Like Byron, I am mad, bad and dangerous to know...why you ask? Because these books will take over your life!
Me and my sister recently re-charged our joint youtube channel and I must say it feels great to be back making videos, there’s just something really fun and creative about it.
I read quite a bit more this month and I also have a couple of unfinished books that will roll over into march or beyond as I have a lot of books to read in part or whole for uni right now. But here are all the books I read this month!
Freud is a must-read for any student of English lit, so naturally, I gravitated towards this collection of essays to accompany my unit on modern lit. I have been fascinated by psychology for many years and even considered studying it instead of Eng Lit. This was an interesting read but some points regarding women vexed me slightly but that’s to be expected from a 20th-century text.
A light-hearted, fun and quick read. The story was a little predictable but I don’t really care about that as it was rather funny and a nice way to pass an evening or two.
I thought this was going to be a short story but it was actually just a collection of Wilde’s witticisms, Funny as they are I was a little disappointed.
I read a couple of Sally Rooney’s short stories to try and get on backtrack with my (totally impossible) 75 books in a year challenge, which I didn’t but I like reading a good short story nonetheless. I like Rooney’s writing and I like how she navigates heavy topics in a sensitive but real way.
I like the David Fincher movie so I thought I would check out the source material. I think its a case of the film is better than the book, in the respect of dealing with the whole Tyler Durden revelation and the iconic ending scene has much more power than the cop-out ending of the book.
I cried. And I can’t believe I only have 2 more books to go before I’ve finished Harry Potter, I only started listening to the audiobooks last year and I’m already nearly finished! Once again I have to commend Stephen Fry on bringing these stories to life with his exceptional narration and I feel like he adds a lot of magic to the stories.
This Graphic Novel tells the story of Yumiko a Japanese woman who has made London her home, she however has to return home as her father has passed away. The story follows Yumiko on her journey home and how the call of your past and people can be so strong. It’s a simple story but the artwork elevates the simplicity and makes it a quick and enjoyable read.
Often referred to as Shakespeare’s Masterpiece Hamlet is a enigma of a play, and as I am studying it for an upcoming essay I find it all the more intriguing as analysis always makes me appreciate literature more and more.
This short story was first written by Kang in 1997 and upon reading it you immediately can see that it is somewhat of a precursor to her most famous novel The Vegetarian. While Kang’s writing style is more lyrical here than it is in The Vegetarian, both tell a similar story of a woman in peril.
Read for free on Granta.com
I watched the Netflix movie with Alicia Vikander in the title role of Lucy Fly and while I wasn’t blown away by the story I was intrigued to read its source material which is indeed better than the movie adaptation and leaves the ending a little more uncertain in terms of who dunnit. And the book also make Lucy’s obsession with Teiji far more creepy.
This is a re-read and I am just as enamoured by Kim’s prose and imaginative weirdness as I was when I first read it. It’s a dark little book but a fascinating one. Slightly reminiscent of Murakami but definitely is Kim’s own thing.
Oscar Wilde’s Children’s story The Happy Prince is a short read but an enjoyable one nonetheless and it has its heart in the right place…or does it??? One reading of this story could tell you that its about encouraging children to be generous and helpful but on the other hand when you consider what transpires in the short story it could be a treatise encouraging the exact opposite!
Read for free on buk.io
I love reading, it is one of my favourite things to do, but sometimes life gets in the way. So here is a collection of books that I have started reading but am yet to finish.
I started reading this book years ago, and I mean years. There is photographic evidence of me reading the book on one of our family holidays to Greece, when I was 10! So that was way back in 2003! I think I got up to something like chapter 11 or 12 and then I just stopped, I lost where I was in the book and the next time I picked it up I just couldn’t remember what had happened in the story. 15 years later I still haven’t read the book. Will I read it someday? No, I’ll just get Stephen Fry to read it to me on audible.
Quite often I have a love hate relationship with classics, their language is beautiful but archaic, they are problematic in their depictions of Women, other ethnicities and social issues when read from a modern point of view. And so on. But Dorian Gray, I really wanted to love it, and maybe I just attempted to read it at the wrong time, but I found it, dare I say…boring.
I love Murakami, I love what I’ve read of 1Q84 so far, but I started reading the book at a really stupid time, just before I started my French module in Uni. That year came and went so quickly and I then had to start reading what has felt like 1 million books for this years studies and as such 1Q84 has sat patiently on the shelf, same for Killing Commendatore too. I promise I’ll get to you two this summer!
I received a ebook copy of this book before it was published, I read some of it, but for a reason I can’t remember I stopped reading it. This book has since been so hyped that I’m kind of curious to get back into it and finish the story as I did get quite a way into the narrative.
Having watched the Sky TV Series based on this book I naturally bought it immediately and started reading it, however it is a rather large book and there have been several novels that I have had to prioritise reading as they are in my course and most likely in my exam in June. So I will have to rediscover A Discovery of Witches this summer.
I set myself the goal of reading a French book in its entirety last year, I failed but I did get quite a ways into Le Petit Prince which is probably the most famous French book from the 20th century. I will dive back into it as I still want to achieve this goal, and hopefully it will also help improve my french so that I can start reading more complex french novels!
So that’s all the books that I started reading and haven’t quite got round to finishing. I wonder how many of these I can get finished this year, shall I aim to get them all read in 2019? Let me know in the comments section what you think!
