You’ll need to lock in early to Happiness and Love, in order to get with Zoe Dubno’s style. But it is absolutely worth your initial effort.
First to the style: It is pure stream-of-consciousness. There are no paragraphs and no chapter breaks – start reading at page one and keep going until you hit the end (page 267), at which point, you are well and truly feeling all the things the novel’s narrator if feeling (annoyed, aggrieved, exhausted, amused, enlightened, relieved). Continue reading
Clear by Carys Davies Continue reading
“Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don’t need applause for every little thing – they can get joy from petting a dog of hanging out with their kid and that’s enough. This kind of person can do cross-country drives… Parkers, on the other hand … need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause. ‘Bravo’, someone might say after they fit the car into an especially tight spot. ‘Amazing’. The rest of the time they’re bored and fundamentally kind of…. disappointed. A Parker can’t drive across the country. But Parkers are good in emergencies… They like to save the day.”
So, are you a Driver or a Parker? When I read this description (it’s key in setting up the premise of Miranda July’s novel, All Fours), I initially thought that I was a Driver. But then I got to the bit about Parkers and emergencies, and realised that that was me. Also, I’m really good at parallel parking (not tooting my own horn, just a fact). Continue reading
Novellas in November is hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. Continue reading
Here’s my year in books (tomorrow I’ll post my favourites for 2022) – Continue reading
It’s been years – no, decades – since I read any Virginia Woolf. And I’d be hard pushed to say what of hers I’ve read, apart from A Room of One’s Own (and when it’s so long ago, I’m not sure it counts).
Anyway, Mrs. Dalloway was in the reading stack and seemed like a decent starting point for Novella November. Continue reading
01. Are we excited about the Man Booker 2017 longlist? I’ve read two (Exit West – didn’t like it much at all; Swing Time – loved some bits, other bits not so much) and have one more in the reading pile (The Underground Railroad). I’m intrigued by 4 3 2 1 and Lincoln in the Bardo. Tell me who you think will win and I’ll endeavour to read those before it’s announced so I can feel smug about being ahead of the curve 🙂 Continue reading
In the end notes of Priya Parmar’s book, Vanessa and Her Sister, the author says “It is not easy to fictionalise the Bloomsbury Group, as their lives are so well documented. They were prolific correspondents and diarists, and there is a wealth of existing primary material. The difficulty came in finding enough room for fiction in the negative spaces they left behind.”
It may not have been easy but Parmar makes it appear effortless. Her novel, a fictional diary by Vanessa Bell, painter, and sister to author Virginia Woolf is so convincing, so compelling, that my ‘belief’ never wavered for a moment. The diary entries are interwoven with correspondence between members of the Bloomsbury Group – letters, telegrams and postcards.
