex workers. The actors apparently had a lot of input in the film, which was somehow shot on an iPhone by the same guy who went on to do The Florida Project.

The Duke of Burgundy (2014) - Lesbians in an S&M relationship that’s going stale, sexual content obviously.

The Gay Deceivers (1969) - The reviews are better than me explaining.

The Handmaiden (2016) - Park Chan-wook makes a film about Korean lesbians and is criminally snubbed at the Oscars. Warning for sexual themes and kink.

The Favourite (2018) - Period movie, and lesbian.

Thelma And Louise (1991) - An iconic part of LGBTQ cinematic history. That is all.

The Celluloid Closet (1995) - A look into LGBTQ cinematic history, and the historical contexts we operated in when we’ve snuck our narratives into film.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) - Adaptation of the YA novel.

The Neon Demon (2016) - Apparently based on Elizabeth Bathory, the blood-drinking countess. Very polarising film and rated R.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) - Book adaptation. It has Ezra Miller in it I guess.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - No explanation needed, queer and transgressive vibes all the way.

They (2017) - Gender identity, teenagers.

Those People (2015) - They’re gay and they’re artists in New York.

Tomboy (2011) - One of the few films I’ve seen dealing with gender identity in children (10 y/o). Celine Sciamma developing her directorial voice.

Tropical Malady (2004) - By Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His is a very particular style so don’t sweat it if you don’t enjoy it.

Vita and Virginia (2018) - Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West biopic

Water Lilies (2007) - Celine Sciamma again! Teenage lesbian coming-of-age.

When Marnie Was There (2014) - A Studio Ghibli film exploring youth, gender and sexuality.

Weekend (2011) - An indie film about young gay love.

Wilde (1997) - It’s a film about Oscar Wilde.

XXY (2007) - About an intersex teenager. Reviews on this are mixed.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) - Wonder what Diego Luna was doing before Rogue One? This is one of the things. Warning for sexual content.

24 notes · View notes

sea-changed · 5 years

Text

vermiculated replied to your post: vermiculated replied to your post...

I can't believe I missed this until now! wow! Here I am, here you are, there are books and words between us. wonderful. thank you.

<3 <3 <3

I have to tell you that I read Olivia Waite's new ff and it has exactly this problem. It is as though both heroines are mealy-mouthed and forgettable so that the reader won't be offended by reading a book about women. Their only flaws are caring too much, wanting appropriate twenty-first century style recognition (ahistoricism doesn't bother me but as I was reading it, I thought, @sea-changed is going to be livid) and accidentally misunderstanding one another...

also attempted financial abuse. which I mention separately because it added a note of the glass armonica to the music of the spheres. how is ff so inadequate to our desires?

Oh no, this is terribly disappointing to hear; I’d been holding out some amount of hope for this one, though that was probably folly on my part. Why, in a subgenre written by and wholly about women, can the seemingly fairly standard “women are people” concept continually fail to gain ground? I’ll still read this, as it’s waiting for me on my phone and the upcoming semester promises to require mindless stress-reading, but I’ll be extremely irate about it. (I always think I can be magnanimous about ahistoricism in romance novels, which is obviously a lie, but it is good to be known like this.)

re: re: 34, I love the sweeping romantic sentiment because they manage to meet in the middle only when they both understand themselves to be ludicrously devoted. It didn't quite feel like a romance novel, you are correct -- there's a bit of neither fish nor fowl here? I personally feel that the natural second-half plot ought to have been shoring up how Richard and David love one another despite their respective troubled backstories rather than ...

...advancing the political thriller from "A Seditious Affair" and developing a coherent moral world. Which is what novels are oriented toward: why do people do what they do, despite everything? In romance, they do it because they love one another (or they're supposed to) whereas I think more complicated motives such as you discuss are much rarer.

oh, novels!, I say, like I live inside Tony Trollope's vision. I think the book tries to have it both ways and ends up being slightly frustrating for all readers. just write two books, Kimberly! Kimberly is what I call her when I am trying to hector her from afar. dear Kimberly, please have Susan stab Templeton. xo.

