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Reading Wednesday
Jun. 3rd, 2020 07:34 amRecently read
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara; I've never read her more famous - and famously bleak - A Little Life, but this one was devastating enough. It was inspired by Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel Prize-winning scientific researcher who adopted 50+ children from the South Pacific and was convicted of molesting several of them, so... yeah. It's rough.
It was conceptually interesting in terms of the world-building of the fictional Micronesian island where much of the novel takes place, and its explicitly unreliable narration - the novel is framed as the memoirs of Dr. Abraham Norton Perina, Yanagihara's stand-in for Gajdusek, as written from prison and heavily edited by one of his few remaining friends/loyal supporters, so much so that said friend/supporter completely excises one particularly damning scene (included as a postscript) - and the story itself, although it left me feeling sick to my stomach long before it got to the child sexual abuse, was undeniably intriguing.
( Read more... )
I also read The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames, following the century-long, near-death-experience-filled life of a woman whose family immigrated from Italy to the U.S. when she was a teenager, just before WWII. Liked the Italian-American cultural backdrop (my people!); disliked the fact I somehow managed to read two books in a row that involved child sexual abuse.
Currently reading
Keeping with this year's theme of revisiting books that I enjoyed in high school, I'm re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. I've also been reading a few chapters of Anna Karenina every night, but they're quite short chapters, so I'm not actually getting very far.
So far, my favorite character is probably the random guy Vronsky offends on the train to St. Petersburg:
( Read more... )
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara; I've never read her more famous - and famously bleak - A Little Life, but this one was devastating enough. It was inspired by Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel Prize-winning scientific researcher who adopted 50+ children from the South Pacific and was convicted of molesting several of them, so... yeah. It's rough.
It was conceptually interesting in terms of the world-building of the fictional Micronesian island where much of the novel takes place, and its explicitly unreliable narration - the novel is framed as the memoirs of Dr. Abraham Norton Perina, Yanagihara's stand-in for Gajdusek, as written from prison and heavily edited by one of his few remaining friends/loyal supporters, so much so that said friend/supporter completely excises one particularly damning scene (included as a postscript) - and the story itself, although it left me feeling sick to my stomach long before it got to the child sexual abuse, was undeniably intriguing.
( Read more... )
I also read The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames, following the century-long, near-death-experience-filled life of a woman whose family immigrated from Italy to the U.S. when she was a teenager, just before WWII. Liked the Italian-American cultural backdrop (my people!); disliked the fact I somehow managed to read two books in a row that involved child sexual abuse.
Currently reading
Keeping with this year's theme of revisiting books that I enjoyed in high school, I'm re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. I've also been reading a few chapters of Anna Karenina every night, but they're quite short chapters, so I'm not actually getting very far.
So far, my favorite character is probably the random guy Vronsky offends on the train to St. Petersburg:
( Read more... )
