Rosa Reads

In which Rosa, a Yorkshire-born-and-Yorkshire-bred English Literature undergraduate at the University of St Andrews in Scotland with an unhealthy book obsession and a penchant for all things literary, reads...

And blogs about it.

You can help me buy more books by clicking below!

theme by Conkers

 

End of exams, end of semester, end of living in this flat. Which means it’s time to pack up my books (as well as, I suppose, other things).

Prizes* for identifying your favourite/least favourite/the most obscure/the best cover.

It’s possible I have a problem.

*Nope.

drinkyourjuice:

oh Jane i’m so happy for you
Thank you
and Lizzie too of course
Yes, that’s wonderful
and now Lydia too
thank God you all found such wonderful men to marry
Thank you
we would all honestly be homeless right now if you hadn’t 
I suppose that’s true
we would have nowhere to go 
everyone we know would just
allow that to happen to us
I hope you don’t think I was so hard on all of you about it without cause
No of course not
It’s just that if you didn’t marry I would spend the rest of my life worrying about my homeless daughters 
I’m just glad we’re all so happy now
and even if you aren’t 
literally your only other options would have been prostitution or begging 
so
Let’s not talk about it
Please have sons 
all right, Mother
have sons and be happy
I know
I’m still going to lose the house 
the minute your father dies 
he’ll just be dead and I’ll have no husband 
and no house and nothing
I know
I’m going to have to live with one of you 
you’re going to have let me move in with you 
I know

- Texts from Pride and Prejudice, The Hairpin

I know I’ve made a similar post before, but when my favourite bloggers post about literary culture, something inside me bursts into a thousand tiny little happy glitter-pieces.

Follow Christine for some of the most insightful, poignant - and bloody funny - Tumblr posts that exist.

coponder Asked:

I don't know how long ago you posted about Alain de Botton, but I recommend starting with Essays in Love. Because it's fiction, it runs a little more smoothly - but at the same time, offers a very accurate examination of love and relationships. 10/10 would recommend. I've also read How Proust... which is also a great book with wonderful insights, but also has some lulling passages.

Thanks to everyone who gave me Alain de Botton recommendations! I think Essays in Love seems to be the most popular - plus this message was the most useful (thanks coponder!)

With the end of my exams in sight and summer coming up, I’ve been going on a bit of a pre-emptive book-buying spree (hah, as if I needed a larger to-read pile), so I shall add Essays in Love to the ol’ Amazon shopping basket.

As always, my Askbox is open to all recommendations, job offers and book deals.

If you guys are anything like me, you’ll get unnecessarily excited about an article entitled The Great Gatsby: Are There Any Feminists in the Disillusioned Jazz Age? Which is why I have a provided a link to said article. It’s really everything I care about rolled into one on-topic-and-not-super-gimicky piece. It’s perhaps rather simplistically written, but at least Feminspire seems to actually understand contemporary feminism as it really stands, acknowledging intersectionality in hints of class and race issues as well as those of gender. Plus it’s succeeded in getting me in the mood (as if I wasn’t already) for the much-anticipated/partly-dreaded/hopefully-wonderful (oh Baz Luhrmann I do hope it’s wonderful) film. And it’ll take you like five goddamn minutes to read is all I’m saying, okay?

If you guys are anything like me, you’ll get unnecessarily excited about an article entitled The Great Gatsby: Are There Any Feminists in the Disillusioned Jazz Age?

Which is why I have a provided a link to said article. It’s really everything I care about rolled into one on-topic-and-not-super-gimicky piece.

It’s perhaps rather simplistically written, but at least Feminspire seems to actually understand contemporary feminism as it really stands, acknowledging intersectionality in hints of class and race issues as well as those of gender.

Plus it’s succeeded in getting me in the mood (as if I wasn’t already) for the much-anticipated/partly-dreaded/hopefully-wonderful (oh Baz Luhrmann I do hope it’s wonderful) film.

And it’ll take you like five goddamn minutes to read is all I’m saying, okay?

feministdisney:

Chimamanda Adichi: The Danger of a Single Story

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

This was really wonderful and I highly recommend taking twenty minutes to watch it (if, like me, you’re currently in the midst of exam season I can only assume that, like me, you need no inducement to procrastination).

I found Adichie such a compelling speaker that I’ve just ordered her collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, to add to my embarrassingly large to-read list/pile/utterly disorganised loose grouping. Oops.