“Just write two books” is honestly what it comes down to: it feels like two books, and while I get that the political thriller part allowed David to be David to to requisite degree, after how gracefully it was cleaved to the romance plot in Seditious Affair it felt a bit tacked-on here. And while I’m certainly not opposed to moral ambiguity in my ships, the genre formula seems to require that said ambiguity, if there is any to begin with, be neatly swept under the rug; it’s really the sweeping I have the problem with rather than the ambiguity itself. (Because like, should Richard be fucking his valet? No! That’s a pretty open-and-shut one. Which certainly doesn’t mean I’m opposed to watching it happen, but I’d like fewer bows on my endings, I guess. Did you know Gentleman’s Position was the first book of the series I read, because I thought it had the most interesting-sounding summary? In hindsight this amuses to no end.)

(The accusation that there are similar moral issues and rug-sweeping in Seditious Affair, and that I am simply too starry-eyed over it to complain about them, is potentially quite valid, though because of said stars in said eyes I’m not the one to judge.)

(dear Kimberly, please have Susan stab Templeton --The only way I can see this going down with zero hair torn out of my head, quite honestly.)

re: re: 39, @mysharkwillgoon made the unkind (but accurate) observation that this series is always available at our county library because no one likes it. I recognize that I am utterly alone in how much I enjoy this, and am really pleased that you picked it up and felt the requisite feelings. I know you're not a Victorianist by practice or nature, so it's impressive that you returned to this weird book.

HA, I’ve made this same observation (likely about the same library!), which I’ll admit is satisfying to the part of me that thinks everyone should have my taste, though dissatisfying to the equally clamorous part of me that wants to read Seditious Affair for the sixteenth time and has to wait for it on hold. Weird romance seems to be my favorite kind, so I too am glad I returned to it. Not a Victorianist by practice or nature may have to go on my office wall.

A general query: can literary fiction be experimental enough to reach the logical end-point of the genre or are we still pretending that felicity in art is enough? Why must there be meaning in the world? Perhaps I judge the Booker too harshly: it is only a literary competition, it is not an immurement by orange sticker -- yet every book I have wanted to love from the longlist has given me the same depth of emotion that I feel on regarding ...

...a tray of wrapped zucchini at the grocery store: why are we engaging in such resource-intensive craft! (this is not strictly true. I delighted in A Little Life, it was nothing like plastic on vegetables at all.) To continue, is the worst thing that happened to literary fiction the application of irony? I am no supporter of the genuine, the real, the unmanufactured, yet ironic distance can hardly support so much.

It's not a prerequisite. and it looks like smugness more often than it comes off as wit. I read someone recently saying that the problem in Jude the Obscure is "done because we are too menny" which struck me -- a biased Hardy fan -- as missing the point about art: the place where it happens is an artificial one, but it has greater force for that. it's not a bug, it's a feature!

"somewhat poisonous nostalgia" sick burn, I like it.

Speaking of sick burns, “the same depth of emotion that I feel on regarding a tray of wrapped zucchini at the grocery store” has the devastating combination of being both pithy and accurate. I do find myself regularly mystified about what criteria are used to long-list books in general (the Booker being, I think, a particularly frequent and egregious example): it leaves me to wonder whether a) people who judge these things find being left cold and unmoved a virtue in fiction or b) they are led to feel things about writing I find cold and unmoving. (I tend toward the first, though the fact that people have seemingly genuine emotions about Madeline Miller novels would argue strongly for the second.)

The pitting of irony and emotion against one another is, I agree, one of the central failings of the literary genre: Both! Both are good! As you say, being in a constructed hothouse universe is not to be derided (though certainly poked at), and it does not (or at least should not) lessen the emotional validity of the created world. Have faith in your own creations, you dimwits.

I have been thinking all morning about your observation that none of these books are experimental enough: I thought the French were meant to be good at this. Do you think it has to do with our late uneasiness around teenage sexuality, and that writing a sufficently-complicated teenager such that he is entitled to his own sexual preference means that authors no longer sound unique, ...

... but rather like a series of psychology textbooks. Which can be a pleasure (what's UP, Megan Abbott) yet tends to make these books extremely ... putdownable. Thank you for this, there's really nothing better than having a person with exquisite taste on whom one can rely to read books first.

I do think that there is an essential trouble with alienation in YA novels: so many read as false and/or patronizing, because they’re being written to teenagers rather than about teenagers. (Sometimes this is rectified when adult lit writes about teenagers, but mostly it is not, and certainly not in this case. Here again is a case of irony vs. emotion; if you’re not going to give me emotion, you’ve got to be a whole lot better at irony--or in this case more specifically narrative commentary--than this.)

(On the subject of complicated teenagers having sex convincingly, I was recently a fan of Patrick Ness’s Release, which the author describes it as a cross between Mrs. Dalloway and Judy Blume’s Forever; a comment I’ll let stand on its own sizable feet.)

And there is truly nothing better than having someone to dump your own particular long-winded exegeses on, so thank you for that in return.

ps I read Astray and it was so frail! "disappointingly pedestrian" indeed. If I could write like Emma Donoghue, I guess I would labor under the curse that afflicts her plotting.

For being a book that contained so much that I love--an entire collection of extremely specific and well-researched historical settings!--it was so flat. I know Donoghue can write better sentences, I’m at a loss why she chose to not put any in this collection.

#vermiculated #replies #books tag

3 notes · View notes

her-culture · 5 years

Text

My Top 10 Books of All Time, and Why You Need to Read Them

In my first article for Her Culture, I thought it would be fitting to write about books that have changed my life and shaped my world views in one way or another. My mom was a journalism major, so I guess I could say I got my love of reading from her. She used to read to me every night as a kid and imparted the importance of good literature to me. As a sociology major currently, these were very formative books in my adolescence that not only challenged certain misconceptions about the world, but allowed me to think in a more macroscopic way by reading different perspectives and experiences as well. I put my favorite quote from each book, if it had one, underneath each title—hopefully those will be enough to give you the general gist of each book. These aren’t listed in any particular order, but they are all relatively equally important to me, and it was incredibly hard to narrow it down (stay tuned for honorable mentions at the end):

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

When I think of this book, I have so many fond and nostalgic memories of adolescence. Even though it was not too long ago, I think this book was really my turning point to begin truly questioning the social facts that govern our society. Although the novel is relatively short, the story holds a much-needed allegory for some of the major plights of Western society: elitism, greed, class, consumerism, etc. I would call this book a buffet of sorts; I say this to mean you can take a plethora of different meanings from Fitzgerald’s relatively straightforward tale. Moreover, I recently learned that Fitzgerald was an Irish immigrant, so the concept of Gatsby’s relentless pursuit to be from East Egg is similar to his own trials and tribulations of fitting into American society—and invariably, not being able to in the end. I really love the imagery and the language in this book as well; essentially, Fitzgerald paints an exquisite portrait of the problem of the consumerist God we worship in America. My favorite imagery in the book is probably the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg; that’s one of my favorite images ever in literature, actually.

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

“Fear no more the heat of the sun”

This book reminds me of the conversations I’d have with my best friend in high school every day after AP Literature. We’d get coffee and drive around and talk about the various existential topics the book discusses. The book takes place over the course of 24 hours, it essentially covers a middle-aged woman’s retrospective meditation of her life and past decisions as she prepares to throw a party. Although it seems like a simple plot, it delves into ideas about purpose, free will, and even the profound effect strangers can have on your life. I loved the interpolation of other people’s narratives into the story as well; it made the story richer than just Mrs. Dalloway’s narration. Furthermore, I like the stream of consciousness style that you don’t see in many critically acclaimed works, but it makes it feel all the more intimate. Not only do you feel for Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus, and others, but the power of this style of writing makes it seem like you are in that character’s predicament. It reminds me not only of the fragility of life itself, but of the gravity of what you would consider menial everyday interactions can have—the butterfly effect.

Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

My mother is specifically to thank for reading this book. She suggested it to me the summer before senior year, and since summer had always been my prime reading time in high school, I read it. Toni Morrison is one of the best writers of the century, without a doubt, and this book is all the proof you need to believe this claim. She created an intricate masterpiece, intertwining various double-entendres—especially with the names of characters, time periods, storylines, and more. Her language is vivid, and every word is meaningful; she has no fillers. Every aspect of the story adds to the jigsaw puzzle that is solved at the end of the book. I’d hate to give any of the plot away, but one of the characters is named Guitar because he’s instrumental to the development of the protagonist, but that’s just one example of her mastery. It explores race, ancestry, colorism, and the power of self as well. This is one of my top favorites of all time, and if I were to order them, this one would without a doubt be close to the top.

Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keys

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

When I first read this book, I was relatively young, but it still had a profound impact. I think it challenged me to think about the power of sentience and that it’s one of the many things we take for granted. It reminds me a bit of some themes in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (an honorable mention), but in my opinion, it’s less cliché in a way. Although it’s technically supposed to be a young adult novel, I would say it has a lot of adult themes, so it was a good stepping stone into adult tragedy. Charly’s connection to Algernon is one of the most poignant relationships in literature, and I do feel like this book gets overlooked frequently when we discuss the greats. On another note, it also caused me to evaluate the power of interactions and relationships with others, as humans are innately relational; this book does a fantastic job of capturing that aspect of life.

Jazzy Miz Mozetta – Brenda C. Roberts

“Okay, young cats, let the beat hit your feet.”

This is the only children’s book in my top 10, but for a good reason. This is another book my mother introduced, but way earlier than the others she suggested, as she would read it to me at night. She’d read it probably 3-5 times a week because this was one of my favorite ones. When I see this book, I have so many fond memories of my mother tucking me in with my matching pajamas and warm milk at night. To this day, I appreciate this book as one of the most incredible children’s books of all time. Roberts’ incredible vision of music, color, and sound made me proud to be black at such a young age, in a world that doesn’t want you to feel comfortable in your own skin. Moreover, you don’t see many children’s books with black protagonists, and this was such a fantastic representation. Especially because I also love music, she did such a good job of creating that through the illustrations. It emphasizes community, music, and living life to the fullest.

Tuck Everlasting – Natalie Babbitt

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”

Tuck Everlasting was one of the first books that really caused me to examine mortality in a secular sense. I went to church school once a week as a kid, and that was the only space where we discussed life and death in that way, so this was an important introduction to the concept of death altogether, in a sense. We’ve all heard about the fountain of youth at one point or another in our lives, and this novel explores that idea essentially. I also really like the tension between immortality and a normal life, somewhat reminiscent of the Greek myth of Eurydice when Orpheus goes back to the Underworld to retrieve her. This is another book connected to my mother actually, who read it at the same time as me so I would have someone to discuss my reading with and bounce off my ideas. I think this is part of the reason this book resonated so deeply with me; I had an adult to converse complex topics of mortality with.

