November 3, 2011

November Reading Plan

Two in progress and another short book should do it for this month. After all, I have a lot of revising to do.

ZONE ONE by Colson Whitehead - As I said yesterday, I'm excited by this book so far. It's the first pick for the Bookrageous book club, and I'm looking forward to the discussion.

BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson - I'd like to finish this last book in the trilogy before the end of the year, so I'll be giving it more attention this month.

WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys - This novel is narrated by a small but important character in Charlotte Brontë's JANE EYRE, so I figured it would make a good follow-up read. I actually read WIDE SARGASSO SEA before, when I was in high school. I remember it being assigned in English class, but I'm not sure why we would have studied it without first reading the original, so I could be wrong about that. I'm sure my reading of Rhys's book will be very different now that I've read Brontë's. However, I have no memories of my first reading, so I won't really be able to appreciate the difference.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ More useful revision advice from Theresa Stevens at Edittorrent, this time on unnecessary scenes with characters dressing and dining: "Sometimes it happens that the characters are having a meaningful conversation as they eat or cook or get dressed. The purpose of the scene is to have that conversation. The purpose of the scene is not to eat or cook or get dressed."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hm, I also read Wide Sargasso Sea in high school, though I kind of think it was on my own rather than for a class...but I'm not positive about that... It seems like the sort of thing that plausibly could have been on the syllabus for Shakespeare's Sisters (and didn't you take that with me? I feel like someone did...).

I remember it was my mother's copy of the book. I don't think I still have it.

(I had read Jane Eyre before reading it, but long enough before that I don't think I necessarily remembered the relevant details -- not that the relevant character gets any screen time to speak of in Jane Eyre.)

And thus does memory become fuzzy.

Lisa Eckstein said...

Ah, Shakespeare's Sisters, that must have been it! My recollection of reading the book for class was connected with a recollection that it was a class focused on female (or feminist?) authors, but I wasn't convinced I'd actually taken such a class until you said the course name. Thanks for remembering.

I think my copy of the book might also have been my mom's. When I asked her about it the other day, she said she read it for book club long ago.

Anonymous said...

I saw a goofy play about Aphra Behn (female restoration playwright) the other day, which had a gratuitous throwaway "room of my own" line... :)

Lisa Eckstein said...

I remember that the class started with Woolf's A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN essay, followed by ORLANDO. I can think of several other novels that we might have read for that class or that might have been for one of the other classes I took in the same room. :)

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