I’m way behind on posting here, so here we go:

(requisite tagging of @internrachel and @julia1)

Since June 16th…

I read Daniel Deronda by George Eliot on my Kindle, but, according to Goodreads, it’d be, er, 832 pages in non-digital format. I read Middlemarch earlier in the spring, and I la-la-loved it, so DD was a disappointment in comparison. The title character just isn’t as complex or interesting as MM’s Dorthea Brooke, whom I loved. (Or, really, most of the characters in MM.) He’s a saint. Mirah, his downtrodden love interest, has even less depth. Gwendolen Harleth is far more complex but deeply unlikable, and her toxic marriage to sadistic Grandcourt has the faintest of echoes to Dorthea’s marriage to Edward Causabon in MM, and a similar ending. Also, while the Jewish mysticism aspect of the book is interesting, and certainly quite novel for its time, it leads to long stretches of very philosophical dialogue, which is thought-provoking but….not exactly what you’d call propulsive. So, if you’re gonna read Eliot, go with Middlemarch, which rules.

I read Fun Home (232 pages/2 =116) and the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (392 pages/2 = 196) by Alison Bechdel. I enjoyed both a lot, but Fun Home a bit more, just as it’s meant as a cohesive whole (it felt especially cinematic), while EDTWOF is just a collection of admittedly related comics. But both funny and sad and engrossing.

This past week, I read Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (150 pages) and Written on the Body (190 pages) by Jeanette Winterson, which were both awesome. I find the best way to get through dense academic prose is to read it aloud in a dramatic voice. It has the added bonus of scaring one’s pets. (And Gender Trouble’s prose didn’t really bother me much. It even made me want to go back and read Foucault, who I remember hating in college. A lot.) Written on the Body got a little slow for me in the middle, when the narrator is discussing the various parts of Louise’s body, but picked right back up once it returned to the main narrative. Just really beautiful and spare. I finished it right as my plane descended into Boston.

Oh, I also read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which was great and creepy and really short. (24 pages.)

That’s all for now!