gorgeousgirl's reviews
341 reviews

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - New and Expanded Edition by Erich Auerbach, Edward W. Said

tbh i didn’t read much of the back half, just skimmed v generally. got a bit bored of tracking only the european developments in fiction & just hit a mental wall at some point, especially trekking thru the chapters on early christian writing lol. i’ll come back to it after i’ve read some balzac & salammbo i think

A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries by Mircea Eliade
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade#Far-right_and_nationalist_influences
 
............. it's ok i don't care for history written by a colleague of evola. wait just read the blurb that storygraph has for this " 'primitive' and Oriental religions".......... the signs were there for those with eyes to see

The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, Robert Fagles, Bernard Knox

ok yayyy finally i finished reading this. love to that intro to poli sci professor five years ago who made us buy the whole book just to read antigone, i prefer this translation to what i'd read b4. interesting to be reading this alongside learning about freud's oedipal complex, freud seems to have done a very modern thing in attaching a name to something that doesn't quite share its meaning. antigone will be one of my favourites forever, but oedipus at colonus sneakily got me with how much it's like king lear

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

writing is so lush, very deliciously working to make the familiar strange, the strange familiar. wanna come back to this to look at it carefully at sentence-level. reminds me a little of toni morrison how the writing enters in & out of memory. could have been gayer but that’s just the world we live in

The Archaeology of Palestine by William Foxwell Albright
Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.

maybe borrow from H again later, genuinely understand nothing, there's long lists of time periods & pottery styles & it's all ✈️ over my head

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Did not finish book. Stopped at 9%.

sorry being precious abt tech ppl is just not interesting to me & on top of that, this reads as YA, idk if it is or not. a bunch of reviews are calling the vocabulary choices pretentious? i think they're just very awkward, overall the sentences r not elegant. & mostly i blame whatever in the ether that sold this to me as something very experimental & novel, i don't feel that it is, can see the outlines already & it seems pretty standard

How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration by David Richo

hopeful reflective fast-paced

pretty much no bullshit, unless ur very opposed to Jungian dream stuff, in which case just skip the dreams chapter. read it slowly, take in whatever u can. very gentle & loving approach, very good for me to have read. it’s the same good advice u can find in most places, i just very much this packaging of it

(didn’t mean to say it’s fast paced, it won’t let me unselect the button lol)

My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

medium-paced

wow! very shaken up, think i'm gonna phase meat out of my diet. v cathartic 4 me randomly? i'm v glad to have read this

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Domestic abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, and Sexual violence

Moderate: Miscarriage

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus by Art Spiegelman

what can you say? v painful to read as genocides continue to happen in the world. spiegelman considers his work so beautifully and carefully, it's wonderful to learn from a master of their craft. sorry to say i skimmed through the transcripts at the end, i found it v difficult emotionally to read

The Iliad by Homer

took me sooo long, but i've triumphed finally! i appreciate the logic behind wilson's translation choices, i just don't think her execution fulfills her ideals. she chose to emulate the poetry of the original by using iambic pentameter, but i really couldn't keep up with the meter just reading on my own, it really bogged everything down. eventually, i just started reading it as sentences. the vocabulary chosen was pretty spare & dull, except in the rare places where she reproduces the multi-syllabic or "strange" words from the original greek. overall, it suffered for a lack of style or flourish. i think it could be a good entrypoint to get an understanding of the skeleton of the verse & story, i don't think it really manages to give the reader the riveting & lively experience of the ancient epic. take it w a grain of salt, i'm very far from being an expert of classics