The Virgin Suicides

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

The above quote is relatively long compared to the rest, but it’s one of my favorite passages in literature. I love the effervescent, ethereal nature of this book. I almost feel nostalgic reading it, although I didn’t grow up in the 70s, but there’s somewhat of a vintage quality to it. These aspects are kind of similar to Lois Lowry’s book A Summer to Die. If you can get past the gruesome, macabre aspect of the actual storyline—young girls committing suicide—you can bask in Eugenides’ masterpiece. His syntax is honestly unmatched, as well as his symbolism. In my opinion, this is a much better version of the popular young adult novel 13 Reasons Why, as it goes into detail about what led to the suicides and you get a look inside the minds of the girls, but from an outsider perspective (as young boys are the narrators of the novel, along with an occasional third person narrator). As a male, Eugenides encapsulates not only youth but the experience of adolescence as a girl as well. The writing is just beautiful, and that’s all I can say about it. The interesting part is that although I guess this would be categorized as a tragedy and certainly has a melancholy tinge to it, you don’t finish the book feeling sad necessarily. I was unsettled, but I still wouldn’t consider it a tragedy per se. Eugenides’ genre-defying classic is one that needs to be acknowledged as the phenomenal work that it is. To this day, I don’t know if I’ve read a book like this one, in the best way possible.

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

The way this book was introduced to me was as a book “about World War II and aliens,” and that is basically the most accurate summary I’ve ever read. It’s hard to say exactly what the premise of this book is because it really is about a wide array of topics, but it’s all connected, and it makes sense when you read it. It had a huge impact on me because I’ve never read a book as non-traditional as this one. I appreciate Vonnegut because he doesn’t subscribe to anyone’s rules—another genre-bender, one could say. It would be diminishing to this work to say that it’s about existentialism, but it is in a sense. The Tralfamadorians (the aliens in the novel), teach Billy how to look at his life macroscopically, and also about the deceptive nature of time. In Vonnegut’s words, “so it goes.”

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

I can’t lie, I wasn’t the biggest fan of this book when I started it because I wasn’t sure where it was going. It has a Pride and Prejudice nature to it at the beginning before you delve into the plot that makes it seem sort of outdated, and although it is a timepiece technically, the actual message of the novel is timeless. There’s a lot more than meets the surface in this novel, and the imagery is also incredible. Hardy’s message is essentially about “crass casualty and dicing time” which is basically the notion that random things happen to us at random times and there’s nothing we can do about it. This also counters the notion of free will which is an interesting stance especially for the time this book was written. In fact, when this book was first published it was banned because of the depiction of rape and of secularism as well. At the time it was written (The Scarlet Letter era), the woman was the party at fault if she was raped, so it was met with generally negative feedback at first. Once I finished the book, I was a huge fan just because Hardy went against all norms to write such a tale. I specifically like the idea that Tess essentially saves herself in every scenario in the novel; Hardy knew even in 1891 that she didn’t need a man to save her.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz

“Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.”

This book needs to be regarded as one of the best ones of our generation, as well as Junot Díaz as an author. Not only is this book timely, but it is also timeless. I really liked the integration of the actual history of the Dominican Republic into the novel, and also the acknowledgment of the intersection of race, language, history, and culture as the book is written in Spanglish. We don’t read many books in school or any books that garner any major media attention about Afro-Latino comic book nerds and their histories, so it’s important for a number of reasons. Díaz takes us on a long, vibrant journey through many genres, full of culture, and unrefined.

These are my top 10 books, at least as of right now, as the more books I read, the more the list changes. However, many of these will always remain at the top as classics to me. These are all must-reads not just because of how significant they were to me, but because of their respective contributions to literature. Outside of the fact that a few of them aren’t even categorizable into a genre, these books were truly eye-opening and formative for me. If you like to conceptualize the world and read about various topics from free will to mortality, I would highly consider reading at least a few of these, if not all.

Separately, I would like to think of this list as an ode to my childhood, and even more to my mother. She gave me this passion and this insatiable love of literature, so I truly thank her for taking the time to read to me, with me, and even for her suggestions. I can’t thank her enough.

