Sofia's Blog

  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...

  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...

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...

Hi everyone, My name is Sofia Almerling, and this is my second year at UBC as a Bachelor of Arts student. I am interested in Art History as my major. I come from Vancouver and live in North Vancouver; therefore, I commute to UBC by taking the bus three times a week there and back. I enjoy commuting as I read over study notes and listen to my favourite songs. Sometimes, I watch my favourite TV show if the bus ride is long. One of my hobbies is singing. I post singing videos on Instagram where I sing covers of songs, and there is one video where I have posted an original song called "Give Yourself a Break." This song is about being easy on yourself through the hard times, giving yourself a break and finding self-love.  Growing up, I never felt the allure to touch a book; however, as I got older, I became interested in poetry (this was popular in high school) "The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur. I have read this short book twice now. Fast forwarding to this summer, I star...