The Woodland Witch

  Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I’m breaking the fourth wall again for these last two blog posts—this one on Love Me Tender and the upcoming Conclusions post. I think it lets me say a little more than when I’m playing at the woodland witch.  So, getting to this final novel (wow)—I was really taken off guard by how quickly this book took off. It hit the ground running and stayed running, with all the commas making each sentence feel almost disconnected. I had to pay close attention to the capital letters and the punctuation to make sure I was following the sentence structure properly, and knowing who was saying what.  It kind of felt like I was being slapped in the face with every new statement that Debre dropped, and it was really conflicting for me because I kept getting checked like, ‘I really need to wait until I’ve finished reading this sentence and the next three sentences before I come to a conclusion’. It felt like I was constantly trying to j...

Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I don't think I've felt this confused about a novel since Combray . Truly, opening the book to two full pages of a spiderweb of characters was daunting, to say the least. It reminded me of the time I attempted to read a story wherein the cast was made up of 700 characters... safe to say that I was unsuccessful.  Moving past that, the childhood that Elena the narrator describes was to me, riddled with psychological clues--insecure attachment, abandonment issues, family issues (mommy issues, so to speak)--about how Elena's life might unfold. Unfortunately, I was not surprised.  The entire story--even the way it begins with an almost vengeful feeling from Elena in the prologue, wanting to foil Lila's plan to disappear by taking it upon herself to write the book--seems to me, as a third party, like an unhealthy entanglement. Elena and Lila are everything to each other in the most literal sense of the word--not in a romantic kind ...

  Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I feel as though I've said this about every book I read so far, but I hope that it does not come off as disingenuous when I say that this was an intriguing read.  Tragically, the Spanish Civil War is not my strongest suit in history--although, I've had to grapple with the discipline many times in order to remember the most basic facts--so I read this novel almost as if it were entirely a work of fiction, accepting the historical facts of the matter as Cercas put them and taking everything in stride as if they were the rules of the story.  So instead of following the historical thread of events, I entertained myself by identifying several, somewhat arbitrary connections to previous books that I read throughout our literary journey together--and there were a good few. For instance, Cercas always comes back to the concept of writing--it ties the novel together a bit loosely, I think, because while it seems clear that i...

Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  The journey back to the cottage after last week's adventures (featuring Calvino) has not been without its bumps and mishaps--I nearly wrote about the wrong book because I misread the schedule, and was a good chunk into The Soldiers of Salamis  before I checked the lectures and realized I was a whole week off. Thank goodness I caught that in time, but it also means I have yet to finish Money to Burn  at the time I am writing this very post. Returning to the topic of the novel itself, I am rather refreshed by the new genre that Money to Burn  presents. Despite the fact that the stories we have encountered thus far do vary in their styles and themes, this one seems a bit more pronounced (for lack of a better word). There was a sense of urgency created by all the heist jargon in the very beginning, which felt like a much faster introduction than the ones that came before--I say faster to mean that I was quicker to become immer...

Hello everyone,  This week I'm breaking character because what is this book. I remember being so sad when I was reading blog guidelines at the start of term and seeing that Tumblr got a specific restriction (which of course is probably for good reason, but still) BUT this was such an interesting read that it makes up for the loss, even if it was a bit slow at times (I learned early on that it got very purple).  Admittedly it did trigger a certain feeling of rebellion (one that you'll be familiar with if you are also a fellow consumer of reader-insert content) that comes with works using the second perspective, like what do you mean I did this. No I didn't.  The biggest 'no I didn't' for me was probably the assumption that 'Reader' is male, like okay. I think the very beginning was just vague enough that I was nodding along, like yeah I can get with this. I believe that this is happening. Okay, I went to a bookstore and bought this book despite all these ...

 Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage. First of all, I hope all of you had a restful reading break, and enjoyed reading The Time of the Doves . As per usual, I find myself sitting down to write a little before making it to the end of the novel, but at this point I'd like to put down my thoughts before I forget them reading the rest of the story.  As some of you may have guessed from this week's title, I do not like Quimet. I think that he, alongside all the frustrating male characters we've encountered so far, make me even more uncomfortable because there is a good chance that one could encounter them in real life. There is no reassurance that they will remain fictional figures, any of us could meet a Quimet and that  is truly terrifying to me.  If Natalia represents a woman's life gone to ruin, Quimet represents the reason.  My goodness, the things he does to marriage's good name--if I can even give it a good name after seeing what it's done to poor, poor...