Maybe it was the long Fourth of July weekend, or maybe I've gotten better at MAKING time to read. So here's another set of books I've recently read.
As I mentioned in a previous summer reading post, I started Damned by Chuck Palahniuk with a friend as a very laid back summer book club. As my second Palahnuik book, I was not disappointed. I was prepared for the unreliable narrator and plot twist right at the end. Hell is apparently a really interesting place. And there's a sequel too so #awesome.
Quote: Jane Eyre is an eternal, ageless character, but no matter how many times you read that darned book, she always get married to gross, burn-victim Mr. Rochester. She never enrolls at the Sorbonne to earn her master's degree in French ceramics, nor does she open a swanky bistro in New York's Greenwich Village.
I checked out Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell because I had heard people praise the book and thought it was worth the read. While it read fast, it wasn't my favorite book in the world. Essentially two high schoolers meet and fall in love. Eleanor has a lot of history and this baggage is something she constantly carries with her. Park is sort of lost in this own world, surviving high school by simply blending in and not saying much. Their worlds collide and they fall in love. Gahh. Maybe I'm jaded about high school, but love does not exist in those halls. However, I did like the ending because it was unexpected. And I won't say anymore as to not give it away.
A professor had Maria T. Accardi's Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction on his desk. It looked good so I put it on hold. It's a quick read and really stuck a chord with me. I was jiving with her ideas and it confirmed that what I've been doing for the past year is done by many other people. Definitely want to purchase this book so I can annotate it.
Quote: Carolyn Shrewsbury said "At its simplest level, feminist pedagogy is concerned with gender justice and overcoming oppression."
I'm a sucker for a good memoir and so of course when I saw this book at the residence hall libraries, I had to check it out. Amy Butcher is also got her MFA at the Iowa's Writers Workshop, a place I'm quite familiar with. The memoir was stunning. Amy had a friend who had a psychotic break and ended up stabbing his girlfriend 27 times. Butcher examines how that murder shook her up and how she dealt with it. It was a book that once I got a few chapters in, I couldn't put it down.
Quote: This is how traume works. It manifests in the everyday, in large ways and in small. You can distance yourself from an event, but not the triggers that can reengage it.
What's next you ask? Well I've got Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews, All the Light We Cannot See (still), and Haunted by Palahnuik (because now I can't stop reading his stuff). Oh, and I want to start reading George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series since I'm deeply committed to the TV show.