One thing that stood out to me most when reading The Book of Chameleons was the idea of identity and how it is seen as something malleable. In the book, identities can be changed, created, or invented from nothing. Félix Ventura’s job is literally creating new identities for his clients. In this way, the book […]
Honestly, this book feels pretty out of place in a romance studies class. The book is based on a real bank robbery and mostly revolves around crime, violence, and a police standoff, so at first glance it doesn’t really feel like a “romance” story at all. But the more I read, the more it started […]
The Trenchcoat by Norman Manea is probably my favourite reading of the course so far. One reason I liked it was that I was finally able to read a story in one sitting. Lately a lot of the readings have felt extra long so it was nice to sit down and finish a story from […]
Reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler felt disorienting right from the start. Instead of easing me into a story, Calvino throws you straight into the act of reading itself. He even addresses “you” as if he is watching you open the book and read the first few pages. At first I found it […]
Reading The Time of the Doves didn’t feel like following a dramatic war story. Instead, it felt like being placed inside someone’s everyday struggle to keep going. The novel follows Natalia (often called Colometa), whose life is shaped not by political speeches or battlefield scenes, but by marriage, poverty, motherhood, and the slow exhausting life […]
Reading Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas kinda messed with my head. It feels less like learning a story and more like learning how to perceive the world differently. Rather than explaining Peru’s colonial history or Indigenous suffering in direct terms, Arguedas filters everything through Ernesto’s body: what he touches, hears, and feels before he […]
When I first finished Nada, my immediate reaction was kind of anticlimactic. After a full year of Andrea’s life in Barcelona, she leaves feeling like she’s taken nothing away from the experience. She didn’t have a crazy transformation, didn’t really take away a clear lesson, and the story ended with no dramatic resolution. Just… nada. […]
I feel like every book I’ve picked up so far in this class has just left me confused. I thought books from the 1900s were easier to understand than the ones I read in RMST201, but these books might be more confusing??? Anyway, The Shrouded Woman felt like a novel that exists in this strange […]
When I first picked up this book and started reading, I literally had no idea what was going on. I kept sitting there waiting for something to happen, be it a plot, a conflict, or anything that would make me understand the storyline better. Instead, it felt like I had opened someone’s diary and was […]
WOW this text was hard to read. I found myself getting lost and having to re-read sections an embarrassing amount of times. As I mentioned in my introduction, I don’t pick up books written before the 1980s so staying attentive the whole time and trying to navigate Proust’s long, winding sentences within this book was […]
