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Hustvedt is a terrific author and I couldn‘t help admiring how fun her feminist diatribe is here. I really enjoyed and was inspired by this oddly structured novel and its appreciation for Sherlock Holmes and the passion under the modern occult. (Although it might only be me. Litsy gives it a lowly 17% rating)

There are so many really good M‘s. I‘ll put a list in the comments.

#Alphabetgame #LetterM @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

I thought it might be interesting to document my current TBR shelf with the start of the New Year. 21 books doesn't seem like a lot but it also seems inevitable that some will be procrastinated on and unread by year's end. They strike me as a strong bunch though from what I've heard so I guess we'll see what happens!

Mature SH rediscovers a journal she kept as a young woman in New York, writing a first novel. Viewed through the lens of male violence (at times physical amongst the everyday micro-aggressions) I'm disappointed not to have found it more gripping. The proto-novel is uninspiring and while I loved the writing at the level of sentence and paragraph, at the level of chapter and book it left me cold. It was - dare I say it? - long-winded and a bit dull.

I hate to say it but I liked this less than other Siri Hustvedt books, which I‘ve always loved reading. The writing was beautiful but I found I got bogged down and lost in which story I was in, because the fonts separating the stories within stories just weren‘t very separate from each other. So no matter how flawless the writing was I felt lost a lot of the time

Wish I could capture this. Playful and clever like Ali Smith, but more philosophy, Hustvedt is just really enjoyable to spend time with. Here she talks to her 23 yr old self alone in New York City in 1978, beautiful, intelligent, awash in poetry and philosophy, disregarded for her gender, writing a failed novel, flashing a switchblade. Somewhere I saw this described as a rage against the patriarchy. It‘s also fun. Really happy I finally read her.

“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”

Started this on audio just now. So far 23 in 1978 New York City.

Always excited to start a new novel by Siri Hustvedt!

Visited three independent bookstores today. I‘ll grab any Hustvedt I can find. The rest were recommended by some of my favorite Litsy folks. All but one were on sale. I‘m feeling very abundant today. 🌹🌹💖💖

I have always liked the idea of promiscuous reading. 🙂

I finished this on audio but got a copy so I can reread some sections.
A highly meta portrait of the artist as a young woman. S.H moves to NYC to be a novelist in 1978. In her 60s, S.H. finds a journal from that year which adds to and challenges what she recalls.
There's a plot of sorts involving a disturbed neighbor and a novel-within-a-novel, but Hustvedt's writing on memory, literature, and women artists lost to time is what I enjoyed most.