1 note · View note

readbooksummary · 5 months

Text

Mrs. Dalloway Book Summary

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

https://www.readbooksummary.com/2023/06/mrs-dalloway-summary.html

0 notes

precisionpapers · 3 years

Text

Mrs. Dalloway Summary

Mrs. Dalloway Summary Mrs. Dalloway Summary Mrs. Dalloway Summary by Virginia Woolf Setting The novel is set in London, England. Main Characters Clarissa Dalloway- is the protagonist in the novel. Clarissa is a middle-aged, upper-class lady throwing a party and is married to the conservative politician Richard Dalloway but is deeply affected by her past love for Sally Seton and her rejection of…

View On WordPress

0 notes

mamondae-blog · 6 years

Text

Shannon Gitte Diaz

Bibliography Entry:

Publication date: 1999

Publisher: ST MARTINS PRESS

Author: Michael Cunningham

Genre: Literary Fiction

Retrieved from http://www.powells.com/book/the-hours-9780312243029/18-0

Introduction:

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. He is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World (Picador) and Flesh and Blood. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, and he is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. The Hours was a New York Times Bestseller, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 movie of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.

Summary:

After opening on a melancholy note with Virginia Woolf's willful death by drowning, The Hours branches out into three interconnected plotlines.

In one plotline, Clarissa Vaughan—a middle-aged book editor living in 1990s New York—gets ready to throw a party. A beloved friend of hers is about to be awarded a distinguished literary prize, and Clarissa is arranging a private celebration where he'll be congratulated by supporters and close personal friends. Clarissa's friend Richard Brown is dying from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses, and when Clarissa checks in on him in the late morning, she can tell that he's having one of his bad days. When she comes back later to help him get dressed for the party, things take a tragic turn: Richard slides himself out of a fifth-story window and is killed. Rather than throwing a party for Richard, Clarissa now finds herself making arrangements for his funeral. In the last hours of the evening, she collects Richard's elderly mother, Laura Brown, and offers her a late-night meal.

In another plotline, that same Laura Brown is still a young woman living in a sunny, pristine suburb of Los Angeles. She wakes on the morning of her husband's birthday and eventually musters up the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Throughout the morning, Laura and her three-year-old son, Richie, make a birthday cake together. It doesn't turn out as Laura hoped, and after receiving an unexpected visit from a neighbor, Laura dumps the cake in the garbage and starts again. In the afternoon, Laura leaves Richie with a neighbor for a few hours so that she can "run some errands," by which we mean she steals away for a few hours so that she can enjoy some rare time alone. Laura checks herself into a hotel, then curls up to read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Back at home that evening; Laura presides over her husband's birthday dinner. Later, once Richie is asleep, she and her husband get ready to head to bed. As Laura fiddles around in the bathroom, she thinks about how easy it would be to swallow a fatal number of sleeping pills and slip away from her life.

In the novel's third plotline, Virginia Woolf wakes up with an idea for the first line of a novel. After getting some coffee and checking in with her husband, she spends the morning drafting the first pages of the book that will eventually become Mrs. Dalloway. In the afternoon, Virginia takes a walk and ponders her heroine's fate. Back at home, she lends a hand in the printing room, where her husband, Leonard, is preparing another book for publication. Virginia is expecting a visit from her sister, niece, and nephews, and soon the clan arrives. The children have found an injured bird in the yard, and before they all come inside, Virginia helps them to make a little deathbed for the creature. In the early evening, after her extended family members are gone, Virginia slips outside for another walk. She heads toward the train station with a half-baked plan to run off to London for a few hours. She buys a ticket, and then decides to walk around the block while she waits for the next train to arrive. As she does, she sees Leonard coming toward her. Playing it cool, she keeps her plans to herself and walks home. Back at home, as bedtime approaches, Virginia makes a final decision about her novel. Instead of killing off her heroine, Mrs. Dalloway, she decides that "a deranged poet, a visionary" will die instead.

Critical Analysis:

It was indeed that this novel was a great novel of all time as it was a recipient of a lot of award. After reading the summary of the said novel, the curiosity of mine upon how this novel was considered as the novel of all time and how this novel was a recipient of a lot of award in America has been answered as the technicality of the author, how great the interconnection was presented in every plotline. One story with three interconnected plotlines is quite a tricky thing to use considering the great outcome and sacrificing your name in one novel is an enormous thing to be noted. The story gives a lot of moral lessons as it tackles a lot of social issue such as the LGBT and also the HIV/AIDS victim. The story had this moral lesson to those writers who didn’t have this chance to be a productive in their field of expertise because of lack of confidence. The novel is very technical in a way that the author used a plot twist and a surprise thingy to his reader. This story will tell how great Michael Cunningman is and how talented he is in the field of literary writing.

