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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
the first half was a bit slow but the second half ahhh sooo good. introspective and honest and FUNNY, i laughed out loud and i also cried. 'Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.'
challenging
dark
emotional
medium-paced
http://dsdmona1.blogspot.com.es/2016/10/por-que-ser-feliz-cuando-puedes-ser.html
Enjoyed this. Funny, touching, heart breaking, with a nice sprinkling of social commentary and class warfare. Fuck Maggie Thatcher.
things got away from me! will come back to it once i’m done moving :)
I had the privilege of attending a discussion where Jeanette Winterson was a panellist earlier this year, where she read some excerpts from Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal. I'd read most of Winterson's earlier works in my late teens and early 20s - Oranges, Sexing the Cherry, Gut Symmetries, The Passion and The Power Book. But somehow along the way, other authors came along, other books caught my attention. The reading by Winterson reminded me what it is about her writing that attracted me to her books, what it is I love about her work: the vivid descriptions, the wry observations; the unpicking of these situations that are her life that are somehow simultaneously dispassionate and emotional; the sharply drawn insights.
Like:
"The only way to sleep in a car is to have a plan. Mine was to sit in the front to read and eat and to lie down in the back to sleep. That way I felt like I was in control."
Or this longer excerpt:
"Working class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home, and as there was still a 'thee' and 'thou' or 'tha' in daily speech for us, the language didn't seem too difficult...In the 1960s many men - and they were men not women - attended evening classes at the Working Men's Institutes or the Mechanics' Institute...The idea of 'bettering' yourself was not seen as elitist then, neither was it assumed that all values are relative, nor that all culture is more or less identical - whether Hammer Horror or Shakespeare. Those evening classes were big on Shakespear - and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn't difficult - it was the language of the 1611 Bible; the King James Version appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest. Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale that year. It was a useful continuity, destroyed by the well-meaning, well-educated types who didn't think of the consequences for the wider culture to have modern Bibles with the language stripped out. The consequence was that uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language."
I read this book, like I read most books, in snatches - while commuting, while waiting in line, waiting for friends. But I wanted so badly to have 2 to 3 uninterrupted hours to curl up with this book. Because more than the other (non-academic) books I've read over the past year, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal is prose you want to lose yourself in, savour and linger over. And having heard Winterson read aloud, as I read her book, I could almost hear the words in her northern accent, which has this soothing, calm quality to it. Time to rekindle my relationship with Winterson's works and dig up her books published in the last decade.
Like:
"The only way to sleep in a car is to have a plan. Mine was to sit in the front to read and eat and to lie down in the back to sleep. That way I felt like I was in control."
Or this longer excerpt:
"Working class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home, and as there was still a 'thee' and 'thou' or 'tha' in daily speech for us, the language didn't seem too difficult...In the 1960s many men - and they were men not women - attended evening classes at the Working Men's Institutes or the Mechanics' Institute...The idea of 'bettering' yourself was not seen as elitist then, neither was it assumed that all values are relative, nor that all culture is more or less identical - whether Hammer Horror or Shakespeare. Those evening classes were big on Shakespear - and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn't difficult - it was the language of the 1611 Bible; the King James Version appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest. Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale that year. It was a useful continuity, destroyed by the well-meaning, well-educated types who didn't think of the consequences for the wider culture to have modern Bibles with the language stripped out. The consequence was that uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language."
I read this book, like I read most books, in snatches - while commuting, while waiting in line, waiting for friends. But I wanted so badly to have 2 to 3 uninterrupted hours to curl up with this book. Because more than the other (non-academic) books I've read over the past year, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal is prose you want to lose yourself in, savour and linger over. And having heard Winterson read aloud, as I read her book, I could almost hear the words in her northern accent, which has this soothing, calm quality to it. Time to rekindle my relationship with Winterson's works and dig up her books published in the last decade.
Vivir en Manchester en los años sesenta no es fácil para una niña como Jeanette. Adoptada desde su nacimiento, crece bajo el yugo de una madre católica ultraconservadora a la que no es capaz de llamar mamá, y de sus dos secretos: su amor por los libros, y su orientación sexual, fruto del ostracismo y la vergüenza en aquella época. Esta es su autobiografía, la de una mujer hambrienta de amor cuyo sueño es conseguirlo algún día. El amor familiar, el que surge fruto de la amistad, el de pareja, el sexual, el pasional. Logra su sueño de entrar en Oxford y convertirse en escritora y en triunfar, pero también tiene que lidiar con sus propios traumas, su sentimiento casi permanente de sentirse abandonada, su incesante búsqueda de su propia identidad. Esta es una novela valiente, triste y resignada, porque la vida para Jeanette y la mayor parte de mujeres de su época, y de la nuestra, es una constante lucha de supervivencia. Pero lo que ella quería transmitir con sus escritos es que aún hay esperanza. Y pequeñísimas cosas buenas por las que seguir aquí. Merece la pena leer este libro para recordarnos cuáles son.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced