The Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-thon begins now. To see my reading plans, check out My Plans for the 24 Hour Read-a-thon post.
Category: Random
My Plans for the 24 Hour Read-a-thon
The Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-thon is a mini reading challenge that happens twice a year in April and October. Traditionally I’m never prepared or often hear about a reading challenge like this too late. This time I made an effort to participate; I want to be more involved in the book blogging community. As this is my first 24 hour read-a-thon I’m not sure what to expect and how much I need to prepare. I may have gone overboard, but I’m planning on focusing on cleaning up my NetGalley list. I’m not going to get through all these ARCs but it would be good to clear of a few of these books. The read-a-thon starts at 11pm Saturday here in Australia, who what I’ll finish but here is a list of the books on my reading list in order of priority.
Top Ten Tuesday: Great Femme Fatales
It’s Tuesday again which means time for another round of Top Ten Tuesday; I like joining in on this meme because I have a set topic to work with. Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogger meme that is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and this week the theme is: Great femme fatales. I love a good femme fatale, they are mysterious, seductive and often deadly.
- Brigid O’Shaughnessy – The Maltese Falcon by Dashell Hammett (without spoiling the story, Brigid is the ultimate femme fatale)
- Phyllis Nirdlinger – Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (like Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Phyllis embodies the perfect archetype of a femme fatale)
- Cleopatra – Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (Cleopatra is possibly one of the original femme fatales)
- Dolores – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (while we may not want a 12 year old femme fatale. You can’t deny she doesn’t embody the characteristics of a femme fatale)
- Vivian Sternwood – The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (I can’t over look Chandler and Vivian is his best example of a femme fatale)
- Daisy Buchanan – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (no explanation needed)
- Rebecca – Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (just because she’s dead doesn’t stop Rebecca from being a great femme fatale)
- Joan Medford – The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain (Cain is the king of the femme fatale and I struggled to only name one of his characters in this list)
- Laurel Gray – In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (sassy, strong minded with a little mystery to her)
- Veronica Mars – The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas & Jennifer Graham (if you’ve seen the TV show you’ll know how great Veronica Mars is; part hard-boiled detective part femme fatale)
Top Ten Tuesday: Love Triangles
It’s Tuesday again which means time for another round of Top Ten Tuesday; I like joining in on this meme because I have a set topic to work with. Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogger meme that is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and this week the theme is: Bookish Things (That Aren’t Books), which I’m not going to do. Instead I’m going to high-jack this week’s Top Ten Tuesday and give you a list of novels with a decent love triangle within them.
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy — Alyosha Vronsky, Alexei and Anna Karenin
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton — Zeena, Ethan, and Mattie
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov — Clare, Dolores, and Humbert Humbert
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro — Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy
- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood — Oryx, Crake, and Snowman
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen — Wickham (or Mr Collins), Mr Darcy, and Elizabeth Bennet
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tom, Daisy, and Jay Gatsby
- The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides — Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell
- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Albert, Lotte, and Werther
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte — Linton, Catherine, and Heathcliff
Top Ten Tuesday: Important Books
It’s Tuesday again which means time for another round of Top Ten Tuesday; I like joining in on this meme because I have a set topic to work with. Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogger meme that is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and this week the theme is: Most Unique Books. I’m not sure if I can find ten books that did something different from the norm, so I’m going to do books (that I’ve read) that are important for the way they helped shape or change the world of literature.
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin – this novel is credited as the first dystopian novel.
- A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle – May not be the first detective novel but it revolutionised the genre.
- Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri – An collection of epic poems that dive into the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – for it’s commentary of the Jazz age and the American dream.
- Red Harvest by Dashell Hammett – may not be the first pulp novel but it is credited for being Hard-Boiled fiction to a wider audience.
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – for the way it adolescent alienation and angst
- Catch-22 by Joseph’s Heller – a satirical look at the military and its bureaucracy
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – Censorship, book banning and the importance of literature.
- The Stranger by Albert Camus – because we need a bit of existentialism in our literature.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (of course) – this novel deals with a wide range of topics; Romanticism, science, feminism and so on, as well as being a milestone in Horror and Science-Fiction.
Top Ten Tuesday: “Gateway” Books In My Reading Journey
It’s Tuesday again which means time for another round of Top Ten Tuesday; I like joining in on this meme because I have a set topic to work with. Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogger meme that is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and this week the theme is: Top Ten “Gateway” Books In My Reading Journey. Basically a list of books that played a significant role in my reading journey, from the start, discovering Russian literature, breaking reading slumps and so on.
- Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! by Craig Schuftan – started my love of reading, the Romantics and learning
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – the book that really started my passion for reading
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – cemented my passion for Russian literature
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë – found a love for the Victorian gothic novel
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut – developed an interest in philosophical science fiction
- The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy – developed an interest in mysteries and pulp fiction
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón – the book you recommend to everyone as a gateway book
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino – an interest in post-modernism (sadly not much of an understanding yet)
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – broke a major reading slump last year
- Careless People by Sarah Churchwell – I credit this book for a new interest in non-fiction
Monthly Review – March 2014
As March comes to a close it is time to look at our reading journey for the month again. This month we took a look at Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, a fascinating look into Greek heritage and intersexuality. I hope everyone has had a wonderful month of reading and had time to fit this award-winning novel into their busy schedule. Still a lot of action happening with the reading challenge as well; looks like two hundred books been added this month. For those who don’t know about the reading challenge, there is still time to join in the fun, so check out my post here.
