Christoff Yurievich
Member
Danke vielmals.
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What are you reading? (April 2015)
- Thread starter Maklershed
- Start date
Danke vielmals.
Thanks for the recs folks, but will pass for now. I'll never stick to something unless I post it, so I guess I'll go back to a security blanket of mine and read a survival story. Was browsing the physicals books I own, and saw this. I bought it for my Dad ages ago (like most of the physical books I have), and seemed about time I read it. Just something to kickstart my reading habits again. So much for wanting a bit of escapism!
Now reading.
Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival by Norman Ollestad
Also, one of the kindle daily deals is 'Waldon on Wheels', really enjoyed the book myself, gets a recommendation from me!
Now reading.
Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival by Norman Ollestad
Also, one of the kindle daily deals is 'Waldon on Wheels', really enjoyed the book myself, gets a recommendation from me!
I checked out A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride from the library earlier this week, based mostly on the having seen that a friend on Goodreads gave it 5/5 and knowing he has good taste. I didn't even read the description to see what it's about before opening to the first page, and I come across the first paragraph:
For you. You'll soon. You'll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I'd say. I'd say that's what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.
And I read through it in this very halted, stilted way. I first thought that maybe this is just the beginning, until I started flipping through it and realize that it is all written like this. So, then I look at the description and see "Not so much a stream-of-consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist..."
Oh. Well, I don't hate stream of consciousness writing; in fact my only experience with it, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, was quite positive. But I couldn't stand this at first blush. The reading experience was so disjointed and jerky, and moreover I had trouble even getting an idea of what was going on - it felt as if I was reading words without deriving meaning about who / what / when / where / why from them. After about two or three pages I was seriously considering dropping it.
But I decided to keep pushing, and I'm glad now that I did. For me, I found that reading it the way I read The Waves helped; just letting myself be carried along rather than reading it in a more stilted way. And there's an intense moment early on, within the first twenty or so pages, where the narrator's mother is criticized by her father for the way she has raised her children, where such a palpable and unfiltered sense of anxiety. I'm about a little over a quarter of the way into it now, and there have been quite a few moments since then that capture that sense of unfiltered, raw emotion.
It's really fantastic, powerful stuff, and I can't think of the last time I had such a positive turnaround from my first impressions. It's obviously not the sort of thing I could recommend to anyone, precisely because the prose style is challenging and some people might just despise it too much to get past it, but I think it's worth the effort.
I am glad you are enjoying it as much as I did.
sparky2112
Member
From what I've read about it, this book's cover should be a giant trigger warning...
Oh, I just remembered.
I read The New Yorker's review of A Little Life yesterday (The Subversive Brilliance of "A Little Life"); I don't recommend it for anyone who has not already read the novel because it talks about the book in its totality, but this excerpt made me think about my experience with it:
And I find, thinking back, that it's true. I was moved in painful moments, of course, but it was in a different way. The feeling Necrovex talked about when he said that it was going to give him a panic attack - that tightness in my chest, the anxiety, the empathic sense of pain, the sense of dissociation mixed with horror - that's the sort of feeling the brutal moments inspired for me. But it was the moments of light - generally - that moved me to tears.
I read The New Yorker's review of A Little Life yesterday (The Subversive Brilliance of "A Little Life"); I don't recommend it for anyone who has not already read the novel because it talks about the book in its totality, but this excerpt made me think about my experience with it:
Martin Amis once asked, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones...
And I find, thinking back, that it's true. I was moved in painful moments, of course, but it was in a different way. The feeling Necrovex talked about when he said that it was going to give him a panic attack - that tightness in my chest, the anxiety, the empathic sense of pain, the sense of dissociation mixed with horror - that's the sort of feeling the brutal moments inspired for me. But it was the moments of light - generally - that moved me to tears.