Partially broken, I stand with my hands Out. Hands flat waiting for the envelope. That once they said my behaviour was bad
All of it is gone. The horses made it to the water, the mare cries for the martyrs that were once his own. It is really the end.
The flies that keep me up for hours may be nothing. But the rumble of the floor, the static of each and every second
Silver branches and a cold black ground that pushes out plants and flowers lined with gold and ruby, and those who meditate inside the house are trampled on
“Barkskins” by Annie Proulx, the writer of “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Shipping News” has often been described as ‘bold and visionary’ or ‘energetic’ with hints of ‘uncompromising splendour’ and ‘extraordinary power’ by various reviews. The reason for these powerful adjectives in use here is primarily because of the way in which nature is depicted throughout the novel. The novel centres around nature as the destruction of the forests seems to be the main point of concern throughout the entire novel for almost every generation of character and yet, the characters cannot seem to stop the violent push-backs that nature is giving them with brute force. Much like the push-back of the natural world in “Frankenstein” when the doctor tries to work nature to his own plans, “Barkskins” demonstrates that humans are a minor part of the natural landscape and however long we are here, the landscape will outlive us, it will be more powerful than we are and ultimately, it will always be above us in ways we could never comprehend. A sublime take on the destruction of the forest, this book seeks out characters who live and die by harvesting wood and ultimately they pay great prices for it. The natural world does not though, just include the forest areas, it also includes the natural landscape, the weather and the way in which night and day are described as being different atmospheres to different characters at different times.
A heartless break, the exhausted soul rips apart The black hole of darkness, the ultimately trip and fall Out of the air and into the nothing. Nothing at all.
The beast underneath the stairs howls at the lightbulb above its head and crouches down under the blanket of shame. The moonlight doesn’t come through the grates
I tore the photograph of myself as a child up between my fingers because I thought I looked frightening. You said I was wrong.
The church is lined with stained glass windows, coins drip from the feet of the crucifix and I stare through from the outside at the empty pews in the mid-winter heat.
You walked over the ocean just to see the angels praying to their god that you could have the horses alive. You opened your eyes with suitcases and horrors;
Pacing around a room, book in hand. A book about drug-induced hazes and alcoholic teens for certain. You’ll walk into the room if these fools feared to tread
"You're an agoraphobe..." the therapist blurts out to the fifteen-year-old who sits twiddling their thumbs. "Go home, get some rest..." go home, he says. Get some rest,
You were alive at another time, the horses around your bed. You left it behind to go and receive the toxic poisonwood bread.
Over the city and the universe, tied tongues gather the forks for the horses and the trailers that spend the winter. They harvest through the mind of the shadows as they talk
I am silence. I do not speak out of place or line. I don’t exist out of place or time. I have no meaning, no starting to
I have a headache that runs from my forehead to my jawbone And the sound of each move annoys me. The existence of you Is like a plague raining down on humanity and kicking me out of
The very thought of us brings images of a horse strapped to a garden hose, being choked by the migraine you have brought to us.
The screeching of the violins runs across the night noises left and right caught in a ray of light blazing like hellfire from the full moonlight. The moonlit bars alive with
With your frontiers set deep within your own imagination, you cannot fight. Your teeth clamped together so hard, one of them cracked and broke.
Light brown, splattered with burnt yellow and my backpack hits my spine. Scowling into the mirror I find that young woman who is always
I was staring at the ceiling, faking a smile and I got a single thought. If I was really happy I’d be counting the tiles by the blackboard where the jukebox once was.
So far, I have read all of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels. I remember when I was in university and she was up for the Booker Prize for her novel “Eileen”, my lecturer recommended we read the book and I spent the whole night up and reading it. It was one of the most psychologically messed up things I had read in a long time and though I spent the whole night with it, I spent the rest of the semester trying to shake it off. It was quite disturbing. A few years later I read her books “Homesick for Another World” and one of my personal favourites, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” which I actually read twice. Now that I am on her novel “Death in Her Hands” I understand that many people think that she writes novels about lonely and isolated women - but seriously this is far different than anything I have read by her so far. This is less of an isolated female novel and more of a psychological thriller that is both horrifying and disturbing at the same time. When I read this book, I found myself being unable to put it down during my work breaks and ended up reading the whole thing in only a few hours. Let’s take a look at what it is about and I will try my best to leave out the spoilers.
