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Recent reading
Sep. 10th, 2022 08:13 pmRead Paul by Daisy Lafarge, which is mostly a contemporary coming-of-age novel - a recent college graduate on a gap year in France finds herself stuck in a cycle of toxic relationships with older men - but also a reckoning with the legacy of French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin by way of modern AU. Weirdly, the third book I've read this year that uses an AU of a historical figure/event as a launching point to... do entirely its own thing? (The other two were Natasha Pulley's The Bedlam Stacks, which did not need to be a fantasy AU of Clements Markham's 1860 cinchona-smuggling expedition to Peru, and Heather O'Neill's When We Lost Our Heads, which probably also didn't need to ask "what if the French Revolution happened in 19th century Montreal and was about feminism?" to tell the story it wanted to, but I'm glad it did.)
Read Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette— also a coming-of-age story, of a sort. In 2005, a young nun begins to question her vocation after her small order's parish in upstate New York goes bankrupt and they are reassigned to a "tuckered-out town" in Rhode Island to run a halfway house and, in her case, teach at an all-girls Catholic school. A slim, muted novel - I finished it in one afternoon - and lovely in its treatment of unloveliness. I would describe it as tender or earnest, but neither feels exactly right? It left me feeling like I'd just had a good cry, although I hadn't actually teared up.
I'd originally picked up The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman back in February, but abandoned it after the first chapter; I'm not sure what changed between then and now, but I gave it another shot and I'm absolutely devouring it, in a "car crash you can't look away from" kind of way.
( Read more... )
Read Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette— also a coming-of-age story, of a sort. In 2005, a young nun begins to question her vocation after her small order's parish in upstate New York goes bankrupt and they are reassigned to a "tuckered-out town" in Rhode Island to run a halfway house and, in her case, teach at an all-girls Catholic school. A slim, muted novel - I finished it in one afternoon - and lovely in its treatment of unloveliness. I would describe it as tender or earnest, but neither feels exactly right? It left me feeling like I'd just had a good cry, although I hadn't actually teared up.
I'd originally picked up The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman back in February, but abandoned it after the first chapter; I'm not sure what changed between then and now, but I gave it another shot and I'm absolutely devouring it, in a "car crash you can't look away from" kind of way.
( Read more... )