“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”

- Lemony Snicket (via honeycaughtalite)

(via fuckyeahreading)

A Portrait of the Artist as Pajama-Clad Undergraduate About to Take an Exam on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Once She’s Got Dressed, Hopefully)* *As well as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rhys’ After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and Golding’s Darkness Visible. Sorry for subjecting you guys to awful pictures of me, but even two hours before an exam I’m trying to find new ways to procrastinate. Wish me luck!

A Portrait of the Artist as Pajama-Clad Undergraduate About to Take an Exam on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Once She’s Got Dressed, Hopefully)*

*As well as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rhys’ After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and Golding’s Darkness Visible.

Sorry for subjecting you guys to awful pictures of me, but even two hours before an exam I’m trying to find new ways to procrastinate. Wish me luck!

I get asked this question a lot. The short answer is nope. The longer answer is I had one for all of about three hours, during which time I tried to input every single book I had ever read, because I’m incurably anal and can’t stand when things aren’t organised properly. Unfortunately I am also incurably lazy, so after an incredibly stressful few hours of feeling like Sisyphus and his damn stone, I gave up and deleted the whole thing. I don’t really know who I was kidding, how was I ever going to be able to remember every book I’ve ever read? Awful idea. PS; You should definitely read 1Q84. Mo’ Murakami, mo’…good literature in your life?

I get asked this question a lot. The short answer is nope.

The longer answer is I had one for all of about three hours, during which time I tried to input every single book I had ever read, because I’m incurably anal and can’t stand when things aren’t organised properly. Unfortunately I am also incurably lazy, so after an incredibly stressful few hours of feeling like Sisyphus and his damn stone, I gave up and deleted the whole thing. I don’t really know who I was kidding, how was I ever going to be able to remember every book I’ve ever read? Awful idea.

PS; You should definitely read 1Q84. Mo’ Murakami, mo’…good literature in your life?

“In university courses we do exercises. Term papers, quizzes, final examinations are not meant for publication. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party, picking up the good bits of food or conversation, bearing with the rest, going home when it comes to seem the reasonable thing to do. Art, at those moments when it feels most like art — when we feel most alive, most alert, most triumphant — is less like a cocktail party than a tank full of sharks.”

- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (via larmoyante)

(via larmoyante)

Review: 1Q84, Books I and II

The first two books in Haruki Murakami’s trilogy, 1Q84 I and II tell the story of Aomame, a skilled assassin who finds herself in a parallel universe.

Yep. And it gets weirder; add to this an extremist cult, a long-lost childhood friend/lover, a high-school girl who appears to be some kind of writing prodigy, mysterious “little people” and multiple deaths. Not to mention a continuation of Murakami’s seeming obsession with giving pieces of music a stranglehold on his books. Norwegian Wood opens with The Beatles’ song of the same name, 1Q84 with Leoš Janáček’s ‘Sinfonietta’.

image

Despite all this (or perhaps because of it?) I thought these books were a pretty good read. 1Q84 is surreal and strange, but has a clean, clipped quality that makes it seem realistic, if not exactly believable. It feels…grown up - in a way that other novels of its type don’t (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go springs to mind, as does David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, although I do have a real soft spot for the latter), to the point where I would hesitate to class it as a sci-fi or fantasy work. Instead, I would place it alongside Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or even Brave New World.

The point is that I enjoyed it quite a lot, although nowhere near as much as Norwegian Wood. I wasn’t wholly convinced by some of the more sci-fi elements of 1Q84, and much as I love Murakami’s writing style, I prefer to have it applied to more mundane plots.

This was read, as with most of last summer’s books, whilst roadtripping in Scandinavia. Unfortunately I can’t read in moving vehicles without vomiting copiously, so I was limited in my roadside reading to the times we slept in the car in lay-bys. Here, have a (less than attractive) picture:

image

By the way, please note that although it looks way too light to be bedding down for the night, bear in mind that this is Norway in July; it was about midnight when this was taken.

Final Word: Sharp, sparse sci-fi for adults and/or literary snobs. I should probably read the final instalment at some point.

Almost as good as the Jay-Z vs. Jay Gatsby one.

Almost as good as the Jay-Z vs. Jay Gatsby one.

(Source: teenfrank, via avocadosalad)

A recommendation request.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Alain de Botton posts on my Dashboard recently (and reblogged a quotation I especially liked here), and I was wondering if anyone cared to furnish me with a recommendation of a work of his to read?

