Tag Archives: literature

04/9/24

FIN

And here comes the last week of classes of my first year. RMST 202 just may be one of my favorite classes I’ve taken this year, and it was such an eye-opening experience about university level classes in general. I’m not sure if it will be the same in the future for my remaining three years or if this is just one of those really cool and unique classes that I got lucky with.

Anyways, I remember that in one of the first classes, during the snowy week, we talked about the difference between reading and reading, which is something that sort of stuck with me as we went through the course. I was never really a reader..  I mean, I used to love reading as a child, so much that I would finish the thin children’s books on the way home from the bookstore, but somewhere along the way, probably when I got introduced to technology, I just stopped reading for leisure. From last year though, I made a promise to start reading more and get back into novels (which I didn’t really succeed in), and it only took this class for me to fall in love with literature again, or maybe for the first time, in a way I have never before. I remember reading the ratemyprof comments before taking the class and reading stuff like ‘be ready to get called on’ and getting really scared of the first class. It still does kind of terrify me but it was much better than I expected, and I loved writing blogs on what we read however we want, without any pressure to be academically ‘correct’. I think that is what makes this class different than the others; other than the obviously unique contract system, the fact that we can express our opinions and discuss with each other in the blogs and in class makes me think about how much I can learn from my fellow classmates as much as I do from the professors. Everyone has a unique perspective on the novels – some hate it, some find it hard and confusing, and some adore it!

For me, my absolute favorite would have to be If on a winter’s night a traveler by Calvino.. As much as I enjoyed reading the others (not Combray though..), that book stayed with me and will probably make it in the tops of my list of less-than-50 books I’ve ever read in my entire life. Reading about the process behind the books that we read, reading different books every other chapter, and reading about ‘myself’ as the reader was evermore enjoyable and fun to read. I would love to find more books like that!! I think I just really like meta-fictional stuff, even in movies and tv shows. For my least favorite, I would unfortunately have to say Combray, I suppose since it was the first read, especially for a non-reader like me, I found it hard to enjoy. BUT I will definitely give the book one more try and read it again soon. I think, as I’ve said in a previous blog, that the books have been getting easier and more digestible the further we get into the course, which is likely because we have been getting more used to and have been learning how to read not just read for the sake of reading. Something I realized from this change is that it is much easier for me to get into the focus and read for long periods of time without getting distracted after like one paragraph, which is something I’ve always done when reading. Not only that, I just found myself enjoying every novel, even more so after our class discussions and the video lectures our professor makes. The difference between scanning a text and summarizing it and really understanding it to form your own opinion is crucial, as someone who never really talked about their opinions on literature nor had people to talk about it with.

For this I would like to say thank you to professor Beasley-Murray, the lovely TAs, and my classmates, for expanding my horizon and helping me enjoy literature again. Thank you to RMST202 for being such a fun and educating class. I am more than ready to read so much more novels in the future!!

My question is: (I can’t believe it’s the last T.T)

For the previous non-readers who took this course, did it help you read better and do you think you will enjoy literature more now? As for the readers, how did this class change your perception of literature, is it different than the usual novels you read?

Have an amazing summer everyone!

04/2/24

Faces in The Crowd – ??!!?

Faces in the crowd by Valeria Luiselli.

I don’t even know yet.. I wouldn’t say it wasn’t an enjoyable novel but it was very hard to read, or to understand. It was fine during the first part, when the narrator was describing about her life in New York city, all the interesting characters and young adult lives, but I think I lost the flow when the perspectives started to change and Owen started to talk about his life. I even thought the other perspective was from the husband’s until I watched the lecture and got clarification. It probably was the point for the book to be confusing, a non-linear story with changing perspectives, blurred lines and its seemingly unpolished state – and if it was it definitely worked because I was very confused. I suppose it was about a translator being obsessed with an author that the whole narration starts getting blurry and her life starts almost morphing into that of the author’s. Maybe it was a book of maybe’s. Maybe she is a ghost in a living city, maybe everyone else are ghosts, maybe her husband went away, maybe not?? I’m not sure.

