Rosa Reads

Donna Tartt’s first novel is a book I’d been meaning to read for a very long time, but for whatever reason never got round to buying. Fortunately it was given to me for my birthday (LAST DECEMBER because that’s how long it’s taken me to get ‘round to writing this review) by my old flatmate/good time gal/pizza partner Holly (ashheapsandmillionaires) who insisted I had to read it before we left university. She was right about that (though sadly not about anything else ever) because - like reading The Catcher in the Rye in your 20s or 30s and trying to relate to a character who in actual fact is relatable in no way unless you happen to be a pretentious 16-year-old boy who thinks he’s special because he has somehow broken out of the rigid masculine power structure by being “sensitive” but in actual fact just wants rewards for being a human being with thoughts and feelings - reading The Secret History when you’re not at university (or at least towards the end of high school) simply will not work.

Oh, sidenote: I really didn’t like The Catcher in the Rye, could you tell?

I had a really enjoyable time reading The Secret History; it was the first thing I turned to after a semester of nothing but Virginia Woolf and dissertation research, so reading it was a bit like having a nice lie down after doing some heavy lifting. Y’know, in that you’ve been productive and done something rewarding but then you’re…well, done. And you want a cup of tea. I feel this analogy may have gone a bit awry, but you understand.

On to a synopsis! Spoiler-free, of course. Richard, who narrates the novel, goes to a New England college and meets a bunch of edgy hipsters who really love Ancient Greece. At first he’s mainly just worried about fitting in, but then it all gets very dark and very serious and very gripping. The Secret History really has it all: fast pace, great characters, wonderful setting, thrilling plot, and some wanky cultural references. Death, sex, poetry.

It also reminded me how much I love mystery novels, which are a seriously overlooked genre in my reading habits. I raced through the first half, with its intrigue and scheming and perfect character development, and although I found the second half lost itself and its momentum a bit, I still enjoyed it enough to do something I very rarely do: I put aside the last twenty pages for a few hours to delay gratification. Adulthood, you guys.

I arrived back in Dublin last night, and despite the fact there's no food in my fridge and it's too rainy to go to Tesco, I feel remarkably ready for the second (and penultimate) semester of my M.Phil.

I mean, before that semester actually starts I have the small matter of an 8000-word essay due in less than two weeks that has yet to be started but look! Look at my tidy desk and my multiple to-do lists and more importantly look at the fancy bottle of wine hiding in the corner! No €4 pink acid this semester! Or at least, not until I finish that one!

I'm heading back to Dublin in a couple of days for the second semester of my M.Phil, which reminded me that I didn't ever mention a cool thing that happened this past semester (which is very strange, as I don't normally miss opportunities for self-promotion).

[ 2012 // 2013 ]

BEST BOOK READ Struggling with this one this year (nothing I read necessarily stands above the rest). Think I'll have to go with A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. It was gut-wrenchingly sad, and the writing was unbelievable.

BEST BOOK NOT READ I'm guessing Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay - which I was given for my birthday and is waiting for me next to my bed in Dublin. Hopefully it'll make it onto the 2015 awards.

MOST TIMELY BOOK The Graduate - Charles Webb: The first thing I (re)read after I graduated.

MOST SURPRISINGLY DULL BOOK Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is ostensibly about magic and other worlds and all that jazz, but ends up being 90% about legal difficulties.

NICEST SPINE The Testament of Mary – Colm Tóibín (it's GOLD and BEAUTIFUL)

LEAST FAVOURITE PUBLISHING TREND Books being published in editions that are monstrously large. Why are books suddenly the size of a small wardrobe?? Even paperbacks! I'm against it, it's very weird and awful.

MOST FUCKED-UP BOOK Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn (I really have some problems with this book actually, I think it does some v bizarre romanticising of violence and abusive relationships, plus the writing is really not what it was cracked up to be - it's genuinely quite terrible in parts. And, w/out spoilers, the end is just ??!?)

BEST RECOMMENDATION ON MY PART The Secret History – Donna Tartt, which I recommended to a friend who hasn’t finished a novel in a really long time, and takes forever to read them. He's been devouring it, so well done me.

BOOK I SHOULD HAVE READ WELL BEFORE 2014 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

2014/2015 YEAR-STRADDLER The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

USA: Poetry, Frank O'Hara (1966)

Some facts about this film:

It was shot about two weeks before he died from an accident involving a buggy on Fire Island.

I watched it about ten days before my dissertation was due in, about six hours into a library stint. I cried.

I then referenced it twice in my dissertation, including as part of the opening sentence.

On the day I finished my dissertation, I spent the afternoon at the pub with my friend Carly. I arrived home slightly drunk and tried to get my flatmates to watch this film. Again.

Since handing in my dissertation in November 2013 I have watched this film about once every month or so. I rewatch just the telephone conversation more than that.

Right, so now we're done with that momentary second in which the world was enjoyed, here's some stuff I've read for my M.Phil, accompanied by some thrilling thoughts and feelings I've had about them.

No Great Mischief - Alisdair MacLeod

Naturally the first book I study after leaving Scotland would be about Scottish people and 50% set in the Highlands (the rest takes place in Canada). Haunting and desperately sad, intentionally repetitive and cyclical. Made me have the Scottish Gaelic phrase gille beag ruadh rolling arond in my head for days after (as I said, haunting).

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Collection of short stories, generally about the Indian diaspora in the United States. Some really beautiful and poignant ('A Temporary Matter'), others more messy ('The Treatment of Bibi Haldar'). Lots of food descriptions. Good stuff.

