Sexual fantasies and affairs taking place in a futuristic dystopian America? Atwood you saucy little minx! Marital problems aren’t uncommon, but adding in the dystopian prison certainly adds some flavor.A lot of story packed into a small package, I was drawn in completely and had a hard time putt...
The story of Stan and Charmaine continues, this installment was definitely a lot more exciting than the first. While the first half of the novel had me wondering in what direction the series was going, boy did it pick up and take an unexpected turn. I was left in shock and I couldn't put it down ...
Atwood's first short story in the Positron series blew me away. Unfortunately, whilst this episode was still enjoyable it just seemed like a filler or stop gap to the next step. It didn't leave you on tenterhooks like the last two. This may be because the main focus of this episode, Charmaine, di...
I think most of the reviewers here have missed Atwood’s point, instead believing the message of the story to be something else. This is not a story, more just an exercise to take down literature’s convention of happy endings. But this convention exists only in Atwood’s head, as many good books ...
I guess Atwood doesn't believe in quotation marks.. I don't think I've ever come across a novel yet in which there is no distinction between the narrator and the character. It took me quite a while to get used to that type of style of writing. I had to go back and re-read sentences again and agai...
This is really more like 3.5 stars for me, but I suppose it does belong a notch above my other 3 star ratings, so it will have to be a 4. After reading and loving The Stone Angel, I decided to try and read all of the Manawaka series of books and, although The Diviners is the last in the series, i...
Best (or critically important to the text) Quotes:"They always want to kill the leaders. With the best of intentions, or so they claim. The leaders have the best of intentions as well. The leaders stand in the spotlight, the killers aim from the dark; it’s easy to score.""Once, this might have be...
I’m not the first to say that, even though I could hardly remember the episode of the twelve maids’ hanging in Penelope’s myth, after reading Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad I will never forget it again. As you probably know, this novella was written as part of an ambitious and interesting project c...
Lots of VERY short but thought-provoking pieces. They are varied, though many involve common Atwood themes (relationships, environmental catastrophe, heaven and hell, women). Some are quite poetic and a few are actual poems; there is an allegorical riddle, or perhaps it's a riddling allegory. The...
maybe 3.5 stars. i feel like atwood's short stories are generally stronger than her prose, which sometimes rambles and baffles. she can already say so much in 10 pages. some of the short fiction is banal though; starting to believe it's a trend that i like only 30% of her compilations, so natural...
Everybody in this novel has a motive for killing Zenia – and that is the point, or at least, one of the points. Zenia is a dark, malevolent force – one of those people we desire in the dark, middle of the forest nightmare spaces in the black pits of our souls. She is the one who knows our secre...
Margaret Atwood has written a lot of books, and for me they fall into one of two camps: either I've read it, or I know nothing about it. Cat's Eye was one novel I only learnt about a few years ago. First I came across a quoted passage from it in another book - I want to say it was Queen Bees & ...
Margaret Atwood has resisted applying the “science fiction” label to those novels of hers taking place in dystopian futures, preferring instead the term “speculative fiction.” So I wonder what she would think of the way GoodReads classifies Oryx and Crake because as soon as I indicated I was don...
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood's ninth novel is a work of historical fiction, although based on a true historical event - the story of Grace Marks, a Canadian housemaid who was convicted of murdering her employer Thomas Kinnear, and suspected of murdering his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery on July 2...
Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/resurgir-de...Pocas cosas hay más gratificantes que encontrarse poco a poco con libros de tus escritores favoritos e ir perfilando su carrera literaria, la evolución en su escritura y los temas que van tratando. Esto es sencillo cuando esta lectura es cronol...
tI don’t trust the light in this book. I don’t trust the personnel on the switches. I think that most of them came straight from a based-on-a-book-by-Nicholas-Sparks movie set. One of the most insightful comments I ever heard about that particular saccharine mini industry was about how the major...
I'll start off by admitting that I'm a great fan of Atwood's writing but absolutely cannot stand her as a person. This being her earlier work I expected to run into some of the vitriolic, man-hating feminism of hers that I can't tolerate. However, I only came to heads with her a couple of times. ...