1 note · View note

inhalingwords · 7 years

Photo

Monthly Wrap Up || June 2017

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster || Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf || Seitsemän veljestä by Aleksis Kivi || Nevada by Imogen Binnie

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

A Room with a View is a delightful comedy of manners about Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman navigating life in the restrained culture of the Edwardian era. The novel is divided into two parts; the first being set in Florence, Italy, and the second in Surrey, England.

This one was my favourite read of the month! Such a fresh, tender, witty romance full of youth, passion and battle for freedom.

Life, so far as she troubled to conceive it, was a circle of rich, pleasant people, with identical interests and identical foes. In this circle one thought, married and died. Outside it were poverty and vulgarity, for ever trying to enter, just as the London fog tries to enter the pine-woods, pouring through the gaps in the northern hills. But in Italy, where anyone who chooses may warm himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished. Her senses expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not particularly high. You jump over them just as you jump into a peasant’s olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to see you. She returned with new eyes.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway is a classic one-day novel about time, memory, war and the city, set in 1920′s London and told in the stream-of-consciousness style. The point of view revolves slowly around, from character to character, coming always back to the titular protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway.

One of the best things in life is when you’re reading a classic and, only a couple pages in, it turns out that the protag is queer. I had a small fist pump moment when that happened. Otherwise, the book didn’t exactly make me jump with joy. It’s slow and meandering, and while I love those types of books, something about this one just didn’t do it for me. I liked the book and it’s molasses atmosphere, but I didn’t love it. The prose is stunning, the subject matter interesting, but something about the book just didn’t click with me. I feel like I need to come back to the book some other time to fully appreciate it.

Seitsemän veljestä by Aleksis Kivi

Seitsemän veljestä (engl. Seven Brothers) is a significant Finnish classic by Finland’s national author, first published in 1870. It tells the story of seven brothers, stubborn and quick-tempered though capable and (occasionally) hard-working, who -- confronted with the task of learning to read before they can be accepted into official adulthood through church confirmation -- decide to run away into the wilderness and live life on their own terms. Cue copious amounts of alcohol, blasphemy, fighting a lot, accidentally burning down things (like their newly built house, nbd), near-death experiences, and religious epiphanies. #justfinnishthings

While I’m very familiar with the story, this was actually my first time reading this novel in full. And I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed. The book has been criticised in the past (especially when it was first published) of being too crude and not moralistic enough, but to be honest I found it too moralistic (and quite repetitive and dull at points). My favourite things were the distinct personalities of each of the brothers, the witty dialogue and sibling banter between them, the vivid stories told from time to time by one of the brothers, and just the pure Finnishness of the language (I’ve read so much in English that every time I read Finnish lit nowadays I almost cry koska suomalaisuus).

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

The moment I read the first line of the summary of this book I knew I had to get it and read it, so here it is, in the hopes that, if anyone’s reading this, they’ll be similarly inspired: “Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working in retail.” It sounds fantastic, and I can attest to the fact that the book delivers. (Oh, does it ever!)

Nevada is hilarious, queer, political, messy, raw, and so fucking real I almost cried several times reading it because I related so hard to the main character who is kinda lost in life, kinda directionless, kinda “what now?”. If you’re looking for a book with a relatable protag grappling with twentysomething life-befuddlement and lowkey existential crisis, this is the book for you. This is also the book for you if you want to read a fantastic book with a trans protag that is written by a trans author.

