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Concluding the course :(

We did it! We reached the last week of the semester and completed our assigned books! I learned a lot about how I read, what kind of reader I am, and what books I enjoy and don't enjoy. This is my second romance studies class; I took 201 in the first semester of my first year. I genuinely appreciated that we got to choose our grades and have a contract to follow to ensure we received the grades we wanted. I have grown throughout this course with the way I read. I was a slower reader at the beginning of the course and had trouble comprehending the material we were given. For example, in Marcel Proust's  Swanns Way , I needed help understanding and following the sentences and how they were structured. I tried my best and wrote a blog post using the parts of the book that made the most sense to me. Aunt Leonie was my favourite character, so I wrote about her.  The next book I read was  The Shrouded Woman  by Maria Luisa Bombal, which was interesting. That Novel caused me to think
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I got disturbed by "Money To Burn"

 Hi, fellow readers, This is the last obligatory book we must read, and we are almost at the end of this term! We were to read "Money to Burn" by Ricardo Piglia this week. I was not expecting this book to be as disturbing as it was. This is the most disturbing book I have read. Although, I haven't read that many books in my life. This book was hard to follow and not the easiest to read in an understandable way; however, I didn't find myself dozing off as much as I did for Proust. This book focused on killing, sex and drugs, and I was not here for it. One thing I learned about myself while reading this book was that I am a sensitive reader, and this book was hard to read. I honestly was surprised at some parts and was shocked by what was written down on paper. I had to accept what was said and move on while reading. Therefore, I did not enjoy this book. We talked about this in the "Time of the Doves" class about reading for analysis and academics. I didn'
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Skepticism and Shocked with Marguerite Duras

  Hi everyone! I enjoyed reading Marguerite Duras's autobiography The Lover but was shocked and skeptical. This story starts when her whole family is together, but then her father dies, leaving her family without any incoming income, so they go to Saigon. Her younger brother becomes an accounting clerk, and her mother becomes a teacher who desperately wants her child to get an education, especially in math. This story takes place at the end of the 1920s. In my blog post, I will talk about the eldest brother, the relationship between Marguerite and her lover, and how Marguerite fantasizes about her love with her lover and wants one of her friends to experience it, even with her lover.  In the Early pages, we understand who her eldest brother is and how Marguerite feels about him. She did not like how much her mother loved him, and because of the way he bullies Marguerite and his family, she wanted to kill him. "I wanted to kill my elder brother, I wanted to kill him, to get the
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Well Done to Italo Calvino's Great Idea

 Hi, Everyone. I hope you are all doing well.  When I started this novel, I thought it would be just an ordinary story. As I started reading it, I thought it might be about this man who gets on a train on a winter's night and stops at places where he may have some adventures as he is a traveller and stops at a bar at his first stop. That's how much titles have significance on how we view and think about the novel, as discussed in the last class with Jon Beasley Murray when reviewing The Time of the Doves. However, as I read, I needed clarification on this book because I was confused when I got to chapter two. The story had stopped. I enjoyed the beginning and how it referred to us as the reader. I appreciated that instead of moving right into the story. It makes us more drawn to the story, and we learn how it is structured. As I got to chapter two, I realized that the narrator told me that the book the reader is reading (not the book we are reading) repeats every 30 pages, not
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The Five Stages of Grief with Natalia

  Hi everyone! I hope you all have been having a relaxing reading break!  I enjoyed this novel the best out of the ones we have read so far. In my blog post, I will briefly summarize how Natalia goes through the five stages of grief and what I thought was questionable. Time of the Doves takes place in Barcelona. Time of the Doves has a wholesome beginning. That is what I thought when reading the words on the pages. Natalia has broken up with her old boyfriend and is swept off her feet by Quimet when he asks her for a dance and calls her Colometa, which means dove in Catalan. Then, Natalia and Quimet are set to be married. Natalia and Quimet have what is called to have a "wedding week" instead of a wedding night. Quimet wants to have a child, and the couple has two. One child is Antoni (a boy), and a girl is named Rita. Sadly, Quimet becomes an absentee father and shows his inconsistency for his family by raising pigeons (doves) and aspiring to make money from them. He also pr
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The Shrouded Woman by Maria Luisa Bombal

  Hey Everyone! I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I did. I found this novel an easier read and more interesting than Proust. I liked that I could read about femininity  and how the story focuses on the lively women's perspectives rather than the men's. This story is a woman's world. This novel is about a woman who has passed, narrating her story.  Ana Maria believes she has lived a small life. Ana was married to Antonio; she is a lover; however, her lover left her and moved to Europe to study science. Ana is a mother to Anita, and Anita marries a good-for-nothing man. She is also a mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law, Maria Griselda, who is not in the same social class as her but enchants all the men in society, "even the great river was in love with Maria Griselda" (196). The character Sofia introduces friendship.  Central themes in this novel are jealousy and loneliness. Sofia is jealous of Ana Maria's childhood. Everyone is envious of Maria's be
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Marcel Proust's Combray "Swann's Way"

Hi, All. I hope everyone has had a great weekend!  We were assigned to read Combray's "Swann's Way" by Marcel Proust this week. This Novel is exciting in the way it captures a recreation of time past. In this Novel, we see different types of time. We experience narrative time with reason, and we have a sensory experience with seeing and touching, etc. This Novel also ventures into habit and memory; involuntary memory puts us in touch with pure time as we cannot repeat the same experience. The narrator realizes how he has wasted his life and that the only way to regain time is to go over memories and become an artist. This book is about a book being written with habit and disruption of habit. For example, the habit of falling asleep aware of your surroundings; in the first scene, the narrator waits for his mother to give him a good-night kiss before falling into a deep sleep. The boy starts to envy his father, which I think about when I get into the story. The narrator
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