Category Archives: Blogs

April 7, 2026 · 10:58 pm

“I think I’m quite ready for another adventure.”

(Title from The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

This course has come to an end and I will miss it. This course was not what I expected it would be and I loved it. The whole format of making it as non-anxiety inducing as possible, the in-class discussions, the blog posts. All of it was wonderful even if I didn’t enjoy the book.  I learnt from this course that I am not a fan of Proust’s writing style and then ignored all the French books. I enjoyed this class and at times hated it. Having to finish a book that I didn’t really get into, or the book itself, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, ending each story just as you get into it. I did like the selection of the books and believe that there is at least one book for everyone to enjoy.

I could not name a favourite book now but, I really enjoyed reading The Time of the Doves. It is a book that I will definitely reread. I would love to really pay attention to the doves and see what else they can symbolize. It was interesting discussing these books and realizing things that you didn’t even think about, such as the translation to english and it being doves (or pigeons). 

While If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler annoyed me, it was very interesting to read just because of the format. Going back and forth between trying to find the next part of the book and then reading the book that the Reader is reading is very interesting. I decided right now to see if Archive of Our Own (a very popular fanfiction reading site) has any works for this story and surprisingly there are only nine. I expected there to be more because of all of the little stories that could be expanded into longer stories. What was even more surprising (was it really tho? ????) was that there was a Star Trek work written in this style. Link for those curious:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24767311/chapters/59885005

But anyways, this class was great. If I ever needed to take another literature course, I would love to have Professor Beasley-Murray.

I also like that the website is available for non-course students as well because I would love to read some of the books that I didn’t get a chance to and read what others had to say about it.

Bye bye everyone and I hope you all have a great summer and good luck on your finals!

 

Jaz

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March 29, 2026 · 10:24 pm

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend

So, I choice this book because a friend of mine (that took this course a couple years ago) loves it and recommended it to me rather aggressively.

The prologue, I loved. To me it felt a little like a set up to a mystery novel. Like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn but with more of an emphasis on the friendship between the two girls and not the disappearance itself. It did kinda end up being like that. The book goes into the girls childhood and adolescence and how their friendship grew. I thought it might tie into the disappearance of Lila but it didn’t. This is the first book of a quartet so hopefully the answer to her disappearance is in the following books.

The childhood part I liked less. The only reason being the formatting of it. Each chapter would be a different time in their childhood that then connected to something else, such as them climbing up the stairs to get to Don Achille’s place but then going to the story of them throwing their dolls which then connects back to why they are going to Don Achille. I don’t hate it, but I think I may have liked it better if they chapters were in order chronologically, or even if each chapter had dates which we could use to see when these stories took place.

The adolescence portion of the book I liked. It was chronological in order. It read like a coming-of-age story.

What I really loved was how the friendship between Lila, Elena, and Carmela. A group of girls will always have a leader and the other girls will always try to be the ‘closest’ or the most like the leader. It was like that in my group of friends in elementary school. One girl was the leader and her I were friends before the other girl joined. The jealousy that is written is done very well because I related. I was jealous when they started hanging out together more.

It was surprising to see that they were still friends years later, because I didn’t stay friends with my group from elementary school. It was toxic. This reminds me of Sociology of Personal Life class I took last semester. My table group (which was all girls) experienced similar things with friends and having a leader who isn’t a great friend. They end up staying in that leader position because we follow them and want to be them and will compete with our other friends for that position of being the right-hand (wo)man.

Lila does end up being a better friend as they get older which does explain how they stay friends years later.

Discussion Question: Did you ever have a friend group that was toxic? A group where the leader was clearly not a good friend but you still followed them around? Do you thing you would be able to stay friends with them?

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March 15, 2026 · 11:00 pm

Money to Burn

This was definitely a book that I would go back and reread. It is a genre that I like to read (well actually I tend to read more on the other side with a detective trying to solve the crime) but also because I did find all the aliases/nicknames and characters a bit confusing. Along with the perspectives shifting. The story has a sort of pressure/anxiety to it but I found it a little difficult to fall into it because I was constantly trying to remember who the characters were, by trying to connect their first name, last name, nicknames, and aliases together.

I was immediately pulled into the book, unlike the others I have read for this course. I like how Piglia describes Dorda and Brignone as twins (even though they look nothing alike) to show how they always stick together and their loyalty to one another. I loved how the heist follows different characters (such as Alberto Martinez Tobar, Spector, and Señor Busch) and what was going on with them around the time of the heist. I think this book would make great heist movie while staying true to the book, especially because of chapter 2 and how its all laid out already.

The criminals are also written very well. They aren’t perfect (their plan goes wrong), they all aren’t suave and charming that can get away with everything. They aren’t completely heroic or completely evil. On one hand, they are people that you don’t agree with because of all the death they have caused of not only cops but other innocent bystanders. But, on the other hand, we are able to see into their thoughts and emotions and it makes us, not exactly like, but understand them more(?). It makes them human and the emotional storyline between Dorda and Brignone made me hope that they would survive and get away with it (so that they could go on and live happily ever after… 😉

The ending of the book with the shootout and being surrounded by cops gave me some Bonnie and Clyde vibes. It makes me wonder if Piglia did that on purpose to show the loyalty and love between Dorda and Brignone. It was nice to read a book where the gay characters aren’t just the comic relief or depicted as soft(???). Like these two guys are considered to be “heavyweights, men of action” (3). It was also great to see how Dorda was the heavy/bigger on of the two and we see just how much love is in him for Brignone. How this big guy, that in media, is normally depicted as the strong, silent type.

Do you think that if this had not been based on a true story, that it would be less compelling and interesting to read?