Also: “The run-on sentences, the internal monologues, the lack of quotation marks; it’s like Binnie takes the boring, pretentious stylistic choices of the (all male) beat writers and punches them in the face. The way young women speak, which is so often maligned as being stupid and vapid, is uplifted to a literary level." (x)

Here’s the thing, James H., she says, still looking all dazed but suddenly lucid. What do you want? Not all this, he says. No I know, Maria says, But what do you want? It’s easy to say that where you are and what you have are dumb, but it’s harder and probably more productive to name concrete things and aspire to them. You know?

#monthly wrap up #june wrap up #reading wrap up #booklr #bookblr #this can all be summed up in two words: READ NEVADA!!!!

3 notes · View notes

staygoldenlightning · 6 years

Text

For anyone not acquainted, that’s “to be read” pile, AKA, the pile of books that I’ve collected before I finished everything else I wanted to read, and are now on deck once I finish my current read. I’ll also throw in a list of my recently read books that I haven’t yet written about here.

Can someone explain why it is so satisfying to buy books? To collect them and stack them up together on your already overflowing shelf and just generally look forward to finishing one so you can start the next? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s thought about it. I’ve even read that it makes you smarter. Either way, there are plenty of books on my shelf that I haven’t read yet but plan to, so I thought I’d show you the newest and most exciting ones in my TBR (to be read) pile.

Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

I bought this book the last time I was wandering a Barnes and Noble because I read and loved Niven’s All the Bright Places. So much so that I picked up this one without even reading the summary on the jacket. I enjoyed reading her so much the first time that I now trust her outright. Now that I have read the summary, it seems to follow a somewhat similar formula to ATBP, one that I really enjoy and use in my own writing as well: two people who are in some ways opposite and some ways the same meet in an unexpected or unusual way, and neither of them is ever the same. I’m curious to see what this looks like for Libby, an overweight young girl grieving the death of her mom, and Jack, the coolest guy in school who secretly can’t recognize faces. (You’re already hooked too, right?) YA/New Adult will (probably) always be my happy place, so I’m glad to have this one on hand.

The Working Woman’s Handbook by Phoebe Lovatt

Female empowerment is the fuel on which I run in order to get through the day. Now that I’m at least some iteration of a ~career woman~, I’m finding it more interesting than ever to read about how other women have found their passions and created empires around them. I asked for this book for Christmas on a recommendation from The Anna Edit, one of my favorite bloggers. Not only is this book super pretty on the outside (composition book nostalgia is real), but the way it’s graphically organized and colored on the inside makes the proposition of reading nonfiction even more appetizing. Mostly, I’m looking forward to the interviews with Girlbosses of all kinds (now that I’ve gotten through the Girlboss Workbook and all). While this book is set up so that you can easily reference whatever section you might be curious about, I have a feeling I’m just going to read it from cover to cover.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Everyone is talking about this book, and for good reason. I have every reason to believe that it deserves its run on the tops of the bestseller lists from every person that’s ever recommended it to me. Angie Thomas’s decision as a woman of color to write a novel on racism, classism, and violence, and then frame it from a young woman of color’s perspective, for YA audiences and beyond, is in my opinion, both incredibly brave and exactly what the world needs right now. Fiction is just one window through which we can observe and analyze the real world around us, and so I think everyone should read this book. I’m looking forward to the privilege. It’s not every day that you can look at something you own and go, “This is going to be really important,” but this book is definitely that and more.

So that’s what I’m looking forward to reading as soon as I finish my current pick, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han (I’m undecided on it, but will finish it and get back to you on that). As a little bonus, here’s a list of some of the books I’ve finished but haven’t written about here yet (my Been Read pile, if you’re keeping up). Watch out for reviews on these soon:

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares (a re-read for research)

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

And that about does it for now. What are you looking forward to reading next? Let me know; I’m always looking for recommendations!

Spring 2018 TBR Pile For anyone not acquainted, that's "to be read" pile, AKA, the pile of books that I've collected before I finished everything else I wanted to read, and are now on deck once I finish my current read.

#books #Literature #reading #TBR

0 notes