Books

I realised yesterday that I completely forgot to finish my Kreativ blogging thing. It kind of got lost in other things. Oh and my smart little sister told me a few weeks ago that "kreativ" is just German for creative. That didn't take a huge leap of imagination but somehow I hadn't figured that one out. Well done Bronnie.

So - Books.
I love reading. It's actually the main reason I picked English Lit as my degree subject. I actually looked forward to working on my third year dissertation, as we got to choose what we read and the topic. Mine was on "The Role of the Gentleman in Nineteenth Century Literature" and I wrote about some fantastic books*. Since I was a little kid I've been perfectly happy reading for hours on end, often I'd be sent to tidy my bedroom and two hours later my parents would look in to find my room in the same state and me on my bed with a book.

My main problem these days is that I'm a pretty fast reader and so I can easily finish a book in a day. Which means I run out of new books to read quite quickly. Luckily there are some books I just love to read over and over, and that I'm quite happy to go back to. My favourite book is one most readers have probably heard of and read already (If not, please go find a copy and read it. When you've finished reading this.) - The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It's a beautiful love story with a twist (in that one of the couple is a time traveller), and it follows Clare and Henry's relationship from their first meetings through to the end of their lives. If the time traveling thing sounds too sci-fi for you try to ignore it, it doesn't feel like a sci-fi novel at all.

I've just finished reading Carole Sheilds' Unless, about a woman writer (Rita) whose daughter drops out of college to sit at the side of a road with a sign reading "Goodness". I love the mundane detail of the family's lives, even as they are trying to work out why Norah is behaving like this. Rita wonders about women's roles in the world - are they, even in 2004, taken seriously as equal citizens? - and about goodness as a quality. It's quite different to most of my reading but I'd definitely recommend it, even just for its difference to a lot of modern writing about women. It's very introspective but also considers the place of women in family life, society and the world.


* All the Jane Austen novels, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde were my favourites.