I have read quite a few books about people killing themselves or contemplating suicide. There seems to be this narrative of having been overtly depressed so to that it is reflected in the language whether it is narrated by the victim or not. But there is something different about “Legend of a Suicide” in the sense that there is not this sense of desperate grief but instead this question of why. There is this question of why because of the fact the victim of the suicide is someone whom the protagonist and narrator viewed as not only successful financially but also as a person who was moving on with their lives. Now, there is an argument of the fact that people commit suicide when they believe people least expect it as to not worry anyone in advance, but the scene in which the fact does kill himself is something else entirely. There is this sense of time stopping, but there seems to be none of this helplessness that surrounds it. In actuality, the scene is pretty disgusting. The father shoots himself in the head and his own brother finds him later on when the birds have already been pecking at him and the flies, eating him. His desecrated corpse is then reported to the child (narrator) and his mother. We then get this flashback upon the parents and why the marriage crumbles into nothingness.
I read a lot of stuff about Greece and Rome, I love to read not only the myths translated but also the way in which they have been reinterpreted for modern use into stories and tales of the modernist era. Tales of Ovid, Troy and more, the books of monsters and myths have always fascinated me and the way in which they manage to give us some of the most memorable stories of all time keep me interested. We have heroes like Achilles and Patroclus and then, the Gods such as: Zeus, Hera and Athena, Aphrodite and Poseidon. But then, there is an even darker side to all of this and that is the stories of monsters. From Medusa, to the Kraken, from Greece to Switzerland and all the way through to the paintings of Vermeer and the legends of Hermes and Orpheus - this book has everything including the narrator who is incoherently obsessed with these things. There have been several interpretations of the book including the fact that many people have concluded that Medusa is the only faithful woman in the universe and so the narrator must worship her and her alone. Let us dive deeper into the fact that this book is one of the best things I have read of its genre for a long time.
I'm pretty sure that it said somewhere in the book that Brian Masters himself is against the word 'evil' as it is an adjective that opens up so many different arguments. But I am going to use the word 'evil' because there is not any other way I can find to describe this man, he makes me sick.
The breeze through the bar pulls forth the open sigh of the sign of light, the lightning yellow sign with it’s jazz hum, it’s oohs and aahs - it’s baseline
Some of the books I read can be quite upsetting though not a lot physically happens. The last book I read that was like this has to be some of the feminist Greek myth analytics I have been reading. Seeing how unfairly women are treated in Ancient Greek Myth really made me rethinking my stance on this literature and expanded my worldview of mythology all around. But, when it comes to dealing with death and/or Illness, there are not a great number of books in my peripheral that I have read in the last year or so. I think that there a requirement for modernist illness literature because the world is becoming more obsessed with perfection - imperfection needs to be represented especially in difference through people and the way we cannot control who we are or whether we are to get very sick in the near future. Many people have difficulties with their illnesses and feel as if they are a burden towards others. This book really does investigate some aspects of that in the midst of it being about this strange modernist love which almost seems completely lacking in romance and is almost entirely platonic from time to time.
Books with twists that you never expect are some of the most exciting books to read. For example: we have the novels of Agatha Christie, the books of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and down the line we get this resurgence of thrillers that we are witnessing in our own day. In the last few years I have read my fair share of great thriller novels and most of them have been absolutely amazing. Recently, I did finish the new and best-selling “The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides which is about a woman in a mental facility who will not talk. A doctor takes his chances to get her to open up but written in the first person from the doctor’s perspective, this book is nothing like you would expect. The twist is something far more horrific than you think it is. After reading this, I thought it would be a great idea to wait for the next thing from this author to float my way and thus, here we have “The Maidens”. I was super-excited to read this and then I opened the book and made my way inside its dark and blood-splattered pages. Flashlight in hand, it was not what I expected at all.
When it comes to writing, I would personally love to write an autobiography like this one when I’m a little older. Writing a book about how much you appreciate books and the authors behind them is a special kind of personal autobiography in which you can really get close to the narrator and where their lives are leading them. It is also a great chance to share some really great book recommendations with the reader. For me, I have read quite a few (but not all!) of the books within this autobiography. I was more or less stunned by the fact that the novel “The Reader” by Bernard Schlink was included. I was told to read that in sixth form and I really did not get over the emotional scarring it left on me. The books are not all good though, some of them are ones that I did not wholeheartedly agree with but then again, it is not my autobiography. You should all take one lesson from this book if any: read what you feel like and do not let anyone else tell you that what you are reading is not ‘worthy’ or that it doesn’t make you ‘academic’ in reading.
