Student Blogs

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 >>

I picked this book because I saw that one of the main themes was friendship and recently I’d been thinking about friendship a lot and my own relationships with some of my friends and this was very interesting to read.I feel like ever since I was a litt... read full post >>

I picked this book because I saw that one of the main themes was friendship and recently I’d been thinking about friendship a lot and my own relationships with some of my friends and this was very interesting to read.I feel like ever since I was a litt... read full post >>

“Do octopuses have little mobydicks? read full post >>

#ElenaFerrante #MyBrilliantFriend read full post >>

So my first thoughts after reading this novel… was honestly “confusion”. I did not know what was going on for the first half of the novel, and even after finishing it, I still don’t feel like I fully understand what was going on. Things started to make sense after I watched the lecture video. The […] read full post >>

I really enjoyed Faces in the Crowd, however, I found myself more confused than not over the course of my read. The multiple perspective changes (from the woman to Owen), the different locations (i.e. New York City and Mexico City) and the various time periods (for example, the woman’s present day compared to her young […] read full post >>

“Then I go back to the novel. A vertical novel told horizontally. A story that has to be seen from below, like Manhattan from the subway.” (122) “Or a horizontal novel, told vertically. A horizontal vertigo.” (125) Getting into the book was a bit difficult for me. It reminded me of Andre Breton’s Nadja due to what […] read full post >>