When tasked to reflect on this course by writing this final blog, my first thought was to do a ranking of all books I read, but then I thought, no, Sofia, you can’t just regurgitate what you’ve been writing all term, but you know what? Jon said he doesn’t care if our blogs are “hot […]
I am deeply disturbed. The story follows three women forced into polygamous marriages, starting with Ramla, who has just finished high school and found true love, only for her parents to marry her off to a fifty-year-old rich man because money. Then there’s Hindou, Ramla’s sister, who is married to her alcoholic, abusive cousin, who […]
Wow. I think we can all agree that My Brilliant Friend had quite the brilliant end. If someone wrote a 100-hundred-page thesis on the significance of Marcello wearing the shoes laboured over by Lila that Stefano bought, I would read it front to back. In a way, I feel like I already did by reading […]
I liked this one! I felt like I read it in mere minutes, it went by so quick. I really felt this book, felt it sweating and sweet as I read it, as our gecko narrator scurries along the wall “like a tick on its host’s skin” and describes how the sun “silenced the birds, […]
Okay, I know this might be a controversial take, but I was bored. Up until the money-burning scene. No offense to Ricardo Piglia, but the genre just isn’t for me. I’ve never been drawn to crime or true crime stories, nor do I particularly enjoy action. They tend to make me feel dizzy and depressed. […]
Another book, another terrible love interest. Can we talk about how everyone in this narrator’s life is simply awful? To begin with, she’s fifteen and a half when she meets and begins a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man. When her mother discovers that she’s been skipping school so he can pick her up in […]
Macabéa, ridiculed, bullied, deemed irrelevant. She “wasn’t an idiot but she had the pure happiness of idiots” (60). She “got up early in order to have more time to do nothing” (26). She “didn’t know what she was just as a dog doesn’t know it’s dog” (19). She was “a hair in the soup [that] […]
I started this book slowly, a few pages a day. Then I read the entire second half in one sitting. At first Natalia’s problems are domestic, thanks to her tyrant of a husband, Quimet. But as the war takes over, Natalia and her children are brought to the brink of starvation and all she can […]
Honestly, even though José gets his education and succeeds in life, the whole story made me very sad. I felt sad for M’man Tine, who literally worked herself to death in the sugar cane fields. I felt sad for José’s mother, whom he rarely saw because she was always working somewhere else. I also felt […]
Carmen Laforet wrote this at 23. What. How. Time’s a-ticking for me I suppose. The main character, Andrea, had my heart from the start, her desire for independence, her dreams of Barcelona which are swiftly crushed by her dysfunctional family. At first, it’s her Aunt Angustias that seems the most overbearing, telling her that “in […]