Roberto Balaño’s novel “2666” was written when he was sick and dying, “Cowboy Graves” is a compilation of short stories written on his deathbed. When I read “2666” I was absolutely astounded. I spent approximately two days reading it and then the next week going back and forth over the book, its structure, its story and its brilliance. A rugged mixture between Sci-Fi and realism, it takes over the mind and you, the reader, must piece together a story in which the puzzle pieces do not fit as obviously as you would like to think. Without giving too much away, if you are new to his novels then I would start with “2666” as it is a masterpiece. If you have already read it then you can check out my review of the book here.
I have to admit, I read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita over ten years' ago now - it has been an awfully long time. I have seen it here and there but since, I have focused my strengths with Bulgakov on his other novels such as Heart of a Dog - which I would have to say is possibly my favourite by him. This book is a slice of history which I really did not know about before - I had heard of what happened in not a lot of detail, but to learn all of this information puts his career into a lot more context than it once did. It also puts into context the tyranny of the Soviet Union and the lengths that they really went to when it came to silencing people that they did not deem friendly to the state.
A.N Wilson has been under fire as we know, for his book about Charles Darwin which nobody seemed to understand was not supposed to be a scientific novel, but rather a novel about Charles Darwin’s deep and personal characteristics, how they intertwined with the time he lived in and whether he was the product of that time and place or not. The same goes for his book on Queen Victoria. I have seen many reviews stating that the book is ‘convoluted’ or ‘difficult’ or ‘jittery’ and even, yes ‘disorganised’ which many people ended up giving reviews of only two stars to. I am here to say that this simply is not the case. It really is not that difficult to follow as long as you know what you are reading. You are not just reading a book about the life of Queen Victoria in the royal courts. You are reading a book about Queen Victoria in the royal courts, how this had an impact on her character and how her character had an impact on the emotions of an entire nation. This book is not just a biography because seriously, we all know the story of Queen Victoria - this is rather a biography of the Victorian Age with Queen Victoria fitting in right at the top. This book is about the reasons why she fits where she does and what made her this way.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte appears at number 14 on my list of my '25 favourite books' of all time and is one of those books which I consider to be truly timeless. It will never go out of style, out of print or go out of mind. It is truly art. I read Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea when I was about seventeen and I'm not going to lie - at first I didn't like it all that much but as I read it again, I started to appreciate it. It was like learning a new language - you don't really get the hang of it at first, but the more intensely you read on it, the better it gets. Wide Sargasso Sea in comparison to Jane Eyre is an entirely different language, yet one does not take away from the other.
I actually read this book because it was the Reese Witherspoon Book Club's pick of the month for February of 2021 and I finished it with only a day to spare, so forgive me if I am a little late with my review. It took me a while to process everything that happened. Written in a compelling fashion with obvious attention paid to the place and the history of place, there is a lot to be said about these dark and engaging descriptions of the building which litter the book and turn the atmosphere right the way around so that everything becomes a shadow. When it comes to the characters, I feel like there could have been more done with them apart from their very obvious functions with Isaac being there to lure his sister back into a familial relationship whilst also making her question her every move. I think that it is important to remember that the place is also part of the cast in this book - the hotel itself is a character and if we start off believing that then I think we will be pleasantly surprised as we read on.
When we think of a psychopath, most of us think of murderous and horrid people and we would be right to do so. But most of us do not even know how to define a psychopath, have not actually met one or have only really seen this stuff on television so do not connect with it in a truer sense. As we are unable to actually put this into perspective, it always comes as a surprise when someone writes about their experience with a psychopath in a very realistic way because it challenges the notions put forward in films such as "American Psycho" (2000) - which may be a good film but not wholeheartedly accurate according to the DSM.
I love gothic novels with weird twists. In my time, I have read a lot of gothic crime novels and have managed on some occasions, to guess the twists when they come around. More often than not, I take off marks if I am able to guess the ending and so, beforehand, I always write down my predictions so that I don't change them halfway through the book. When I predicted what was going to be the twist of this book, I thought I was right when I hit about a quarter of the way through. Then I realised I was wrong and finally, by the end of the book I do not think I could have been further from the truth if I had tried. When I say I was terrified, I mean it. I did not get anything right when it came to predicting the twist - not a damn thing. And guess what? I loved it.