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Weekly-ish Reading
Reading
My highlight of last week was finding a brand new copy of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino on the college library's "Free Books" cart (maybe they ordered too many copies?), so I've been working my way through that! Currently about halfway through the "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" essay, which is great, though my favorite so far is probably "Ecstasy"; I didn't grow up Evangelical or in a megachurch, but her descriptions of drifting away from it as a teenager, plus that weird, mixed-up feeling of ambivalent on the one hand, needing to be a part of something bigger than yourself on the other, hit close to home.
I stalled out in the middle of Mississippi Jack (aka Bloody Jack #5) and am working on getting back into it.
Read
Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola, which a good friend recommended to me with the selling points "It's about a repressed woman in an unhappy marriage and also Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse in the stage version." (And yep, there's a stage version! And Keira Knightley starred in a production in 2015! And Elizabeth Olsen starred in In Secret, the 2013 movie adaptation! With Oscar Isaac!!) Which, I won't say my main take away from this book was "Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse," but boy would Amber Gray make a fantastic Thérèse--she's a bit of a Helene Kuragina dialed up and down at the same time, much more reserved and not willing to flaunt her affair in her husband's face, but also willing to conspire with her lover to get rid of her husband. Which, you know, murder doesn't tend to make you any less repressed or any happier than you were to begin with, especially when your husband was selfish and ineffectual but basically harmless, and your lover is, at best, a bit of a sociopath.
Anyway. I loved this book a lot. Its biggest strength is that it's ridiculously readable and enjoyable despite being creepy, gruesome, and depressing with some honestly sickening moments. Nobody comes off that well (duh), least of all Thérèse, but everybody is layered and complex in their awfulness, and Thérèse's romance (?) with her lover, Laurent, is both the least romantic romance in the history of unromantic romances and very hot in its own way.
Oh, and:
* I was listening to "Down by the Water" by P.J. Harvey a couple days after finishing the book, and now the two are fused together in my head. This should give you some idea of how Thérèse and Laurent decide to off her husband.
* Aside from the husband, the character who comes the closest to an innocent victim in the book is the mother-in-law, Madame Raquin, and by the end your heart will absolutely break for her.
* There's a cat. At first you'll be creeped out by the cat. Then your heart will absolutely break for the cat.
My highlight of last week was finding a brand new copy of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino on the college library's "Free Books" cart (maybe they ordered too many copies?), so I've been working my way through that! Currently about halfway through the "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" essay, which is great, though my favorite so far is probably "Ecstasy"; I didn't grow up Evangelical or in a megachurch, but her descriptions of drifting away from it as a teenager, plus that weird, mixed-up feeling of ambivalent on the one hand, needing to be a part of something bigger than yourself on the other, hit close to home.
I stalled out in the middle of Mississippi Jack (aka Bloody Jack #5) and am working on getting back into it.
Read
Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola, which a good friend recommended to me with the selling points "It's about a repressed woman in an unhappy marriage and also Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse in the stage version." (And yep, there's a stage version! And Keira Knightley starred in a production in 2015! And Elizabeth Olsen starred in In Secret, the 2013 movie adaptation! With Oscar Isaac!!) Which, I won't say my main take away from this book was "Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse," but boy would Amber Gray make a fantastic Thérèse--she's a bit of a Helene Kuragina dialed up and down at the same time, much more reserved and not willing to flaunt her affair in her husband's face, but also willing to conspire with her lover to get rid of her husband. Which, you know, murder doesn't tend to make you any less repressed or any happier than you were to begin with, especially when your husband was selfish and ineffectual but basically harmless, and your lover is, at best, a bit of a sociopath.
Anyway. I loved this book a lot. Its biggest strength is that it's ridiculously readable and enjoyable despite being creepy, gruesome, and depressing with some honestly sickening moments. Nobody comes off that well (duh), least of all Thérèse, but everybody is layered and complex in their awfulness, and Thérèse's romance (?) with her lover, Laurent, is both the least romantic romance in the history of unromantic romances and very hot in its own way.
Oh, and:
* I was listening to "Down by the Water" by P.J. Harvey a couple days after finishing the book, and now the two are fused together in my head. This should give you some idea of how Thérèse and Laurent decide to off her husband.
* Aside from the husband, the character who comes the closest to an innocent victim in the book is the mother-in-law, Madame Raquin, and by the end your heart will absolutely break for her.
* There's a cat. At first you'll be creeped out by the cat. Then your heart will absolutely break for the cat.
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Now I want to read more of his books! I can't quite put my finger on what made this one so depressing-yet-enjoyable for me, but I just gobbled it up.