{"id":135986,"date":"2014-10-08T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danversreads.wordpress.com\/?p=135986"},"modified":"2014-10-08T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-08T17:00:00","slug":"what-im-reading-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=135986","title":{"rendered":"What I’m Reading Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle here, former Book Monogamist. See, these days I have any number of fairly wildly different* books in progress at roundabout the same time, so, occasionally I’ll post an annotated list here on Read This. (And if you’re pages-deep in the middle of one or more books, please share the titles and your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to know what you’re<\/em> reading.)<\/p>\n

\"Life<\/a>Positive pre-publication buzz swarmed Rebecca Mead\u2019s My Life in Middlemarch<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, dropping the book onto my radar (and TBR list) well before its release date. Funny that, because for all that my curiosity had been piqued, I hesitated once it was finally available. Then came the deliberate swerve, when I\u2019d look the other way whenever I walked by its shelf. I imagined that, having never read Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch<\/a><\/em>, some if not all of Mead\u2019s narrative would be lost on me. (Best to steer clear.) It seemed a reasonable assumption to make; it was also incorrect. Threaded throughout the book are biographical details of Eliot\u2019s life, mostly those experiences that were thought to have shaped her fiction; here and there, running parallel to Eliot\u2019s story, Mead talks about her own life and how her<\/em> experiences shaped her reading of Middlemarch<\/em> and vice versa. (To be sure, the book is about so much more than that, but trying to summarize it all here would do it an injustice.) For me, My Life in Middlemarch<\/em> has been Resonance City, and I\u2019ve reached for my notebook countless times to jot down striking lines (paragraphs) and other sundry notes. For me, it\u2019s been that kind<\/em> of rewarding experience.<\/p>\n

\"Liar<\/a>Between the title\u2013Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u2013and that cover, I was helpless against the high appeal of Karen Abbott\u2019s new book. The first mark in its favor, I think, is the execution of the four women\u2019s stories: like a braid, each woman\u2019s personal narrative is interwoven with the others’. You get to know each of the women but having their stories repeatedly start and pause accomplishes two things of note: already thick due to the fraught time the book is rooted in, the tension heightens still, and the pace quickly becomes inexorable. The group of four represents both the Union and the Confederacy, with each woman supporting her cause in a different manner: one assumes a male identity to enlist, for example, while another uses her status as a wealthy widow to draw well-informed men into her home and confidence. The whole of it is, so far (and I don\u2019t foresee this changing), fascinating. (I have to confess, at one point I put the book down, too worried about one of the women in particular to continue reading just then.) If non-fiction is not typically your cup of tea but the subject matter intrigues you, give Liar, Temptress<\/em> a try. More than once I\u2019ve forgotten it\u2019s not a novel I\u2019m reading.<\/p>\n

\"Belzhar\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em>Belzhar<\/a><\/em><\/strong> is Meg Wolitzer\u2019s first young adult novel, set in Vermont at a \u201ctherapeutic boarding school\u201d called The Wooden Barn. After a traumatic event causes Jam Gallahue to withdraw from the world, her parents send her to The Wooden Barn, where she is selected for enrollment in Special Topics in English. The class is small, in fact it consists of just five students, and the curriculum even moreso, as the students study one writer only throughout the semester. That writer is Sylvia Plath, and the book is The Bell Jar<\/em><\/a>. With their assignment being to write in it twice a week, each student is given a red journal. Jam is initially reluctant but once she begins to write she\u2019s immediately transported to an otherworldly place the students dub Belzhar. (Despite that otherworldly bit, this is not a fantasy novel.) I was immediately sucked into the story, curious and hungry for explanations. (And maybe wanting a red journal of my own, because I\u2019m fairly certain I know what my personal Belzhar would look like and what I\u2019d find there.) As with My Life in Middlemarch<\/em>, if you\u2019re worried about having never encountered Plath\u2019s work, be it The Bell Jar<\/em> or her poetry, that won\u2019t pose a problem here. Plath doesn\u2019t factor into the story as much as I was expecting, and where she does, background is provided. I\u2019m not sold on Belzhar<\/em> in its entirety, at least not yet, but I have no intention of putting it down either.<\/p>\n

*Usually this is true, no matter that the theme above suggests otherwise.`<\/p>\n

[Links point to the NOBLE catalog.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle here, former Book Monogamist. See, these days I have any number of fairly wildly different* books in progress at roundabout the same time. Here are early thoughts on the three books I’m Reading Now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":135987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,56,65,67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-staff-reading","category-what-im-reading-now","category-ya-fiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6V6sR-znk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}