As the book says and the lecture quotes,

“I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it”. 

in this structure of holes and loose ends, I’ll talk about what I found interesting. More than the main story about the slow descend to obsession the narrator is going through and the weird coincidences and parallels(?) like the 3 cats :0, I found the different characters to be most interesting. The narrator talks about each of their traits like how they smell (which was very prominent for some reason), their routines inside the apartment, or their mannerisms; they just kind of made me think about the different characters we meet throughout our lives. It is kind of cool but also sad to see the differences of the livelihoods the narrator had in the past versus the present. She would live in a small apartment with a few furnitures, sharing them with others who she would then become friends or lovers with, while in the present in Mexico city, she lives with this responsibility of a mother of two and a husband who I’m not sure if he’s happy in the marriage or not, and she can’t even write her novel in peace without the husband making comments of jealousy on it. It’s also interesting to see how the family members are not named when the ‘characters’ in her past lives all have their names. This makes me wonder if they are truly fictional or not (in the novel). The narrator almost creates this life for Owen from his perspective, talking about the people he meets, his prostitute lover and how he’s fat and almost blind.. so it could be that she was making up these characters in her past life as well. Maybe the real faces in the crowd were not the ghosts but the people she met.. maybe the faces were the friends we made along the way.. (i;m tired)

I found the parallels at the end really cool even though I was not sure what actually was going on, like how Owen had three cats and the narrator with her children were walking around like ‘three little cats’, the buzzing of the flies and mosquitoes and the children’s singing and crying, until it clashes in the end to one when the children finds Papa, or otherwise, Owen? It reminded me of those movies with multiple universes and how they overlap or clash in the end..

My question is:

Who was the most interesting character in your opinion? Mine was definitely Dakota; I really liked their (Dakota and the narrator’s) relationship for some reason.

03/6/24

If on a Winter’s night a Traveler – mind is blown, mouth is agape

If on a Winter’s night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Forgive me for having an impressionable mind, I can’t help but love every single media I consume, and I say this the loudest when I read this novel. From the beginning to the end, I was obsessed – it was unique, it was new, I had never read a book about books ever! But then again, I hadn’t read that many books before taking this course. Nonetheless, I think it could be said that this book has been the most entertaining and interesting one from all the other novels I’ve read, yet I wonder if the opinion will change the more novels I read.

I found myself relating somehow to Ludmilla, about how I usually stay reading books as a reader, without crossing the boundaries between the author and the reader, and only absorbing the stories as themselves, but I suppose the difference lies in how she prefers to do it that way and I having never tried otherwise. Meaning, I have never thought about what goes beyond the book, or should I say before, about the process of the writer writing it from scratch, to being produced, et cetera.. So this novel really made me think about books from a whole other perspective, about books as their own world! It also does this by involving us, the readers into the narration, with its meta-narrative state and second person perspectives. I could almost imagine myself as the character, inside the novel, in a journey to finish his books that ended with a cliffhanger. I couldn’t really delve into the narration as I couldn’t relate to the Reader himself, as I am a woman, and I couldn’t help but notice how clear it was that the novel was written by a man. As the critic in the lecture says, it assumes that the Reader, the norm is masculine and in that I couldn’t bring myself to fully immerse into the novel as a character in it. In addition, the small stories as the unfinished books always were from the perspective of men and the objectification of women in them were recurrent. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the novel and its postmodern, or metamodern? narrative. It sort of reminded me of the tv show Fleabag, in which the main character talks to the audience as we were in on her mind, involved with the story and her thoughts.

Anyways, I really enjoyed the 10 books, and stupidly enough, every time, I kept forgetting that it was going to end abruptly and was disappointed whenever I turned the page and it was either blank or onto the next chapter. This almost deepened my relatability to the Reader, or myself in the novel as I understood the need for continuation and endings of the novels the Reader had. It makes me wonder about books in general, about how as readers we expect every page to be a new addition to the story, a new layer to the meaning it had been trying to entail.

“Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end: I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.”

The main story, on the other hand, was very interesting as it was like a detective mystery book, but in the world of publishing and literature. Every aspect of the novel was new and refreshing to me, so I hope to read more works like this in the future!!

My question is: (or /s are)

What are you like as a reader? Do you peek into the ending of the book to give yourself a small view of the novel itself? Do you judge books by their covers? Do you read about the author to know more about what the author was trying to give, or do you prefer to read it as it is, no expectations nor prior knowledge?