#2017 reading

what i didn’t like: 

i wanted the story to be more about nadia and her mom, nadia and her grief, nadia and aubrey, and aubrey and her mom; and nadia and not being a mother, and aubrey and the experience of being a mother. everyone has a mother in this but the only person who *is* a mother (with a living child) and acts on the page is mrs. sheppard. i wanted more about motherhood, i guess.

luke’s an asshole, i can’t stand him. i wanted so much for him to have grown up even just a little bit! but he doesn’t. why does he want a kid so bad? it baffles me. i wanted more about how he wanted to be loved and what violence was to him. i’m honestly confused about how he went from “oh i love nadia” to “oh i love aubrey” to “oh i love nadia she was first” to “oh i need to be with aubrey cause i want to know my daughter” like????? i don’t understand his desire at all, and i don’t understand how a man who can’t take responsibility for fucking someone thinks he can take responsibility for being a father. 

i didn’t like how every section ended with this pat summing up, like the rule about the last sentence of a paragraph in an essay, trying to deliver like a final emotional *thing* before moving on. idk exactly what i mean when i say this, but it’s such an american convention in writing?

what i liked:

nadia. i loved that she wasn’t like, redeemed in the end or anything. i loved that she felt fucked up about getting an abortion, but she never changed her mind about how she didn’t want to have a child. 

Also finished Universal Harvester by my beloved John Darnielle and would recommend it for people like me who are okay with ambiguous endings to horror/mystery stories. Even for me this ending left me feeling a little abandoned, but I really enjoyed reading this and a feeling of abandonment certainly fits with the theme.

* The Passion According to G.H. (1963), Clarice Lispector * Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Paolo Freire * The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath * History & Presence (2016), Robert Orsi * Willful Subjects (2014), Sara Ahmed * Float (2016), Anne Carson * Gravity & Grace (1947), Simone Weil * Dubliners (1914), James Joyce * Anger & Forgiveness (2016), Martha Nussbaum * Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Michael Ondaatje * Known and Strange Things (2016), Teju Cole * Too Much & Not the Mood (2017), Durga Chew-Bose * Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2016), Angela Davis * Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), Matthew Desmond * My Name Is Red (1998), Orhan Pamuk

Other writers to encounter more this year: Roberto Bolaño, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Elena Ferrante, Roxane Gay, Seamus Heaney

I have two reading goals for 2017: 1. Read 70 books (I am getting married and writing a thesis this year so this might not be realistic but whatever!) 2. Finish 13 series. Some of these I have started, some I have not. Some of them have three books, some have 6 or more. And some of them aren’t completely published yet! I noticed this year that I have a real problem finishing series, so I want to work on that. Here are the series, from left to right: 

1. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

2. The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare

3. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

4. The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo

5. Unwind Dystology by Neal Shusterman 

6. Red Rising by Pierce Brown

7. The Young Elites by Marie Lu

8. Shades of Magic by V.E. Schwab

9. Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

10. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

11. Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness