Book Rambling

This semester is still rough in terms of me having time to read outside of assigned reading. Therefore, as much as I wish I could do weekly updates on all the fantastic books I have loads of time to read, that's just not realistic. So, I'm going to combine some thoughts on various book related things I've encountered throughout the week and hope it's somewhat coherent. 

First things first, last night I watched the newest To All The Boys I've Loved Before movie, called P.S. I Still Love You. These movies are based off of a YA trilogy written by Jenny Han. This is one of the classic series many of us probably read in middle school or high school. For me, I read these during the summer of my sophomore year in high school. Not really fantastic writing, it's your typical YA high school romance, but I enjoyed it well enough. I'd give it 3 stars out of 5. However, I'm a sucker for rom coms, and so when they released the first film in 2018 I was excited. Netflix does a pretty good job with book-movie adaptations, so I knew I wanted to include it in my blog post after discussing adaptations in class earlier this week. While they're definitely not filmmaking masterpieces, they get the job done and they draw a lot of viewers. This is mainly because the male love interest, Noah Centineo, is the perfect teenage heartthrob and these films launched his career basically. One thing that I think is great about this series is that the main character and her sisters are half Korean. It is refreshing to have a successful YA story that isn't just more white female characters with cliche characteristics of beauty. They include some aspects of their Korean heritage in the books and films too. All in all, while this isn't the best story ever deserving literary acclaim, there are some great things about the series. 

This past week I finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs for my American Renaissance class. This is obviously on the complete opposite side of the spectrum in comparison to To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. I really enjoyed this novel, despite the fact that it was very heavy. I mentioned reading Frederick Douglass’ narrative in an earlier blog post but reading a slave narrative from a woman’s perspective was a bit more impactful for me being a woman. Douglass’ narrative was jarring in itself but reading the same atrocities in addition to the sexual assault that was done by plantation owners was on another level. Obviously, I knew this often occurred between slave owners and slave women but reading what Harriet Jacobs went through for years was deeply disturbing.

We have a long weekend coming up, so I am going to try to make time to read for pleasure. I have to read excerpts from Walden, which will definitely be encouragement enough to do some pleasure reading. I’m planning to pick up The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, which has been on my list for a while now. I'll report back next week.