Week 10
As a continuance of last week, I’ve been thinking about where this year has gone. What have I been doing with my time? Ugh! Do I need to book a holiday? More concerts?
This week, I fasted again and worked slightly less. I celebrated my sister’s birthday last weekend, which is always nice; cake, pottery painting, excellent Vietnamese food all with people I love. I caught up with my girl friends of … 12? 13 years? and it reminded me how much I hate catching up and much prefer being an active part of their lives. Anyway, Spring has come and it has been lovely :-)
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
This book was delightful. It was funny, enjoyable, unserious and yet entirely serious. Phoebe is a divorcee, accidentally attending a stranger’s wedding. She and the bride become unlikely friends over the wedding week. I can’t give more away, because I loved seeing how things unfolded, how parts of Phoeobe’s life fit together like a jigsaw, completing the image of someone who was so unhappy, had always been unhappy, who didn’t know to be happy. But it was optimistic; the idea of being able to find happiness again, and how you can be brought back from rock bottom with enough whimsy.
I loved the parts where Phoebe described herself, and someone pointed out how that wasn’t reflected in her actions. The struggle and tension between how she saw herself, and who she actually was, felt so cleverly written it was almost indistinguishable. An overall, fun, easy to read novel.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
I love Curtis Sittenfeld! Her novels are so long, so well written, so descriptive and so full of character. Prep fell short in comparison to Romantic Comeedy, but that’s not an entirely bad thing. Prep is about Lee Fiora, a girl from South Bend, Indiana attending a boarding school full of people completely different to her. The novel follows her freshman year to her senior year, driven completely by the characters and the passage of time.
Sittenfeld is sooooo good at world building and it really shone in this book! There are so many critiques of this book; Fiora is boring, self centred, narcissistic and unpleasant. I agree. The book doesn’t really have a plot. I agree. But it so accurately captured the feeling of being in secondary school - the forced proximity creating a sense of friendly intimacy between the characters. The awkwardness. The rumours. It was full of the confusion of being a teenager and I loved it. Fiora was the most unreliable of narrators, and it became so clear about halfway through the book that her version of events were not the actual version of events. Just a very enjoyable read overall.
Rating: ★★★★☆