COUVERTURE DU PARIS MATCH N°2889 : FRANCOISE SAGAN UNE VIE (Photo credit: Patrick Peccatte)
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A Certain Smile: A Novel by Françoise Sagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Cassandra Neace who blogs at Indie Reader Houston and is a contributor to BookRiot, has initiated #DailyBookPic, a little book-related photo project that I’ve been participating in. For full details, you can check out her post here. Essentially, she’s come up with a set of book-related topics and asks for a photo a day. You can tweet your pics with the hashtag #DailyBookPic.
Here are the topics:
My contributions so far:
Day 1: Favorite Reading Spot
Day 2: Current Read
Day 3: Book Browsing
Day 4: Book Shelf
Day 5: Book Mark
I’ll send future pics directly here!
This post is related to our Riot Read of The Great Gatsby. Check out related posts here.
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Alright folks, here we go. The inaugural Riot Read begins today, and we are kicking off with a few Gatsby-inspired posts, including an extended discussion of the first two sentences, a new literary term to describe Nick Carraway, and a look at what some notable readers said about it.
Also, our forums are live today, and there is a special sub-forum for Gatsby discussion. To get things started, our friends at Out of Print Clothing are giving away a Gatsby tote. To enter, leave a non-anonymous comment in this thread. We’ll draw somebody to win one. Out of Print has a few other prizes for us as the Riot Read moves along, so stay tuned there.
While there is no official schedule, some folks might want to pace themselves. So if you want to read at a steady pace, here is a possible roadmap
June 26 – July 2: Chapters 1 & 2
July 2 – July 9: Chapters 3 & 4
July 9 – July 16: Chapters 5 & 6
July 16 – July 23: Chapter 7
July 23 – July 31: Chapters 8 & 9
We hope there will be discussion happening at various paces, so there are dedicated forums for each chapter should you want to dip in and out at your own speed.
We hope you’ll read along with us. Any ideas about what we can do to make this more fun, interesting, and just plain better, please let us know.
I’m doing this, and am going to follow their reading pace.
I first read this to support Alex when he was reading it in high school (when we were in Atlanta). I’d never read it before (horrors!) and very much enjoyed it. Am looking forward to learning more about it this summer.
It’s been a bit of a wild reading ride recently, mainly because we’re in the middle of some home renovations and I’m also trying to get some progress on my genealogical work. But there’s always time at the end of the day (or on the subway) for a good book.
I’m finishing up Howards End.
How do books get there? Mainly recommendations from friends, book reviews in one of the papers I read, online at places like Book Riot, and of course, the book club. I also like to read books from anyplace I’m planning to travel, although we don’t have much coming up, vacation-wise. I don’t browse in bookstores or the library much…I have a huge hold list (sourced from the above) so I’ve always got books being fed to me.
I subscribe to Shelf Awareness‘ weekly newletter and it was just chock full of good stuff today.
by Tinsley Mortimer (doncha love that name? Tinsley?); and The Uninvited Guests
by Sadie Jones. The first is a novel featuring a displaced Southern woman in Manhattan, the second a comic mystery set in an English manor house.You can check out the rest of the newsletter here.
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I’m currently reading Mindy Kaling‘s memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
Little darlin’…it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darlin’… it seems like years since it’s been here.
Today felt like the right day to get back to my blog. My last post was in December and I’ve been carried through the last few months on the backs of those who love me.
Some of the things that I look forward to, cultural events, travel, singing, have been whizzing by me and I’ve only been able to partially engage. These past two weeks I have struggled with a very bad cold that started in my chest, and is ending there. My allergies have compounded the problem, but I feel like I’m coming out on top.
I am feeling the need to write more, to find creative ways to express myself, both publicly and privately. I have signed up for a webinar that introduces LifeJournal software to see if that might be a platform that I could use for my personal writing. I need to pick up knitting needles, or an embroidery needle, or set up a sewing space to get back to a quilt I’ve started. My plan is to claim a basement bedroom that is normally used for guests as a place where I can leave my work out for short periods of time.
We have some interesting things on the cultural calendar this month, and I hope to use this space to blog about them.
We’re seeing the play High starring Kathleen Turner at the Royal Alex next week. We’ve also got tickets for the TSO’s performance of Holst’s The Planets for which Michael will be joining us. His school music program does their May Lyrics concert that week as well. The following week we have another Books on Film event at TIFF featuring Graham Greene’s novel The Third Man and 1949 film starring Orson Welles.
My reading life has suffered somewhat recently, but I recently finished Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. My review over at Goodreads read:
I love Hollinghurst’s prose, and would have given this five stars. But I can only take so many pages of coke-fuelled gay sex and this novel went over my limit.
That aside, it captures the times so aptly: the British class structure; and the world of rich young men (and their hangers on) who want to DO something, like publish a glossy art magazine; the intersection of race and wealth; and what sexual sins are forgivable.
I also had a quick re-read of the Keep Toronto Reading pick Girls Fall Down
Enough for today but I’ll be back soon. May is looking up!
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Don’t know whether it’s the cooler weather or all the arts events I attended, but I feel more like writing.
First though, I’ve been reading Mary Gordon’s Pearl, a novel concerning a young American woman studying in Dublin who goes on a hunger strike in support of a casualty (at least in her view) of the troubles. What is particularly interesting to me is the voicing of the work. If I am not mistaken, it is written in the first person, the author’s voice, which was at first difficult to read. For example, at the beginning of the second section, she writes:
This is who and what Pearl Meyers believes she is, what and what she is to herself. But what is she to us? A twenty-year-old woman. A woman who is starving, a woman chained to a flagpole in front of the American embassy in Dublin, Ireland. A woman who is lying on the ground.
But who am I? you may be asking.
Think of me this way: midwife, present at the birth. Or perhaps this: godfather, present at the christening. Although of the three people with whom we are concerned, perhaps the most important, Pearl herself, was never christened. If not the christening, them, perhaps the naming. Present at the naming. A the speaking of the most important word.
I am about two thirds of the way through this work and it’s a little slow going, but (I think) an important read.
I’ve got four books on the go right now which is a lot. But so far it’s working for me.