Charming Billy - Alice McDermott

My copy looked like airport trash, but once you see it as more than a romance, it's really pretty good. Irish-Americans, alcoholism, freckles.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston

More short stories, and the best thing I've read since September (aside from Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldùa, which doesn't make this post because it's non-fiction). Not actually memoirs, despite the title - although Hong Kingston does draw on her experiences both as Chinese-American and a woman. 'White Tigers' is far and away the best story.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey - Brian Moore

Irish-Canadian pulp. Sort of, anyway. Ginger's your standard put-upon protagonist, and everything goes to shit for him. A cold, somewhat predictable text.

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

The kind of book I can imagine would be given to a class of bright 14-year-olds to introduce them to modes of writing (it's told in tiny little vignettes of chapters, like flipping through a stack of photographs) and adult issues (race, identity, rape, emergent sexuality, class, wealth, partiarchal structures, cultural differences) within the framework of simple language and a childlike perspective. A tiny little flash of a novella, well worth the hour it takes to read.

If you sensed a theme with these, well done, they were all read for a module  on diasporic identities/voices in the Americas. We also covered some other things that I didn't get round to reading (Bharati Mukerjee's The Middleman and Other Stories) and bits and pieces of Asian-American poetry (which were very good).

*(said every hopeful professor ever. In vain.)

The inimitable christinefriar did her yearly book round-up and, as usual, it’s gold.

Someone at The Millions wrote an article about my favourite phenomena in reading: books that make you hungry.

This anthology of new Scottish poetry is on my to-buy list purely on the merit of its title alone.

Speaking of new Scottish poetry, my favourite Shetlander (ahem, the only Shetlander I’ve ever met, shh) wrote a thing that’s in the third issue of The Grind. You can download it for free here and you should because syntxx is like, talented as fuck.

Washington Square - Henry James

I loved Turn of the Screw, and found The Aspern Papers generally alright, but this book is singularly frustrating. Beginning as an Austen-esque depiction of a heroine with a tyrannical father and a possible suitor, it then becomes a novel in which James tells - rather than shows - the reader all of Catherine's increasing misfortunes at the hands of absolutely everyone in her life. Plus, the protagonist herself is dull, her suitor ambiguous, her father sadistic, and her aunt the most irritating character I have been forced to endure. All in all, I'd give it a miss.

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

You know that section of Gatsby where Fitzy G outlines Jay's young life - the schedules of self-improvement that he sets himself, his 'becoming'? Well Paradise is like an extended version of that; a true bildungsroman in which the protagonist is (unlike Gatsby) not a cipher, but a tangible character. Amory is narcissistic, obsessed with his own path to fame and glory, and yet also somehow lovable. I found that his similarity to myself both truly attracted and utterly repelled. His similarity to his creator is also obvious: Paradise was Fitzgerald's debut novel, written almost entirely in order to achieve the recognition that would convince Zelda to marry him (it worked, by the way - they got married a week after publication). Much of the novel is set at Princeton, which was also a plus point for me, desperate as I am to do doctoral study in the States. What I'm saying is that this book is very very enjoyable. Read it.

Diving Belles - Lucy Wood

This is a collection of short stories I bought and read in Cornwall last year. Picture a kind of watered-down Angela Carter crossed with local Cornish legends. Not bad, nice cover.

I mentioned during the summer that come September I would be moving to Ireland in order to do my M.Phil at Trinity College Dublin. This has in fact happened, which is why it's all been quiet on the western front recently. I am now, however, settled into the new Rosa Reads HQ in Dublin, and am ready to re-take up the mantle of responsibility for this blog.

In honour of this, here's what I read this summer (as it is now October, I'm pretty sure summer is officially over):

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

A Death in the Family - Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith

The Graduate - Robert Webb

Independent People - Halldór Laxness

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

As you may have noticed, this is the stack of books accompanying Bruce Springsteen's bottom in the above picture. He's just there for balance.

(Also known as EN3206, Honours module at the University of St Andrews.)

The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad

Detectives in Victorian London crossed with political commentary about anarchists, punctuated by an obsession with clocks/time imagery. Heart of Darkness this is not.

Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence is at his best when he's writing from an impersonal narrative perspective; the first section of Sons and Lovers, depicting not the experiences of Paul (Lawrence's fictionalised but generally autobiographical younger self) but those of Gertrude Morel, is much more poignant and vivid than the rest of the novel. Nostalgic, morally didactic, sensual.

Selected Stories - Katherine Mansfield

I think I feel about Katherine Mansfield the way any lover of Virginia Woolf must: "I love this! Oh...fuck." Read 'The Garden Party,' 'Prelude' and 'Miss Brill.'

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

The best introduction to Joyce: difficult, but not impossible (and more engaging than The Dubliners).

A Passage to India - E. M. Forster

JUST THE BEST BOOK. An exposé of Anglo-Indian colonial attitudes, beautifully written, highly cinematic, occasionally very funny - and always so tangible.

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

A three-part novel about the potential for human connection and the effects of perspective. Despite the (purposeful) gaping void in the middle, a book about hope. Sort of. Oh, Ginny.

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie - Jean Rhys

Okay, so aside from Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys only ever wrote one story: woman is wandering outsider, mistreated by everyone (especially men), is unhappy. And she wrote it about seven different times. But this is a good version - and the ending is especially beautiful.

Nineteen EIghty-Four - George Orwell

Surely I don't need to go into this? Read it, if you haven't already.

The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles

When I first read this at about fourteen I thought it was a Victorian novel BUT I WAS FOOLED. It's actually a kind of pastiche of the form, with all sorts of meta commentary on the process of writing a novel. It made for a bad and boring Victorian novel, but a much better not-a-Victorian-novel.

Darkness Visible - William Golding

Golding is convinced the world is going to shit and he put it all in this weird book. Atrophy and despair. Sigh.