The Big End of Semester Wrap Up – Goodbye:(

It’s here! The last blog post of the semester! Thank you, dear reader, for reading all of my little blog posts. I hope you enjoyed my analysis and shared some similar thoughts, or thought differently about sections after reading my thoughts. I am honestly going to miss this blog, it was very fun to design a little blog (yes this is a prompt to look at the homepage, I think it’s cute and I spent a long time on it) and to share my thoughts somewhere. Thanks to the class I am halfway through my Goodreads reading goal of the year too! Woo!! Yay for accomplishing goals. Honestly, I did enjoy reading and discovering new books almost every week this semester. It was quite the undertaking, but I managed it. There were definitely books that I thought I was going to enjoy and didn’t, books that surprised me, and books I liked the longer I sat with them. Here’s my ranking of the books and how I rated them:

1. My Brilliant Friend – 5 stars
2. The Shrouded Woman – 5 stars
3. The Time of the Doves – 4.5 stars
4. Nada – 4 stars
5. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – 3.5 stars
6. The Lover – 3 stars
7. Nadja – 3  stars
8. The Way by Swann’s (Combray) – 2.5 stars
9. Death With Interruptions – 2 stars
10. Money to Burn – 2 stars 

There weren’t any that I hated but there were a few that disappointed me or that were just boring. There are a few I want to highlight/give awards to (cosplaying Jon who?).

Favourite book: 

It might be because it is the freshest in my mind, but I loved My Brilliant Friend. It was beautifully written and highlighted a whole bunch of social issues very well, including helping me to recognize my privilege. Not to mention the girlhood aspect. While I did not relate to their situation, my best friend, Zahara, has a very similar personality to Lila, so I also think I liked it a lot because I miss Zahara (she is at Queen’s University sadly). I am looking forward to reading the rest of the books in the series! 

Book I liked the more I thought about it:

This one goes to The Time of the Doves. Initially, I thought it was good but not my favourite, well written but bleak. As time went on though, I have come to like this book a lot more. After watching the lecture and talking about it in class it has become more of an impactful book and one I think about often as well. The different class themes and heartbreaking story of a woman simply trying to survive through difficult times has stuck with me. Also, shout out Quimet for the shittiest boyfriend award (close tie with Breton in Nadja). 

Book I really wanted to like but didn’t:

I really really really wanted to like If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler a lot but I did not. It was so confusing, and while I did enjoy reading it, it was hard to understand and follow. But I also kinda liked it? I don’t know, the jury’s still out on my feelings for this one. I love the idea of playing with the meaning of narrative and the expectations of what a book should look like. That is exactly what this book did but I think we lost the plot a little bit towards the end. One redeeming quality though is when the titles all line up, “If on a winter’s night a traveller, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end? —he asks, anxious to hear the story” (Calvino 258), it is so satisfying to see it all come together. 

My least favourite book: 

My least favourite book was Money to Burn (sorry Gabby!). At first, I was really into the high-stakes crime vibes but then it became vulgar and tragic. Those are not inherently bad things in a novel, but I just did not like it. I think it was too bleak and choke-full of misogyny for no reason. Not a single one of the characters had redeemable characteristics in my eyes. Maybe I’ll reread it and like it more later on, but right now it was my least favourite of the ten books I read.  

It feels weird that the semester is already over and that my first year of university is done with it too! Here’s to 3 months of a book per week (almost) and crack open some celebratory champagne as a drinks pairing for this blog post. 

As always, thank you for reading!

– Len ❤