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all the books i read in august and what i thought of them

 All the books I read in August and what I thought of them This month I read 8 books. I did not have a pleasant August, but I am not a woman in translation, so not everything is about me. But I did, as you see, read Ion in Greek, so, on that level, I guess I am a woman in translation and everything is about me, actually.  I had a conversation once with one of my erstwhile friends about how the emotional distance between two people is that, when you have a subjective experience, you have to translate your feeling into language and tell it to someone else who then has to translate language into a feeling, and this is why no one can ever understand each other. So I guess, in a way, all of us are women in translation. Except for those of us who are men. I would like to extend my condolences to all men.  I read one book by a man writing in English, one book by a woman writing in English, five books by women writing in foreign languages, and one book by a man in ancient Greek ...

all the books i read in july and what i thought of them

 All the books I read in July and what I thought of them I am releasing my blog post into the void of the internet today on August 9th in order to observe the fake holiday "Book Lovers Day." I would also like to wish my readership a very happy Women in Translation Month (which is to say August). This is another fake celebration, but no one seems to be familiar with foreign books by women, so I have only support for the fake celebration.  In July I read 5 books. First I read Shapes of Love , which is the Y.A. aroace book they are publishing this year (every year there is exactly one, and I read it). It is a very nice book but not groundbreaking at all and does not ask any of the difficult questions about love that I think aroace books should be asking these days. I don't really like when the very reasonable fears that asexual people might have of loneliness and abandonment and missing out on real connection get resolved very easily because it is a legitimately difficult qu...

omg it's the odyssey hour!!

The only movie I have cared about in years and what I thought of it Me and Tanya went to see the Odyssey movie with Emily at the Coolidge Corner movie theater, and we also went to the Harvard Natural History Museum, and it was all a real hoot [hoot]. I maintain that movies are a bad form of popular media and certainly my least favorite. I will be spoiling the Odyssey poem and the Odyssey movie. The worst thing about the Odyssey movie is that it's incredibly loud and should be quieter. I'm sure they also could have stood to cast some Greek actors in a movie about Greece. The director of the Odyssey movie has, very amusingly, made the Odyssey movie about the Bronze Age collapse. The characters are always worrying about the growing threat from the "people from the sea" (sea people), and then at the end of the movie, Penelope says something along the lines of, "will people sing about our story in the future?" and Odysseus says, "they will have to because th...

all the books i read in may/june and what i thought of them

  All of the books I read in May and June and what I thought of them Ultimately I have decided to write about the books I read in May and June in the same blog post because I only read 2 books in May. I am less unhappy than I was last you heard from me, but there is still a limit to the happiness I can achieve as long as the weather is as it generally is in the summer and I am not in school. Hopefully these problems will both be resolved not this September but next September. And of course my seasonal problems are only seasonal. I read Laughter in the Dark after I came home from school and I didn't like it very much because everyone is this book is a real loser who sucks and none of them make good choices. I was not at a time in my life to read about such a bunch of degenerate losers. Then I read The Master and Margarita . I have read this book before, and then in the intervening time I read a thinkpiece from a literary magazine about how The Master and Margarita will solve all of ...

all the books i read this winter/spring and what i thought of them

 All the books I read since I last updated the readers of my blog (this occurred in January) I appreciate my blog readers' patience since I spent the last semester too busy with my thesis to update my blog, or, at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'm actually of half a mind to put my entire senior thesis in a blog post because I've been told it's really good and I love attention. When I say I am of half a mind, I mean I am going to do it when I get around to it.  I have recently graduated, and I'm not happy about it at all, but the good people who read my blog might at least be pleased to know that I will certainly have more time for reading books and blogging about books.  In January I read 5 books and then it all sort of went downhill from there. I reread The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which is my third favorite book of all time and makes me start thinking like the protagonist Selin. I feel when I read this book that I am seeing the world throug...

all the books i read in december and what i thought of them

All the books I read in December and what I thought of them I read three books in December. Then I coughed for two weeks. Then I read three more books. Immediately after I stopped coughing, I pulled a muscle in my stomach. I have very good timing. I can't imagine how it would have been if I had pulled a muscle in my abdomen while I was coughing for two weeks.  I was undertaking an intellectual exercise beginning over Thanksgiving break in which I read The Golden Ass by Apuleius concurrently with Auctor and Actor by John J Winkler (who was a monk, which kind of makes sense), which is about The Golden Ass , and my second-favorite book of all time  If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (🥰) because The Golden Ass and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler are practically the same book. I will defend this claim.  The Golden Ass is the only complete surviving ancient Latin prose novel about just a really charming and hopeless guy who turns himself into a donkey...

all the books i read this fall and what i thought of them

 All the books I read this fall and what I thought of them I would like to assure the readers of my blog that, although I was too busy this fall being an academic weapon and being insulted by various individuals, my book blog will never die, so long as men can breathe or eyes can see.  In August, I read 5 books. I read The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson so I could review it for my job, and then I did review it, but they didn't put it up anywhere, but I still got paid to read it. I have since tried to convince my academic advisor who also directs the organization I work for to pay me to read other books, but I don't think they would put up those reviews either. This book was fine and I pretended to have sophisticated opinions on it. It is trying really hard for an academic book to not be boring; they almost succeed. I read Engine Summer by John Crowley because (and again I am very embarrassed to admit this) the AI robot recommended it to me because I wante...