I think this is my favourite book we’ve read so far this semester. I felt very present, in the moment, and aware of myself in a way that made me want to find the joy in smaller moments this week. Calvino discussed reading and life in general in a way that emphasized romanticizing the experience and finding importance in small moments. It did feel a bit whiplash-y at times, but more often than not, I found it very enjoyable to just go along for the ride.<\/p>\n
That being said, I think every single pronoun in this book confused me. I felt constantly lost as to whether they were speaking directly to me or to someone else, or if ‘I’<\/em> was the author or a character of a book. It was mentioned later on that the author intended it that way, that “the you that was shifted to the Other Reader can, at any sentence, be addressed to you again.” (pg. 147) Whether I interpreted ‘you’ <\/em>as myself or the Other Reader, or whether I interpreted ‘I’<\/em> as the author or a character was pretty random, which I think is what Calvino intended. The way that we were a part of the experience was unique, and I felt a sense of unity with other readers when the novel happened to describe a habit of mine or something I was doing in the moment.<\/p>\n I like that we only got the beginning of each story, and I appreciated how they were interwoven as it became clear that they were all actually interconnected, and not just through a mistake of the publishing house. The word incipit<\/em> was new to me, but this book was a collection of incipits in a rather recursive way; a book about the main character trying to find the rest of the beginnings. At the same time, the plot of the novel itself is also continually interrupted in such a way that each and every chapter feels like a new beginning in some form.<\/p>\n The library goers’ discussion on the ways they prefer to enjoy books was a fitting conclusion to a book about reading, that there are a thousand different ways people consume literature. That being said, the way Lotaria talked about reading\/understanding books is DEFINITELY wrong: I don’t think it’s at all possible to get everything you need out of a book from the most repeated words, and I don’t necessarily think the most common words are representative of any sort of meaning: they may tell you some common points of the book, but the message could be found in a completely random sentence. The ending completed what felt like organized chaos in a very neat and concise way, and tied together all 10 stories and the story of the main character perfectly.<\/p>\n I’m curious what your thoughts were on the use of personal pronouns in this novel: how did you tend to interpret them, and did it ever create a sense of feeling a bit lost?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think this is my favourite book we’ve read so far this semester. I felt very present, in the moment, and aware of myself in a way that made me want to find the joy in smaller moments this week. Calvino discussed reading and life in general in a way that emphasized romanticizing the experience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107552,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[26,25,24],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-calvino","tag-interconnection","tag-present","tag-romaniticization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107552"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmstemilia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}