#backlog logbook

Also known as EN4361, Honours module at the University of St Andrews.

A Sicilian Romance - Ann Radcliffe

Possibly the funniest thing I've ever read for a class, this novella by the mother of gothic fiction is not in any way supposed to be amusing. It's supposed to be packed full of suspense and horror and sublime landscapes, but the amount of imprisonment/escape/recapture cycles and astoundingly convenient coincidences just make it unintentionally hilarious. If you fancy a giggle at the expense of a great pioneer of the gothic romance novel, it's available free on Project Gutenberg.

Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft / Letters for Literary Ladies - Maria Edgeworth

Can you tell I had to study a fair amount of gothic fiction for this module? Because yes, I very much did. And now these are things that I've read. Moving on.

The works of Jane Austen (excluding Sanditon)

The reason I took this module was twofold: one, I needed to fulfill my Group C (Victorian and Romantic) requirement; and two, I had already read most of the reading list. Honestly, I don't have a lot to say about Austen. The module was interesting enough, but rereading her six novels back-to-back really did nothing to make me enjoy her more as an author, and by the end I was pretty glad to have them all out of the way. You should read her, of course. She's incredibly witty and was pretty groundbreaking for her time. Northanger Abbey and Emma are my recommendations, and stay away from Mansfield Park (Fanny's a complete wet blanket).

More Jane Austen feelings can be found in this post, and you can read my review of Emma (pre-this module) here.

As long-suffering readers of this blog will know, I make notes on books at the time I read them, and then six months down the line when it comes to making a review post about them, I look in my notebook and find (thirty pages back) some useful scribbles. Sometimes these take the form of full-on reviews, which I transfer into post format and we all get on with our lives. Other times there’s the title of the book, the author and…a blank fucking page.

Thanks, past Rosa. You useless worm.

Anyway, the point of this is that the following three books would normally have been awarded full reviews, rather than being consigned to Backlog Logbook neglect. They deserve full reviews. Unfortunately past Rosa decided to deprive them of this glory and here we all are. Alright, let’s get on with it.

Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel absolutely and completely deserves the acclaim she gets from both the literary establishment and mainstream consumers. Her talent in rendering the past at once painstakingly accurate and engagingly tangible is unbeaten, and her Cromwell is just fascinating. I can’t recommend these books more (start with Wolf Hall, then read this one). I’m also currently reading A Place of Greater Safety because I was getting Mantel Withdrawal Syndrome (in which you are utterly convinced you live in the murky depths of the past and never refer to yourself except in the construction [second person singular pronoun], [name]: i.e. “she, Rosa” or “he, Cromwell”).

The Thing Around Your Neck - Chiamanda Ngozi Adichie

After watching her incredible TED talk, there was no way I wasn’t going to read some of Adichie’s work. And this collection of short stories did not let me down at all. I can’t stress enough what a wonderful storyteller Adichie is, how much compact complexity she manages to get into her characters in such little time, how good an eye she has for atmospheric detail. Read this book, guys. Read this book.

White Teeth - Zadie Smith

I wish I liked this book more than I did, because it was my first foray into Zadie Smith and it didn’t leave me wanting more. I am very much aware that I will love many of her other books, I just wish I hadn’t started with this one. Ah well, writers can’t be perfect all the time. And as far as I can tell, Smith spends a lot of her time being perfect.

I made a promise to myself when I started this blog that I would really endeavour to review every book I read, in order to both encourage myself to think critically about the literature I was consuming, and also to share my incredible insights for the benefit of the internet (you're welcome).

But here's the thing, you guys: Rosa reads too damn much.

I've been playing a pretty serious game of catch-up with my reviews for ages, meaning that every now and again I get panicky and churn out a set of sub-par semi-reviews that are of little to no use to anyone. And there are a whole load of books I don't even bother reviewing, for various different reasons. The main culprits here are the books I read as part of my degree; once you've sat through a lecture, participated in a seminar, and written an essay on something, you don't have a lot of motivation to then voluntarily produce some kind of review of it.

So I am hereby sparing you all a load of substandard reviews by instituting a new Rosa Reads feature: the Book Blog Backlog Logbook (you have NO IDEA how pleased I am with myself right now) - or probably just Backlog Logbook for short. This will take the form of round-up posts cataloguing the books I've read that I won't be producing full reviews of, but which will include a few comments, an anecdote, or a particularly nice photograph.