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paigeweb's reviews
98 reviews
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield
mysterious
slow-paced
3.5
Thoughts:
- Loved the atmosphere! Very transportive (listening to the audiobook definitely contributed to this effect) and eery.
- The language was great. Very vivid imagery. The water metaphors, though excessive, actually really worked for me.
- Became very frustrating in the second half .... Every single time the narrative came close to revealing something interesting, even at the end, it slipped away to a different character's perspective or an informative lecture on marine life or another reminiscence on an irrevelant memory. Tests your patience, ends at the climax, and ultimately refuses to give up its secrets.
- Loved the atmosphere! Very transportive (listening to the audiobook definitely contributed to this effect) and eery.
- The language was great. Very vivid imagery. The water metaphors, though excessive, actually really worked for me.
- Became very frustrating in the second half .... Every single time the narrative came close to revealing something interesting, even at the end, it slipped away to a different character's perspective or an informative lecture on marine life or another reminiscence on an irrevelant memory. Tests your patience, ends at the climax, and ultimately refuses to give up its secrets.
Cut These Words into My Stone by Richard P. Martin
5.0
If things turn out as people say and you join the dead, to drink from the river that helps men forget, please don't drink the drop that makes you forget me.
A Woman Appeared to Me by RenƩe Vivien
2.5
Frequently incomprehensible, but with some moments of beauty.
Really interesting if read as an example of the continued historical reception of Sappho and her legacy.
BUT if I have to read the words āamourā and ādolorā one more time Iāll genuinely go insane.
I love you because you are going to die. It is the brief joy in ephemeral beauty that I drink on your lips.
Really interesting if read as an example of the continued historical reception of Sappho and her legacy.
BUT if I have to read the words āamourā and ādolorā one more time Iāll genuinely go insane.
I love you because you are going to die. It is the brief joy in ephemeral beauty that I drink on your lips.
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love by Hugh Nini, Neal Treadwell
5.0
many tears were shed.
Classical Women Poets by Josephine Balmer
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
5.0
āI feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass.ā
This Sylvia Plath quote came to mind continually while reading this book. A hundred years ago or two thousandā¦ we are more alike than we think. Itās incredibly moving to think about these women who lived so long ago, and to read fragments of their lives in their own words. It really is a testament to the universality of human experience: Nostalgia for distant childhoods, the bitter torture of unrequited love and the sweeter tortures of love fulfilled, the sting of abandonment, the joys of female friendship, the love of mothers for daughters, the consuming grief for people who we have loved and lost. The pleading human need to be remembered in a future youāll never get to see. God it makes me so emotional.
Josephine Balmer did beautiful justice to these forgotten voices with introductions to each poetess that included biographical information and enlightening notes on their (often misogynistic) modern reception. Absolutely recommend.
Baucis, these tears are your embers and my memorial, traces glowing in my heart, now all that we once shared has turned to ashā¦. Baucis, this crimson grief is tearing me in two.
Your love, Biote, was like honey, like truth, and now Iām placing a slab above your grave. Set it in stone: Euthylla took you for her lover and these tears are your memorial falling one by one for the years we have lost.
Farewell, take comfort, my darling girl.
This Sylvia Plath quote came to mind continually while reading this book. A hundred years ago or two thousandā¦ we are more alike than we think. Itās incredibly moving to think about these women who lived so long ago, and to read fragments of their lives in their own words. It really is a testament to the universality of human experience: Nostalgia for distant childhoods, the bitter torture of unrequited love and the sweeter tortures of love fulfilled, the sting of abandonment, the joys of female friendship, the love of mothers for daughters, the consuming grief for people who we have loved and lost. The pleading human need to be remembered in a future youāll never get to see. God it makes me so emotional.
Josephine Balmer did beautiful justice to these forgotten voices with introductions to each poetess that included biographical information and enlightening notes on their (often misogynistic) modern reception. Absolutely recommend.
Baucis, these tears are your embers and my memorial, traces glowing in my heart, now all that we once shared has turned to ashā¦. Baucis, this crimson grief is tearing me in two.
Your love, Biote, was like honey, like truth, and now Iām placing a slab above your grave. Set it in stone: Euthylla took you for her lover and these tears are your memorial falling one by one for the years we have lost.
Farewell, take comfort, my darling girl.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5.0
This book had my jaw on the floor repeatedly just from the beauty of the writing. I loved so much about it, from the pirouetting of the social rituals and its reflection in the way the narrative ricocheted seamlessly from the perspective of one character to another, to Clarissaās rejection of religion for a unique theology of human interconnectivity, to the themes of temporality and memory, to the dark underside of war, trauma, and death that lingers beneath the mundane performances of daily life that we cling to. My favorite Virginia by far. An offering for the sake of offering. This will stay with me forever.
āClarissa had a theory in those daysā they had heaps of theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not āhere, here, hereā; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who complete them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counterā even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after deathā¦ perhapsāperhaps.ā
āDeath was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.ā
āThen (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, oneās parents giving it into oneās hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.ā
āClarissa had a theory in those daysā they had heaps of theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not āhere, here, hereā; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who complete them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counterā even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after deathā¦ perhapsāperhaps.ā
āDeath was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.ā
āThen (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, oneās parents giving it into oneās hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.ā
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
4.0
A cathartic exorcism of childhood and adolescent memories in the form of a letter to an illiterate mother. Themes of emigration, diaspora living, the effects of war and generational trauma, queerness in rural America, etc.
Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.
You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, youād know itās a flood.
Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.
You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, youād know itās a flood.