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Sophronisba

Sophronisba

Joined October 2016

More about my reading at https://www.sophronisba.com
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Sophronisba
Stone Blind: A Novel | Natalie Haynes
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“I see you. I see all those who men call monsters.

“And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course.

“I only see them for an instant. Then they're gone.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

16 likes1 stack add
review
Sophronisba
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Mehso-so

Somewhat to my surprise, I did not love this. The writing is lively & engaging and there's certainly plenty to say about the Dudleys; but I was frustrated by the handling of Amy Robsart's death. (I do not think Dudley killed her.)

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Sophronisba
Y/N: A Novel | Esther Yi
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Mehso-so

I was interested in a novel about celebrity and fandom in the twenty-first century, and that's what this is -- but I wanted something more grounded and less abstract. Didn't love the way this story was told.

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Sophronisba
Elizabeth I | Anne Somerset
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Pickpick

I have read a shocking number of Elizabeth I bios in my time, and this one is my favorite. Comprehensive but still an absolute pleasure to read.

13 likes1 stack add
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Sophronisba
Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston
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Pickpick

I _really_ struggled with the dialect but this book hooked me in the second half and I ended up falling in love with it. Janie is a wonderful protagonist. Pro-tip: Read it in big chunks if you can.

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Sophronisba
Clear Light of the Day | by Anita Desai
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Pickpick

Maaaaybe a little bit pat in the end but I just could not get over how beautifully written it was. The kind of book that makes you want to just luxuriate in its sentences. For a 184-page book, that's enough.

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Sophronisba
South Riding | Winifred Holtby
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Pickpick

I really loved this portrait of a town in the 1930s. It's a political/social novel so not all the characters are as developed as I would have liked them to be, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

16 likes1 stack add
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Sophronisba
The Death Of The Heart | Elizabeth Bowen
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“That morning‘s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

review
Sophronisba
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Mehso-so

Comprehensive but oddly-paced -- Spawforth is apparently a lateral thinker and there's not really a clear chronology even though it's billed as a biography. Lots of great anecdotes, though.

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Sophronisba
Elizabeth I | Anne Somerset
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Don Carlos, Philip II's son, contemplated as a match for Mary Queen of Scots, sounds like a real winner: “He had always been an unpromising youth, but in 1562 his 'natural imbecility' had been aggravated by brain damage incurred when he had fallen downstairs while chasing a maidservant.“

Suet624 Wow! 3w
12 likes1 comment
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Sophronisba
Elizabeth I | Anne Somerset
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Every biography of Elizabeth I devotes pages and pages to the question of why she never married but honestly I feel like “My father had my mother and one of my stepmothers beheaded“ serves as an adequate reason. That is not a great introduction to the institution of matrimony!

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Sophronisba
Clear Light of Day | Anita Desai
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“The koels began to call before daylight. Their voices rang out from the dark trees like an arrangement of bells, calling and echoing each others‘ calls, mocking and enticing each other into ever higher and shriller calls.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
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Pickpick

I actually loved this book -- very engagingly written and Cecil himself is as vivid as any fictional protagonist. Highly recommended if you're interested in how Elizabeth's court functioned.

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Sophronisba
The Applicant | Nazli Koca
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Pickpick

You can definitely see Elif Batuman's influence (she blurbs it and is thanked in the acknowledgements) but I actually enjoyed this more than I usually enjoy Batuman's work. Interesting portrait of a frustrating protagonist.

Ruthiella Just put a hold on it at the library. I love Batuman. 1mo
Sophronisba @Ruthiella I think you will like this then! Enjoy! 1mo
11 likes1 stack add2 comments
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Sophronisba
Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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“On Friday Penguin Random House confirmed that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel – titled En Agosto Nos Vemos, (We‘ll See Each Other in August) – not only exists, but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024.“

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/28/gabriel-garcia-marquez-unseen-nove...

