Lelia
Book Review: Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
I’m not sure what happened in Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, but I loved every minute of it. From what I gathered, a young woman, who’s ...
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Lelia
- Jul 7
- 1 min
Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness
This book was too disappointing to finish. I loved Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, so maybe my hopes were too high for this one. But...
Lelia
- May 21, 2022
- 7 min
Gibbons, Gornick, Hardy, Bauby and Living Your Great Story
Great Story Coaching* outlines the 3 ways we tend to narrate our lives to ourselves. The victim story (similar to Parul Sehgal’s “trauma...
Lelia
- Apr 19, 2022
- 1 min
Penelope Fitzgerald & the Exponentially Possible
Barbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes, “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...
Lelia
- Mar 19, 2022
- 2 min
Trying and Losing in Fitzgerald's The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald writes such quietly brutal books. Florence Green with her naivete and kindness says toward the end of The Bookshop,...
Lelia
- Mar 14, 2022
- 4 min
Uranian Freedom & Vita Sackville-West
Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...
Lelia
- Feb 28, 2022
- 4 min
Bernardine Evaristo, Elaine Dundy, Patti Smith & Resilience
There’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...
Lelia
- Feb 2, 2022
- 4 min
Good Behavior + Beauty Norms
I finished Good Behavior which I read without great relish. I mostly cringed and held my breath. Molly Keane is merciless in presenting...
Lelia
- Jan 24, 2022
- 7 min
"Nightbitch" & Wildness: A Descent to Soul
Nightbitch has created a tangled skein of ideas in my head and I’m not sure I’ll unravel it. You know how Austin Kleon does mind maps? I...
Lelia
- Jan 16, 2022
- 3 min
Eudora Welty, Peter Schjeldahl + Bill Plotkin
In The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...
Lelia
- Jan 11, 2022
- 10 min
Jane Austen, Joan Didion & Self-respect
Don’t you think Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel ever? It’s by far my favorite. That’s kind of a joke because most characters in...
Lelia
- Jan 2, 2022
- 4 min
My Best-of Book List for 2021
I like year-end best-of lists. Reading others’ lists is a fun way to learn about things I’ve missed. And thinking about my own best-of...
Lelia
- Dec 24, 2021
- 3 min
Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Rereading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I caved in and let myself skip Helen’s painful awakening to her husband’s true character. At first...
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