reading wrap-up: Good Material
(01) January 2024: Eileen, Winter Love, Good Material, and Pride and Prejudice
As a child, my mother would read to me. I distinctly remember this one night on our living room couch, me on my mother’s lap, huddled together with our noses in Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets. As voices emanated from walls (in the book), I begged my mother, out of fear, to please stop reading.
I don’t know why this memory has stayed with me. Perhaps because we’re hard-wired to remember the things that scare us, but I believe that the book and the act of sharing this experience with my mum had such an emotional impact on me, that it left an imprint in my brain.
To this day, I love sharing books with my mum. Granted, she no longer reads them to me, and I no longer get scared, but we rejoice in giving each other recommendations.
My love for sharing books has now evolved from the intimate setting of my home to the vast online. Still, sharing what books we all read and like is, and will remain, a special and personal act to me.
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh | Contemporary Fiction/Thriller | Liked it
I’ve decided that this year is the year that I will finish Moshfegh’s entire oeuvre. Something about her disturbing yet subdued writing reels me in - her unlikeable characters, her lyricism in describing the ugly and nasty, and a nihilism that is somehow comforting. (flash forward to me dnf’ing one of her works because I didn’t enjoy it but that’s a story for the next newsletter)
Nothing is yet to beat My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was a masterpiece. However, I did enjoy Eileen. I love that it isn’t plot-heavy, but focuses instead on the character of our protagonist, a troubled woman who is stuck between working at a juvenile correctional facility for boys and living with an alcoholic father in a decrepit house. Eileen is absolutely insufferable, especially in terms of her personal hygiene, but I also feel for her at times because she seems traumatised, and only a few moments here and there give us a hint as to why. The slow pace of suspense as well as the deadpan expressions in this novel remind me of a Yorgos Lanthimos movie - and some may not enjoy that.
quotes:
“All I had to offer were my skills as a doormat, a blank wall, someone desperate enough to do anything – just short of murder, let’s say – simply to get someone to like me, let alone love me”
“A grown woman is like a coyote – she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they’ll die of sadness. Over the years I’ve grown to love men for this weakness.”
“The Beach Boys came on the radio. I didn’t understand rock ’n’ roll back then – most rock songs made me want to slit my wrists, made me feel there was a wonderful party happening somewhere, and I was missing it – but I may have jiggled a little in my seat that day”
“At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it.”
Winter Love by Han Suyin | Contemporary Fiction/LGBTQ+ | Really liked it
I loved this little evocative romance about two women and their love for one another during the last wintery months of WWII in London.
The weight of the era’s suffering is depicted in such a nonchalant way - they’re literally bombed whilst having tea at a cafe, an event that spurs them to spend their first night together. Significant but understated moments like these fill the novella. They matter and they don’t.
This is a tender novel about desire, melancholy, love, and heartbreak, and asks the question of why we hurt the ones closest to us.
quotes:
“(…) already that smile line at one corner of her mouth etched an ambiguous droop, joy using the same line as sorrow.”
“(…) there once again I walk with Mara through the evening that is night, holding an electric torch in my hand, the blacked-out glass letting through a faint yellow ring at our feet, and I know what it is to love, to want to die for love.”
“Now I resented her, the bondage of love upon me, for I had not learnt that in love there is also bondage, that resentment is always a part of love.”
Good Material by Dolly Alderton | Contemporary Fiction | loved it
Dolly has gone and done it again! As I mentioned in my recent simple pleasures newsletter, I’m currently in a bit of an Alderton frenzy, and will probably finish her oeuvre pretty soon.
Alderton truly is a master of the current zeitgeist - she writes poignant works about contemporary life with all its splendor, pitfalls and emotions. Good Material is no different. It details, diary-style, Andy’s slow descent into post-breakup madness, and his trial and error of getting over Jen. He’s an infuriating character, and being stuck in his head gets quite exhausting, but he’s real and therefore likeable. I even chuckled out loud a few times.
I listened to Good Material on audiobook and I can completely recommend it for this format, because it really feels like a podcast. The narrators are perfectly chosen as well.
quotes:
(me scrambling around on Goodreads quotes because I don’t have a physical copy which I’m low key sad about)
“I soon realized that inevitability of every relationship: the things which initially draw you to each other become the exact things that irritate you the most.”
“Really, the thing that’s going to hurt a lot is the fact that someone doesn’t want to be with you any more. Feeling the absence of someone’s company and the absence of their love are two different things. I wish I’d known that earlier. I wish I’d known that it isn’t anybody’s job to stay in a relationship they don’t want to be in just so someone else doesn’t feel bad about themselves.
Anyway. That’s all. You’re going to be okay, mate.”
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen | Classic | Liked it
I have steered clear of classics for a few years now, because I tend to reach for contemporary novels. This means that classics barely pass through my hands.
However, the lovely Elise from our book club over on Fable recommended Pride and Prejudice for December 2023. And even though I only managed to finish it in the new year, I did thoroughly enjoy it!
There’s not much one can say about Pride and Prejudice that hasn’t already been said. So I’ll talk about my reading experience instead. Not having read a classic for a while, it took me some time to get back into 18th-century English, rich in language and sentence structure, but so worth it once you put in the effort. The plot was also different than I expected somehow. Perhaps, having watched the 2005 movie adaptation when I was younger, I had conjured up an image in my head of a wild romantic tale - I was especially waiting in vain on the infamous flex scene where Mr. Darcy’s hand twitches after accidentally brushing against Elizabeth’s. Sadly, that’s only in the film. And although the novel does feature romance, it’s more successful to view it as an exploration of the time, tinged with sarcastic social commentary. Elizabeth Bennet and her father are so utterly witty and that made it on the whole extremely amusing to me. The self-awareness and growth that the characters undergo as the novel progresses is also written beautifully.
quotes:
“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence than can be placed on appearance of either merit or sense”
“Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.”
“We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing”
What did you read this month? I’m always open for new recommendations. Let’s chat!
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