Hello everyone! 🙂 Well, it’s that time again where we close another month and welcome a new one.
November was a slightly better reading month for me, as I actually managed to finish a book (Yay!). Despite it only being one book, it is one more than the previous two months where I have struggled to finish a book due to work and life commitments. However, after managing to work hard to find time in the day to read, even if it’s just for 5 minutes or so, I have finally finished a book. Even the smallest amount of time to read can make all the difference. I have been juggling about 3 books at the moment, so I will also include these as ‘to be finished’ in this wrap up. In my defence, the one book is about 1300 pages long, so will take me a while to finish I reckon.
- Donna Tartt, The Secret History, ★★★★★
“Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever. Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt’s cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement – both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.” (Goodreads).
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2. Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume I, 1940-1956, (STILL READING BUT REALLY ENJOYING)
“Sylvia Plath’s renown as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets is beyond dispute, but she was also one of its most captivating correspondents. This remarkable, collected edition of Plath’s letters is a work of immense scholarship and care, presenting a comprehensive and historically accurate text of the known and extant letters that she wrote to over one hundred and twenty correspondents, including her husband the poet Ted Hughes, to whom previously unseen letters are now revealed. The edition reproduces previously unknown photographs, and a gathering of Plath’s own elegant line drawings taken from the letters she sent to her friends and family, offering the reader generous insight into the life of one of our most significant poets.” (Goodreads).
3. Amanda Lee Koe, Delayed Rays of A Star, (STILL READING/LISTENING)
“At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world’s first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father’s modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famous–then, infamous. From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women’s lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA’s Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players–a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director–whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe’s playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood–its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals–and announces a bold new literary voice.” (Goodreads).
Hannah's Bookshelf 