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reading life and the joy of worlds within it
You might know the Lion or the Witch and even the Wardrobe. If you don’t, you should just know that any wardrobe is a very foolish place to shut oneself into, but there’s a magical one.
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imagine you’re cleaning a room
Imagine you’re cleaning a room, and you kill a cockroach with the door of a wardrobe… What would you do next? (A) keep cleaning the room?, or (B) think about your reason to exist? Or do both things belong to the same process readingthisweek Back to my Brazilian Literature project, I just started reading A PAIXÃO SEGUNDO G.H. (“The Passion According to G.H.”), by Clarice Lispector. Written in a very difficult moment for Clarice, the book is the monologue of a woman simply identified by G.H. drawn in an existential crisis after a random episode in her life. It all starts when G.H. decides to clean her maid’s room in…
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CULTISH, book review
Have you ever seen words being used as a form of power to influence people or common words being used in a way that scared you? CULTISHby Amanda Montell First off, let me say. Amanda is not just an incredibly talented writer and language scholar, she gives me hope and evidence that the future of language and young brains are not as doomed as I thought they were. Every time we chat, I leave the conversation with new ideas, a smile on my brain, and something new to study. She has a gift I rarely see these days. Thanks to Amanda I dived into a thousand articles on the internet…
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books are mirrors
What part of you do you leave in your book reviews?
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it starts with a plane crash…
Book review. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.
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on to Jane Austen’s most flawless work
Dear reader, She’s handsome. She’s clever and rich. She has a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence (whatever that means), and she had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not talking about Cher (or Alicia Silverstone in that coming-of-age teen film). She comes from another time (definitely not the 90s). She’s the kind of girl who likes trying to make people happy, you know? But in the following pages, I think she will realize that it’s not the lives of others she wants to transform…
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What We See When We Read
Dear reader, You know, it’s like the pictures were projected on the pages, and the scenes and characters and worlds suddenly become clear in my head. Everything around me just disappears, and before I realize, I’m flying over the story. The words, I mean the ink and lines, they just fade out, and I hear the narrative and dialogues, I see through the paper, and it’s like I’m over a hill, or I’m a fly on a scene, I’m inside a mirror, I’m a lamp, or the button of a shirt. You know what I mean? There’s this book called What We See When We Read, by Peter Mendelsund. You…
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How to read and why
“It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgements and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest.” Harold Bloom The book is How To Read and Why. Harold Bloom starts by advocating for deep reading. Reading classics or reading great works that enrich our culture and mind is basically the reason we should read. Then Bloom goes through the works and authors he believes to be the best for this quest, this adventure and journey of reading…
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crime and punishment – the end
“But here a new story begins: the story of a man’s gradual renewal and gradual rebirth, of his gradual crossing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new, as yet unknown reality…” Dostoyevsky, in “Crime and Punishment” That could be a subject for another tale — our present one has ended. And we finished reading CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. SPOILER ALERT. The burden of his crimes without a proper punishment became unbearable. A sudden realization that humanity wasn’t so bad and that he wanted to live a common life with common people led to his isolation in Siberia. But now he’s there to redeem himself, to learn about…
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The whole world is an enigma
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum It all starts with a man hiding in a museum, a friend in need, and files of a word processor in a computer. A few pages later, we’ve already embarked on a perfectly crafted page-turner thriller that has semiotics, secret societies, religious and historical mysteries of mankind, and nonsensical conspiracy theories as the main characters. This book is for readers who can laugh at philosophical jokes, chuckle when Templars are compared…
