Thursday, January 12, 2012

Reading in the train

Lately I find myself actually enjoying my commute because I am reading all the time. I actually look forward to the quiet time in the train where I can just focus on whatever it is I am reading. (That is of course after almost fighting to make sure I get a seat, preferably by the window).
I am currently busy with The marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, and I am truly liking it. The back cover convinced me from the minute I read that it is about a girl a bit obsessed with Jane Austen and everything romantic and Victorian in contra position with a boy who is a biologist, a darwinist, and a trip to South Africa Cape Cod . Also, the line "Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead?" made me want to continue reading. The fact that Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of The Virgin Suicides just did it. I loved the book, and I loved the movie. Sophia Coppola's dreamy aesthetics and the way she can make the screen full of feelings just with images is really something. And well, I could probably relate to The Virgin Suicides, having been to a rather extremist catholic all girl school for 5 years, rebelling to all of that while still questioning if they might be right with their stories of hell (at the time I was 11) and been raised in a household where my father was something of a skeptical atheist, and my mom a religious but not church goer person.
And well... because of paragraphs like this  and quotations of Barthes (that made me even more curious) I can not stop reading.

"Madeleine had never been close to anyone with a verifiable mental illness. She instinctively avoided unstable people. As uncharitable as this attitude was, it was part and parcel of being a Hanna, of being a positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person. If there was one thing Madeleine Hanna was not, it was mentally unstable. That had been the script, anyway. But sometime after finding Billy Bainbridge in bed with two women, Madeleine had become aware of the capacity in herself for a helpless sadness not unlike clinical depression; and certainly in these last weeks, sobbing in her room over her breakup with Leonard, getting wasted and having sex with Thurston Meems, pinning her last hope of being accepted to a graduate school she wasn't even sure she wanted to attend, broken by love, byempty promiscuity, by self-doubt, Madeleine recognized that she and a mentally ill person were not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. "

Image from here

4 comments:

  1. That sounds like the sort of book I'd absolutely adore. . . It's such a shame I don't get the train anywhere anymore, I used to love reading on the train, even if I had to sit on the floor by the doors in the Vestibule! I may check this for my next read, thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ Hanna, yeah, it gets better and better this book I am really hooked, it discusses lots of things like the nature of God, feminism, human behaviour (in a way) and well, love.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A mí también me gusta leer mientras voy en el metro! Si no hago nada siento que he perdido media hora.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Si, es genial, siempre , desde chica he sido fan de la lectura y en el transporte da mucho tiempo! Que estas leyendo ahora?

      Delete

I love your comments, let's talk .

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...