Student Blogs

 Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli is an interesting story! It follows a woman writing a book and she has two children, a boy and a baby girl. At first, I was confused when all these characters did not have names. It made me wonder if the mai... read full post >>

 Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli is an interesting story! It follows a woman writing a book and she has two children, a boy and a baby girl. At first, I was confused when all these characters did not have names. It made me wonder if the mai... read full post >>

Sorry if I posted it twice. Not sure if it posted so I’m doing it again. Hellooooo I know the end of the semester is coming up soon but on my little reader app I always rate all these books that we read in class so this one I’m rating a 7/10, a little confusing […] read full post >>

A horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within. I thought a lot about what this could have meant. Although I may not have fully deciphered it, I thought this sentence summarised the structure of this novel beautifully. The book made me question a lot of things;... read full post >>

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 atte... read full post >>

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 atte... read full post >>

  Do you believe that the way you have progressed in life was a slow, continual growth or more of a “phase/section” based growth? -LS read full post >>

I think this is my favourite book of my contract. I mean, considering there’s only one book left, I’m fairly confident in saying that this is my favourite （´∇｀”）After so many books where perhaps the sentences were a bit complicated, or where the scenes jumped around in time, it was great to read a book […] read full post >>

Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the crowd struck a cord for me as a balancing act, finding time between work, family, and more. It isn’t a book which sits still, instead including so many different voices to create the narrative we follow. The young mother in the present aims to navigate her authorship while parenting, with … read full post >>

I was looking forwards to reading this book and it did not let me down! Although it was a bit longer than the other books, it had me really invested in it for almost all of it. I liked it right from the start when it lays out all of the characters in the narrator […] read full post >>

For starters… there were once again a lot of characters in this novel! So I’m extremely grateful to Ferrante for including an index of characters at the very beginning. It was very much appreciated for someone like me, who struggles with remembering characters – especially side characters that are only mentioned a handful of times […] read full post >>

I’ve never been so tense yet invested while reading a book. Elena and Lila’s friendship was stressful to the point I was holding my breath in for the most of it. The starting scene where Elena says, “she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found” (pg 20) and the title, “my brilliant friend” didn’t brace me for what was about […] read full post >>

So, I choice this book because a friend of mine (that took this course a couple years ago) loves it and recommended it to me rather aggressively. The prologue, I loved. To me it felt a little like a set … Continue reading → read full post >>

I feel like My Brilliant Friend is one of those books that I didn’t fully get into right away, yet the more I read, the more it grew on me. At the beginning, I was honestly kind of confused with all the characters and the neighborhood dynamics. It took me a bit to figure out […] read full post >>

When I think back on my adolescence I feel a strong sense of nostalgia — a painful sort of longing that will never truly be fulfilled. I suppose it’s true what they say… you don’t truly appreciate what you have until it’s gone. As time passes, I look back fondly on my childhood years, but […] read full post >>