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Reading Wednesday
Mar. 18th, 2020 12:26 pmRecently read
Finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi's memoir about teaching English literature in Iran in the late 1970s-early 1990s - a period including the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, etc. - and the private class she held for a small number of passionate former students (all women) after she resigned from her university post. The book is divided into four sections, focusing on different times/themes in Nafisi's life but also literary analysis of different authors: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen. I've never read Nabokov or James, but I found Nafisi's analysis of, and her students' responses to, The Great Gatsby and Pride & Prejudice even more interesting given my own experiences studying them.
Re-read Ian McEwan's Atonement, which is a personal favorite; I first read it in a high school English class, and I've re-read it a couple of times since. This time, I realized I'm now the same age as Robbie and (presumably) Cecilia at the beginning of the novel - 23 - which made the hindsight-is-20/20 bittersweetness of their early POV chapters hit a little harder. I continue to have a lot of feelings about Briony Tallis.
Read Indelicacy by Amina Cain. I have... absolutely no feelings about this book one way or another. It's a sparse novella (both language- and plot-wise) with a vaguely Cinderella narrative, in which an aspiring author who works as a cleaner in a museum marries rich and finds her new life unsatisfying. The most memorable thing was its sense of timelessness and placelessness; I found myself picturing it as 1950s New York - later amended to Chicago, when the narrator mentioned her city was by a lake - but I made this assumption on the flimsiest of textual evidence.
Currently reading
Re-reading Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. It's more depressing than I remembered.
To read next
Already borrowed The Heart Goes Last for a Margaret Atwood double feature.
Finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi's memoir about teaching English literature in Iran in the late 1970s-early 1990s - a period including the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, etc. - and the private class she held for a small number of passionate former students (all women) after she resigned from her university post. The book is divided into four sections, focusing on different times/themes in Nafisi's life but also literary analysis of different authors: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen. I've never read Nabokov or James, but I found Nafisi's analysis of, and her students' responses to, The Great Gatsby and Pride & Prejudice even more interesting given my own experiences studying them.
Re-read Ian McEwan's Atonement, which is a personal favorite; I first read it in a high school English class, and I've re-read it a couple of times since. This time, I realized I'm now the same age as Robbie and (presumably) Cecilia at the beginning of the novel - 23 - which made the hindsight-is-20/20 bittersweetness of their early POV chapters hit a little harder. I continue to have a lot of feelings about Briony Tallis.
Read Indelicacy by Amina Cain. I have... absolutely no feelings about this book one way or another. It's a sparse novella (both language- and plot-wise) with a vaguely Cinderella narrative, in which an aspiring author who works as a cleaner in a museum marries rich and finds her new life unsatisfying. The most memorable thing was its sense of timelessness and placelessness; I found myself picturing it as 1950s New York - later amended to Chicago, when the narrator mentioned her city was by a lake - but I made this assumption on the flimsiest of textual evidence.
Currently reading
Re-reading Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. It's more depressing than I remembered.
To read next
Already borrowed The Heart Goes Last for a Margaret Atwood double feature.