Should I start with How Proust Can Change Your Life? Or begin at the beginning, as it were, and read Essays in Love? Or something else? Or should I even avoid him entirely? Is he secretly a bit rubbish?

I value your opinions! Let me know here.

theawkwardpufferfish Asked:

Hey, just wanted to say I was in Paris last week and I read your note in Shakespeare and Company, just thought I'd say hi :)

Really? That’s wonderful! I didn’t think anyone would see it in amongst everything else - congratulations (I guess)! Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoyed Paris/Shakespeare and Co. as much as I did.

colporteur: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. Jessica takes the most beautiful photographs*, posts the most beautiful poetry, and (most importantly) feels the way I feel about food. Also I once used her scone recipe and then lived off the results for about two weeks. Both her Tumblr and her blogspot are magical. Go follow. *The above photo is not one of hers, but that doesn’t matter. Be quiet.

colporteur:

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

Jessica takes the most beautiful photographs*, posts the most beautiful poetry, and (most importantly) feels the way I feel about food.

Also I once used her scone recipe and then lived off the results for about two weeks.

Both her Tumblr and her blogspot are magical. Go follow.

*The above photo is not one of hers, but that doesn’t matter. Be quiet.

Theming My Life

I recently read “I Read About It: Music, Food, Poetry, and Lifestyle Suggestions We’ve Taken from Literature”, a really great piece from The Millions about the influence of books and films on…well, everything really:

Nick Moran: Maybe I’m too suggestible, but I’ve a habit of absorbing bits of books I read. I used to think it was like literary osmosis — natural, spontaneous — but I’ve since noticed a primary trigger: food. In this respect, perhaps it’s more like literary  Inception — involuntary, unconscious. Food references grab my attention even when they’re wildly inappropriate. I bought a doughnut right as I started reading Skippy Dies. I ordered fugu twice in Japan because I read People Who Eat Darkness on the plane over. I’ve tried to read on a full stomach, but it does me no good. Months later, these references might come back to me. It’s been over two years since I read Origins, but I’m still near-manic when I see pregnant women in public. Eat more salmon! I wish I could scream. (I’ve since disbarred myself from reading about childbirth.) The other day I finished reading The Westies, T.J. English’s salacious overview of Manhattan’s Irish mafia, and now I’m trying to eat a meal at all of the bars mentioned. Sometimes I reflect on this development shamefully. I really want to eat a meal where Mickey Featherstoneshot a guy? And yet there’s nothing I can do. I am too easily swayed. I am biddable. One thing I know: it’ll get worse before it gets better. Next I’m reading The Master and Margarita. I’m told there are pickles. I’m told there are sausages.

All this resonates with me strongly. I am consistently swayed by what I read and what I see. I theme my life something awful - whether it’s theming my holiday reading with the place I’m visiting, or theming my dinner to the film I’m watching. Some of these are mere association; there is nothing, for example, in The West Wing that suggests one should accompany a viewing with a bacon sandwich, and watch it only in the mornings, preferably hungover - and yet that is absolutely what it means for me.

Other links are more direct. I read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy whilst in Denmark and Sweden, and developed a penchant for rye bread, Jarlsberg, remoulade and black coffee. Four years later, and to this day I can’t have it for lunch without feeling like Lisbeth Salander.

Perhaps more worryingly, I am so easily swayed by what I read that it can affect my life choices. Possibly the most formative influence of my childhood were Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. There are ten, and they span Betsy Ray’s life from her fifth birthday party to her mid-twenties - her Minnesotan childhood to her married life. Betsy wants to be a writer. Betsy wants red hair. Betsy wants to prove herself to be the absolute best at everything. Betsy wants to go to university. Betsy wants to be a leader. Betsy wants to travel the world. Betsy wants fame and glory. Substitute ‘Rosa’ for ‘Betsy’ in any of these sentences and you’re faced with my life story. I’m actually planning on writing another post on the importance of this series to me, but for now suffice to say that when I left home for the first time to go travelling on my gap year, I took Betsy and the Great World with me and used it as a sort of guidebook (albeit one nearly 100 years out-of-date).

So what I’m saying is that it’s not really just “suggestions” that I take from books - it’s instructions. Is that troubling? I feel troubled. Welp, I guess I’d better go find a book about feeling troubled so I don’t feel out of sync.

  archive     ›