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March 1, 2026 · 11:14 pm

Calvino Participates in Evil Author Day

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler pulled me in from the start. The way that it is about you reading a reader (yourself) read was very interesting. I loved how he tells you to find your most comfortable position to read and the fact that I have read in most of those positions. I also love how having a massive TBR pile but still going out to buy a new book is not a 21st century phenomenon. It was a little unsettling seeing how well he described his readers. “You open your book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is” (8). This was exactly what I did when I picked the book up to read it. I got comfortable in my bed and then checked to see how long the book was.

I starting off loving the book and the concept of reading a reader read their book and we also getting to read the book the reader is reading. My love for it decreased when every book ended up being a new book. It was like reading an uncompleted fanfiction that hasn’t been updated since 2014 and therefore, most likely, never will be. I was hoping, after reading the premise of the book, that the different stories would somehow come to some sort of conclusion, or that they would somehow connect to each other, like Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. I also started to dislike how it moved away from the stories being connected to one another in some way. Like the first was because they got bond together, and then because it was a book with the same characters and so forth. When the reader goes to the publisher and reads the book from there, it starts to move away form the original story is a different way that I did not like.

This book to me seemed like Calvino had a bunch of drafts or snippets of different stories and put them together and made a story around it. It reminds me of Evil Author Day, which is fanfiction event where writers share their drafts, abandoned work-in-progress works, and snippets. I’m not a writer, I’m a reader, and I have read many that are so good, but then they end before the climax and we are left unsatisfied.

I would recommend people to read the book just because of the concept and how it is written. I would give them a fair warning though that they might hate it.

My discussion question is: What story do you want to get a completed version of to read? What makes you interested in that story and not the others?

For me it was definitely the first one, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It might be because I was actually interested in the book and the time and not just reading it to finish it, but I would love to keep reading that story and see what was in the suitcase and what sketchy things they were up to. I do think that if I read all of the stories, not knowing that I would be left in suspense, then I would want to finish them all. I stopped caring about the stories once I figured out that they will not be continued.

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February 22, 2026 · 11:47 pm

Can anyone be normal?

We talked about people being normal and what normal meant in one of our classes and  I go back to that because for almost 3/4 of the book the only normal person was Mateu and maybe Cintet. Mateu was a man that was very much in love with his wife and daughter. He was a man that missed them and stayed friends with his wife to raise their daughter together. There was no romantic love for Natalia which was nice to read.

The boy, Antonio, was a monster as a child and it is interesting in reading how the parents would react. Also who the freak keeps a tapeworm in a jar. I was honestly surprised that the girl, Rita, didn’t die because of her brother.

Now Quimet, I could go on and on about him being a horrible husband. He was abusive. We are only shown one instance of physical abuse (iirc) but that paragraph ends with “From then on he played that joke a lot” (44) making it known that it happened many times after that. He would also take Natalia on a motorcycle when she was clearly afraid of riding it. ALSO he did even call her Natalia, he called her Colometa!

The whole thing with saying “Poor Maria” (46) and talking about Maria seeing the motorcycle was just plain weird. If he had a dead wife or something he should have told Natalia that and not had her think that she can’t do things to Maria’s standards.

Now going to the book itself, Mercè Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves starts off a little slow. It took my a while to get into it. It is also interesting how it isn’t split into chapters. You can tell when a new one starts because of formatting, but it is not split obviously. I did like the writing style. The whole book and a sort of sadness layered over it that stayed even during the happy/celebratory scenes.

The doves were a major part of the book for good reason, but main thing that they symbolized for me (without going super deep into it) was their relation to their wealth and how they are getting along, but also Natalia’s mental health. With the war starting and them becoming poorer, the doves also are hit and do not have enough to eat. Many of the doves leave, like the some citizens of Natalia’s city and other refugees that were fleeing the war. The doves also showed the “second shift” that women have (the doves might actually make it a third shift) to do once they get home from work. Women work, then come home to take care of the kids and the housework, while the men do not.

My discussion question is: Do you think that Natalia was only going to kill her children or herself as well? Do you think she would have been able to go through with it if Antonio Sr. hadn’t called her back to the shop?

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February 1, 2026 · 11:59 pm

Freud would have loved this one

Like many of the other posts, this made me a uncomfortable. The vibe of the book was a little off to me. It was a great book to read and it was an easy red (compared to Proust and Bombal), but it still was uncomfortable.

Right of the bat, the way the mother acted around her son, and how she acted with Renzo around her son sent warning signals to my head. The reason I hesitate to say the she was in the wrong (That’s not exactly the word I’m looking for, but it’ll have to work) is because this is told from Agostino’s perspective and a 13-year-old who is going through puberty and is learning about sex for the first time might not be the most reliable narrator. But just in the first couple of chapters, the people around Agostino were very sexual. Agostino’s mother “would remove the top of her bathing suit and lower the bottoms so as to expose her whole body to the sunlight” (p. 5). Sandro in p. 32 explains what sex is to him, which is’t very sexual in the context I am discussing but then he goes on to let the boys, “show him how to do it” (p. 32).

They all were weirdly sexual around a 13-year-old. Some of the comments that the boys make also sound very sexual, especially because they had just had this talk. An example being when Tortima tells Agostino to jump into the water and Agostino says he has clothes on. Tortima responds with “Now I’m goign to tear them off of you” (p. 37).

The whole scene with Saro and Agostino in the boat on the way to Rio also is very uncomfortable. Not only because of how Saro is acting. but also because Agostino himself is very uncomfortable during it. This whole scene makes me uncomfortable and makes me think why a grown man hangs out with teenagers.

During that scene there was also something about the black boy which was the reason he didn’t come on the boat with Saro and Agostino but I did not pick up on what it was.

I am running out of words here so here is my question:

Do you guys think that Agostino’s mom was being inappropriate with the way she acted or was it just weird?

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