A reminder that next month’s book will be The Magician by Levi Grossman for our fantasy theme. I haven’t read this novel before but I’ve heard good things. Marketed as Harry Potter for adults, which makes me a little worried. I’ve not read Harry Potter before but always cautious when a book is marketed to be the next of anything.
Highlights for my month’s reading included Middlesex of course but also By Blood We Live by Glen Duncan, and Alif the Unseen by G. Wilson Willow. The biggest highlight was Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an exciting novella that surpassed all my expectations; heaps better than the movie. What have you been reading this month and what were the highlights?
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Title: Middlesex (Goodreads)
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Published: Bloomsbury, 2002
Pages: 529
Genres: Literary Fiction
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
When Jeffrey Eugenides set out to write Middlesex he wanted to “[tell] epic events in the third person and psychosexual events in the first person”. He had decided that the voice “had to render the experience of a teenage girl and an adult man, or an adult male-identified hermaphrodite”. This was no easy task; he had to seek expert advice about intersexuality, sexology, and the formation of gender identity. His motivation came from reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and being unsatisfied by the lack of detail about intersex anatomy and his emotions.
”I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
If you’ve read Jeffrey Eugenides before you will know he doesn’t just stop at one issue, Middlesex is also loosely based on his life and is used to explore his Greek Heritage. While the book’s main protagonist is Cal Stephanides, Middlesex is a family saga that explores the impact of a mutated gene over three generations. Starting with Cal’s grandparents, the novel looks at their escape from the ongoing Greco-Turkish War and emigrating from Smyrna in Asia Minor to the United States. This section has similar themes to most immigration stories, looking at Greek and US culture in the 1920’s as well as their efforts to assimilate into American society. However this is overshadowed by the fact that Cal’s grandparents are also brother and sister.
Middlesex continues to follow the Stephanides family through the story of Cal’s parents and eventually his life. While the reader gets glimpses of Cal’s life throughout the novel, the last part is where we really explore how the 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (a recessive condition that caused him to be born with female characteristics) impacted his life. While I got the impression that this was the main focus of the novel and to some extent it is, I was expecting to explore the struggle and emotions behind his condition to a greater extent.
Jeffrey Eugenides has a lot going on his novels and you really need to be a literary critic to enjoy Middlesex to the full extent. I love Eugenides because he is too smart for his own good, on a basic level you can enjoy his novels but there is so much going on underneath that rereading is almost essential. Middlesex is a family saga but there are elements of romance, history, coming of age and, because of his Greek heritage, tragicomedy. You could spend hours exploring the hysterical realism and metafictional aspects from this book. For example; does Cal’s condition have any bearing on where he is narrating this novel from? Berlin, a city that also was divided into two (East and West). Also, why does the narrative style switch between first and third person? Some parts of the story are told in first person but Cal would never have been able to recount what happened in that kind of detail. Is this to evoke confusion within the reader, forcing them to just feel a fraction of what Cal must be feeling?
This is an incredibly complex novel and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what Jeffrey Eugenides has done. This is in fact the third of his novels I’ve read and sadly that is all of them for now. While I did enjoy Middlesex I found more joy from The Virgin Suicides (which deals with suicide) and The Marriage Plot (dealing with mental illness). I really appreciate the themes Eugenides explores and the complexities of his novels, but personal opinion is going against the norm here. Middlesex is probably his most recognised novel; it even won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Don’t let the complexity of Middlesex put you off reading this fantastic novel; sure, there is a lot there but it still worth picking up. You can spend as much time as you want exploring its depths but in the end you’ll come away with something. It is a compelling read that will stay with you well after finishing it. This is the perfect type of novel to pick up for a book club.
Top Ten Tuesday: Books on my Bookish Bucket List
It’s Tuesday again which means time for another round of Top Ten Tuesday; I like joining in on this meme because I have a set topic to work with. Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogger meme that is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and this week the theme is: Books on my Bookish Bucket List. These are books I plan to read to increase my pretentious levels but feel like I need to become a better reader first.
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
Top Ten Tuesday: On My Autumn 2014 TBR List
It’s Tuesday again which means time for another round of Top Ten Tuesday; I like joining in on this meme because I have a set topic to work with. Top Ten Tuesday is a book blogger meme that is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and this week the theme is: On My Autumn 2014 TBR List. I’m not sure if I’ll get to all these books; I’m sure others will get in the way but here are ten books I plan to read over the next few months.
- Equilateral by Ken Kalfus
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Ransom by David Malouf
- Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh
- The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
- The Magicians by Lev Grossman
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit
- The Yellow Papers by Dominique Wilson