Patterns. I made a list to see if I could notice some patterns in the themes that caught my attention the most from each book. Overall, as the title suggests, I think in most of the novels the main character(s) were misfits in some way, people who do not quite fit into the world around […]
I saw in a couple other blog posts about Love Me Tender that people say not much really happens in the book. At first I kind of agreed. It doesn’t have the usual kind of plot. There’s no big dramatic sequence of events. The narrator swims, writes, meets women, walks around Paris. The chapters are […]
Faces in the Crowd was definitely my favorite book we have read so far. It gave me a strange but interesting feeling, mostly because parts of the narrator’s life felt surprisingly relatable. When she describes her younger self living alone in New York, it made me think about what it means to be a young […]
“The only thing about me that doesn’t change is my past: the memory of my human past. The past is usually stable, it’s always there, lovely or terrible, and it will be there forever” (55). This whole book left me thinking a lot about an essay I did in first-year philosophy class, where I wrote […]
“After all, what is robbing a bank compared to founding one?” VERY Robin Hood-y. That line stayed with me the whole time I was reading. The quote already suggests that the novel is less interested in judging the robbery itself and more interested in the strange contradictions behind crime. While reading the book, I kept […]
I think my first thought after finishing this story was how strange the situation felt, but also how familiar it seemed in a different way. Nowadays, people gather, have dinner, talk about random things, and often avoid discussing politics, even when the political situation around the world feels chaotic or upside down. The difference is […]
To be honest, I did not like If on a winter’s night a traveler. I get why it’s considered creative, but my experience was mostly confusion and distance. In the beginning, when the narrator tells you where to sit, adjust the light, relax, and prepare to read. I remember thinking: why is he telling me […]
Reading The Time of the Doves I kept noticing how Natalia’s life is shaped more by what she’s missing than by what she has. No one ever showed her what a healthy relationship looks like, so when Quimet appears she doesn’t really choose him; she just drifts into him. And Quimet? Major red flag. Immediately. […]
Being Peruvian definitely shaped how I read this book. I probably would have enjoyed it even more if it had not been midterm season, but I still ended up liking it a lot. Through Ernesto’s inner conflict you can understand a lot about the society around him. He is mestizo, and because he grew up […]
Reading Agostino felt worse than Proust for me. Besides the fact that it is uncomfortable in a way that seems very intentional, it lost my attention at many parts of the book. The way it is written felt repetitive or bland, yet there are some interesting parts in this story. “She wasn’t naked, as he […]