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Sophronisba
The Applicant | Nazli Koca
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“How could we deprive them of the daughters they raised to become their allies, their cellmates in the prison called life, because we want to not only have but also to show off having the freedom and happiness that they never did?“

#SundaySentence

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Sophronisba
England Made Me | Graham Greene
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“She might have been waiting for her lover. For three quarters of an hour she had sat on the same high stool, half turned from the counter, watching the swing door.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
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You think you've picked up an accessible narrative history, and then Jurgen Habermas shows up in the first paragraph.

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Sophronisba
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Still working my way through this book, I have reached 1970 and learned that Candice Bergen's mother got very huffy about what she wore to the Oscars. I disagree, to my mind this is the Platonic ideal of 1970s Oscars regalia. 10/10, no notes. My only regret is that I cannot find a less blurry image.

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Sophronisba
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Thirty pages in this is wildly entertaining. So far I have learned that Douglas Fairbanks turned pale and wept when his wife Mary Pickford had the audacity to cut her hair (men are so _emotional_, amirite?) and that on the set of one early talkie, the microphone was hidden in the false hump of a man playing a hunchback, which he swung back and forth between the other actors when they were speaking.

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Sophronisba
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“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,“ Jane Austen famously wrote in _Pride and Prejudice_. Two hundred years later, Margaret Atwood offered a riposte from the other side: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
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This is grim:

“Magellan‘s crew, confined aboard their ships, relied on worm-eaten biscuits and flying fish that landed on the decks. They slowly succumbed to scurvy, which Magellan and other officers escaped by accident. Because of their rank, they were entitled to an allocation of jam made from quince, a tart little fruit rich in vitamin C. Without realizing how or why, those who had access to quince were protected.“

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Sophronisba
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“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished.“

#SundaySentence

Cathythoughts Great sentence 👍🏻 2mo
Sophronisba @Cathythoughts This book can be confounding, but it has tons of great sentences and paragraphs. 2mo
10 likes2 comments
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Sophronisba
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“Even by royal standards, the family into which the future Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 was a nest of vipers.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
A Spell of Good Things | Ayobami Adebayo
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Pickpick

An absorbing, brutal novel about Nigeria. Hard to read at times but worth the effort. The characters felt real and I grew quite attached to some of them; Wuraola especially has my heart.

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Sophronisba
Cold Comfort Farm | Stella Gibbons
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Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘Collecting material‘. No one can object to that.

#SundaySentence

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Sophronisba
Cakes and ale | William Somerset Maugham
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Pickpick

I enjoyed this social satire quite a bit -- it's well-written and witty, if dated in its treatment of women and occasionally offensive language.

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Sophronisba
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“The headmaster‘s wife twisted herself round in her chair to talk to Mrs Morland, who was sitting in the row just behind her. ‘I can‘t make out,‘ she said reflectively, ‘why all the big boys seem to be at the bottom of preparatory schools and the small ones at the top.'“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
All Passion Spent | Vita Sackville-West
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Pickpick

Went in completely blind. I don't know what I expected but this wasn't it -- still, I loved it to bits and plan to read it again in, oh, I don't know, thirty years or so.

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Sophronisba
Cold Comfort Farm | Stella Gibbons
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“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
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When her husband Henry II died during a joust, Catherine de Medici replaced her previous personal device (a rainbow) with a broken lance and a Latin inscription that means “From this come my tears and my pain,“ and I respect her grief but that just feels a little extra.

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Sophronisba
Roman Stories | Jhumpa Lahiri
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New Jhumpa Lahiri collection coming in October! (I admit I didn't love Whereabouts but I'm hoping this is a return to form.)

jlhammar Oooh, so excited! Love Lahiri. 2mo
Sophronisba @jlhammar Me too! I feel like this could be really great. 2mo
12 likes2 comments
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Sophronisba
Cakes and Ale | W Somerset Maugham
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Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

#SundaySentence

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Sophronisba
Leonardo da Vinci | Walter Isaacson
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Today I learned that the king of France may have cradled da Vinci in his arms as the elderly artist died. After da Vinci delivered a short lecture on the probable causes of his own death.

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Sophronisba
All Passion Spent | Vita Sackville-West
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“Henry Lyulph Holland, first Earl of Slane, had existed for so long that the public had begun to regard him as immortal. The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognise extreme old age as a sign of excellence.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
Leonardo da Vinci | Walter Isaacson
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The Last Supper, both in its creation and in its current state, becomes not just an example of Leonardo‘s genius but also a metaphor for it. It was innovative in its art and too innovative in its methods. The conception was brilliant but the execution flawed. The emotional narrative is profound but slightly mysterious, and the current state of the painting adds another thin veil of mystery to the ones that so often shroud Leonardo‘s life and work.

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Sophronisba
The Future | Naomi Alderman
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New Naomi Alderman incoming in November: https://lithub.com/exclusive-see-the-cover-for-naomi-aldermans-the-future

I loved The Power so I'm really excited about this one.

12 likes1 stack add
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Sophronisba
Leonardo da Vinci | Walter Isaacson
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Da Vinci's to-do list:

* Describe the tongue of the woodpecker
* Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men
* Inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length, or only in width

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Sophronisba
A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway
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“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were.“

#SundaySentence

15 likes1 stack add
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Sophronisba
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A few weeks ago I realized both that I missed cooking and that the picky eaters were (mostly) out of the house, so I've been spending weekends trying new recipes. I made shakshuka for the first time and it turned out so pretty. (OK, this isn't _super_ book related but I do recommend this cookbook very highly, we've loved almost everything I've made out of it.)

Tamra ATK books are very reliable! 😋 Cookbooks count to me - I read them for fun regularly. 3mo
Sophronisba @Tamra I can't read cookbooks for fun, it makes me hungry! I used to read books of sheet music for fun though. 3mo
9 likes2 comments
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Sophronisba
After Sappho | Selby Wynn Schwartz
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“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
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May we all face the challenges of our day with the composure of John Stubbs, who was condemned by Elizabeth I to lose his right hand for a seditious pamphlet. On the scaffold he made a dad joke (“Now my calamity is at hand“), then removed his hat and shouted “God Save Queen Elizabeth!“ before fainting at the sight of the stump where his hand used to be.

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Sophronisba
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The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there: “In 1593, upset over the French King Henry IV‘s conversion to Catholicism, Elizabeth spent twenty-six hours translating Boethius‘s Consolations of Philosophy into English, to calm her anger.“

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Sophronisba
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I just read the last 300-odd pages of this in one sitting and now I have a slight book hangover.

14 likes1 stack add
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Sophronisba
A Personal Matter | Kenzaburo Oe
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“We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.”

-- Kenzaburo Oe, 1935 - 2023

Sophronisba (I've only read his _A Personal Matter_, years and years ago -- this reminds me that I really must read _Hiroshima Notes_ at least.)

Link to obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/obituaries/kenzaburo-oe-dead.html
3mo
8 likes1 comment
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Sophronisba
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“What‘s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.“

#SundaySentence

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Sophronisba
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Lovely interview with Margaret Atwood: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/11/margaret-atwood-it-would-be-fun-to...

“I can see Wife of Bath syndrome going on all around me in women my age who are thinking: 'I‘m not done yet, I‘ve had all this life experience and here‘s what I have to tell you.'“

(I haven't read Old Babes in the Wood yet but I'm on the library list.)

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Sophronisba
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“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

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Sophronisba
Twilight Sleep | Edith Wharton
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I was finishing Twilight Sleep today when I heard that Kellyanne and George Conway were divorcing and I could not help but think about what Edith Wharton might have done with that marriage. What a novel that would have been!

11 likes1 stack add
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Sophronisba
Decline and Fall | Evelyn Waugh
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“Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs‘ room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College. From the rooms of Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, two staircases away, came a confused roaring and breaking of glass.“

#FirstLineFriday #FridayReads