Tags
books, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Die Ringe des Saturn, monthly wrapup, reading, The Yellow Wallpaper, W.G. Sebald
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I’m sure if you’re (still) following this blog, you will have noticed that things have been awfully quite around here for a while now. I haven’t given up on this blog – I enjoy writing reviews far too much to do that – but I have been rather busy with my research and very short on energy and brain space. That isn’t an unusual thing for me to happen in winter, and November tends to be particularly bad, but this year clearly has taken its toll in how much the darkness and the clock change (and, let’s be real, the general state of the world) have affected me. My reading has been very slow as I’ve struggled more than usual with just keeping functional in other parts of my life. It feels like the thing that the virus situation has affected most is my creativity, and like all my ability to string words together in a coherent manner has gone into writing research papers and my PhD thesis over the last couple of months.
Unsurprisingly, given that introduction, my November reading is less than impressive: I finished a total of two books, one of which was a novella/short story.
W.G. Sebald – Die Ringe des Saturn ★★★★☆
Sebald’s Ringe des Saturn (translated as The Rings of Saturn) is one of those weird mixtures between memoir, nature, and travel writing. Though written about a decade earlier, it is reminiscent of Olivia Laing’s To the River and thus should have been an instant new favourite of mine. As it happens, it did not quite make that cut, and I’m not even entirely sure why. I definitely enjoyed Sebald’s meandering tale of a coastal walk interspersed with reflections about history, literature, and decay, but I never really got used to Sebald’s idiosyncratic use of language. (His German is strongly influenced by English in ways that took me out of the flow of the story on several occasions.)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Yellow Wallpaper ★★★★☆
Some friends of mine started a quarantine book club a while ago and I decided to rejoin in November; this was one of our picks. We don’t usually manage full novels (all of us have too much other stuff going on, mostly work), but we do get to a couple of short stories and novellas each month. The Yellow Wallpaper is one of those stories everyone seems to have read in school or university (I never did), and I can see why. It’s skilfully crafted, topical (even being over a hundred years old), and the ending packs a punch.
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I’ve also decided to DNF Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester, which I started as an audiobook in September. It’s not that I don’t like it (so far, I’m indifferent to mildly entertained), but because I’ve found that I just can’t focus on audiobooks right now. I might try again some other time, I might pick up something else in December – or I might not. As of right now, I honestly couldn’t say.
(Yes, I’m still chopping away at Bleak House and I’m very slow at it.)