March Book Haul

Happy St Patrick’s Day! Today I picked five books up from the library and bought 6 more. In the happiest of circumstances Danny then came home from work with two more! Here are the books we ordered/bought:

 

This extraordinary historical novel, set in Medieval Paris under the twin towers of its greatest structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, is the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work that gives full play to Victor Hugo’s brilliant historical imagination and his remarkable powers of description.

This is one classic I’ve always wanted to read. I adore Paris and French Literature. I also, albeit less relevant love the Disney adaptation and am interested in Hugo’s family’s sheer loathing for this adaptation. Obviously I am expecting it to be vastly different from the Disney version, in fact I’m hoping it will be. I cannot wait to get around to this one!

 

‘We believe in her as in a woman we might providentially meet some fine day when we should find ourselves doubting of the immortality of the soul’

wrote Henry James of Dorothea Brooke, who shares with the young doctor Tertius Lydgate not only a central role in Middlemarch but also a fervent conviction that life should be heroic.

By the time the novel appeared to tremendous popular and critical acclaim in 1871-2, George Eliot was recognized as England’s finest living novelist. It was her ambition to create a world and portray a whole community–tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry–in the rising provincial town of Middlemarch, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in narrative irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, in its sense of how individual destinies are shaped by and shape the community, and in the great art that enlarges the reader’s sympathy and imagination. It is truly, as Virginia Woolf famously remarked, ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.

I read The Lifted Veil at university and it is one of my favourite books of all time. Therefore I’d love to go into this book blind as I know it is Eliot’s most popular novel and hope to enjoy it as much.

 

For the centennial of its original publication, a beautiful Deluxe Edition of one of Joyce’s greatest works — featuring an introduction by Karl Ove Knausgaard, author the six-volume New York Times bestselling global literary phenomenon My Struggle, which has been likened to a 21st-century Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero’s quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

I have only ever heard one review of this novel and it was terrible, yet it was this poor review that made me want to read it. Maybe there’s something wrong with me? I also decided that I had to buy a James Joyce novel as it’s St Patrick’s Day. I will be reviewing this one.

 

Everything you thought you knew about witches is wrong. They are much darker, and they are much more horrifying. Wytches takes the mythology of witches to a far creepier, bone-chilling place than readers have dared venture before. When the Rooks family moves to the remote town of Litchfield, NH to escape a haunting trauma, they’re hopeful about starting over. But something evil is waiting for them in the woods just beyond town. Watching from the trees. Ancient…and hungry.

Will I leave this one to October? Do I have that much will-power? probably not. I have been wanting to read this one for a while and horror is a genre I want to delve into this year. I am also interested in different depictions of witches and am hoping this one is unique.

 

On the day that Naho begins 11th grade, she receives a letter from herself ten years in the future. At first, she writes it off as a prank, but as the letter’s predictions come true one by one, Naho realizes that the letter might be the real deal. Her future self tells Naho that a new transfer student, a boy named Kakeru, will soon join her class. The letter begs Naho to watch over him, saying that only Naho can save Kakeru from a terrible future. Who is this mystery boy, and can Naho save him from his destiny? This is the heart-wrenching sci-fi romance that has over million copies in print in Japan!

Sci-fi and Romance are both genres I rarely reach for. This is perfect for me and I’ve been wanting to read it for a while, I assume I first heard of the series through Booktube but I can’t accurately remember.

 

 Blurb for Vol 1:

Light Yagami is an ace student with great prospects–and he’s bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notebook dies, and now Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Note to rid the world of evil. But when criminals begin dropping dead, the authorities send the legendary detective L to track down the killer. With L hot on his heels, will Light lose sight of his noble goal…or his life?

I love the animé, which I haven’t finished because I want to read the manga. I’ve only watched the animé to the the point where the last volume ended which I read this year and also loved.

 

These are the two novels Danny purchased:

Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program.

Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘colored computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a rich history of mankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.

We both want to watch all of the Oscar nominated movies and I would like to read more non-fiction. Especially non-fiction about women who were omitted from our History lessons. I also love learning about NASA.

 

What is the difference between friendship and love? Or between neutrality and commitment? Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in ‘neutral’ Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav’s father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav’s childhood is spent in lonely isolation, his only toy a tin train with painted passengers staring blankly from the carriage windows.

As time goes on, an intense friendship with a boy of his own age, Anton Zwiebel, begins to define Gustav’s life. Jewish and mercurial, a talented pianist tortured by nerves when he has to play in public, Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably his life and Gustav’s are entwined.

Fierce, astringent, profoundly tender, Rose Tremain’s beautifully orchestrated novel asks the question, what does it do to a person, or to a country, to pursue an eternal quest for neutrality, and self-mastery, while all life’s hopes and passions continually press upon the borders and beat upon the gate.

If you want to know my thoughts on this novel check out my first impressions of the blurb and free e-book sample here.

Sophie