A WOMAN MADE OF CAKE!

I was in London this week, bought these books:
Margaret Atwood - The edible woman
Margaret Atwood - The robber bride
Margaret Atwood - Moral disorder
Margaret Drabble - The sea lady
Margaret Drabble - Jerusalem the Golden
Doris Lessing - The fifth child
Lionel Shriver - A perfectly good family
Sue Miller - The senator's wife
Sarah Walters - The little stranger

Read The edible woman while in London, reading The fifth child now. Left The last life at my friend Palle's house.

IT IS NOT THE ONE THING NOR THE OTHER THAT LEADS TO MADNESS, BUT THE SPACE IN BETWEEN THEM

Read Oranges are not the only fruit by Jeanette Winterson, reading The last life by Claire Messud now.

OH GODS AND OH PROPHETS, PLEASE ALTER MY LIFE

I finished reading The lace reader last Thursday; I actually really liked it, it was very entertaining, a page-turner, albeit not being a book that I'm likely to think much about. Isn't this like a fairytale though (got it off Brunonia Barry's Wikipedia page):

"Originally self-published by the author[1] it (...) got rave reviews in many places including Publisher's Weekly, and was eventually picked up by the US branch of HarperCollins in a multi-million dollar deal[3]."

Anyway, from Friday-Sunday I read Notes on a scandal by Zoë Heller and from Sunday to today I read Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, which is The Odyssey from Penelope's perspective (and the twelve maids who were hanged by Odysseus and Telemachus also have their say). It was, of course, amazing. Now I'm trying to decide on a new book. Sorry about not updating this blog in a while, I've been working a lot and went to Stockholm this weekend.

So I gave up on Dermaphoria; just can't seem to read books written from a man's perspective anymore (with the exception of Alex Garland's books, of course). Reading The lace reader by Brunonia Barry now. Not what I would normally go for, but it seems OK so far.

SHE BELONGED TO NOBODY BUT LIFE

"Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the loneliness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows - nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away."
- Revelations, Katherine Mansfield

Read these short stories by Mansfield while I was trying to pick a new book to read:
Je ne parle pas français
Bliss
Sun and Moon
The escape
The daughters of the late colonel
Feuille d'Album
Revelations
Psychology
Pictures
A dill pickle
The wind blows

Now I've decided to read Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger; I wanted to read something The beach-esque without (yet again) resorting to read The beach 'cause I can't find something that is as good.

QUERY: WHY AM I SO BITTER AGAINST LIFE?

"When a thing's gone, it's gone. It's over and done with. Let it go, then! Ignore it, and comfort yourself, if you do want comforting, with the thought that you never do recover the same thing as you lose. It's always a new thing. The moment it leaves it's changed. Why, that's even true of a hat you chase after; and I don't mean superficially - I mean profoundly speaking...
I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge it. You can't get it into shape; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in. Looking back, of course, is equally fatal to Art. It's keeping yourself poor. Art can't and won't stand poverty."
- Je ne parle pas français, Katherine Mansfield

Finished reading A gate at the stairs yesterday, and read Good bones by Margaret Atwood today. Might go for The piano teacher by Elfriede Jelinek now, but haven't decided. I really liked A gate at the stairs; I was a bit skeptical at first but then the protagonist, Tassie Keltjin , was like a mix between Lee Fiora (from Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep) and Blue van Meer (from Special topics in calamity physics by Marisha Pessl) while still having her own personality, so it was pretty great.

AS FOR LIVING, WE SHALL HAVE OUR SERVANTS DO THAT FOR US

"I would never take a man's name. I knew that, in the deepest part of me, even though I suspected that women who did take their husbands' names understood something about marriage that I didn't. Me? I would never even let a man drive."

"Like everyone, Robert would have loved to have attended his own funeral. Of course, one did always attend one's own funeral. But usually one was so deep in the role of the dead person that one didn't get to pay attention to the nice things people were standing up and saying about you."

- A gate at the stairs, Lorrie Moore