If I start a new author and I suspect I'm really going to like them, like REALLY planning to dig all the way into their bibliography, I tend to go out of my way to begin with the debut, rather than, say, with their "best" work. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's interesting to me to see wher...
Non-Fiction. The Franklin Expedition left England in 1845, made a stop in Greenland, met up with some whalers by an iceberg, and then disappeared into the Canadian Arctic forever, leaving behind two message cylinders, hundreds of tin cans, and three marked graves.I recently read Dan Simmons' The ...
Although this book of short stories is brief, it is very dense and is not a quick read. In fact, most (if not all) of the stories beg for a re-read in order to catch Atwood’s subtleties. As a whole, the pieces have a strong feminist theme threaded throughout, with a gifted writer’s sense of humor...
You attempt merely poweryou accomplish merely suffering - pg. 32The collection is divided into four sections. Each section begins with a short poem, reminiscent of the way some books are interspersed with quotations or blurbs at the beginning of chapters or what have you.The first part begins...y...
A literary exploration of Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm.
The children on the lawnjoined hand to handgo round and roundeach arm going intothe next arm, aroundfull circleuntil it comesback into each of the singlebodies againThey are singing, butnot to each other:their feet movealmost in time to the singingWe can seethe concentration ontheir faces, their ...
About 25% of this 80 page book is worth reading; the other 75 is pretty bad. I'll start with what worked.She has a piece, the longest in the book, about a trip to Mexico. It's not perfect by any means, but it really does live up to the premise of the book: thoughtful, full of striking imagery, su...
She was walking towards me in her khaki outfit through a wide field of dry grass with many white bones in it. There were vultures flying over her head. But she saw me dreaming her, and she smiled and waved at me, and I woke up.It was too early to really go to sleep, so I did my toenails. Starlite...
I had myself driven down to Union Station to meet the train, but she wasn’t on it. She wasn’t at Avilion either: I phoned Reenie to check, provoking an outburst: she’d always known something like this would happen, just because of the way Laura was. She’d gone with Laura to the train, she’d shipp...
The window is open a little at the bottom, she left it that way when she set off for work this morning, and the room is chilly and damp. She’s looking at the bedside clock, wondering whether it’s worth the effort to get up, get dressed and go back to the office for an hour or so. Probably not. Re...
On that day you were supposed to act silly and laugh a lot. I pinned a fish onto Shackie, and Croze pinned a fish onto me, and Shackie pinned a fish onto Amanda. A lot of kids pinned fish onto Nuala, but nobody pinned a fish onto Toby because you couldn’t get behind her without her knowing. Adam ...
It was an accident: I collided with him between an anti-vivisectionist speaker and a man who was predicting the end of the world. I was living with a Polish Count in London at the time, and I still wasn’t sure how I’d gotten into it. When I’d walked out my mother’s front door two years earlier, c...
ONE: ANCIENT BALANCES This chapter is dedicated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where my interest in Egyptian coffins was awakened when I was nine; to my father, Dr. C. E. Atwood, through whom I read The Water Babies; and to all the children I babysat and watched over at summer camps and ...
Charmaine did try for a comforting note: “Let’s concentrate on the things we have,” she’d said into the moist, stinky darkness of the car. “We have each other.” She’d started to reach her arm from the back seat into the front, in order to touch Stan, to reassure him, but then she thought better o...
i Escaping from allegoriesin the misty east, where inherited eventsbarnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshakemight be a finger pointing; you can’t lookin store windows without seeingreflections/remnants of privateerbones or methodist grandfathers with jawscarved as wood pulpits warningof ...
Everyone gets a turn, and now it’s mine. Or so they used to tell us in kindergarten. It’s not really true. Some get more turns than others, and I’ve never had a turn, not one! I hardly know how to say I, or mine; I’ve been she, her, that one, for so long. I haven’t even been given a name; I was a...
This is a question Richard is in the habit of asking himself, as he sits at his desk again, shuffling his deck of filing-cards, trying again to begin. He has a repertoire of answers. Sometimes he pictures her drifting down towards the mundane rooftops in a giant balloon made of turquoise and emer...
An indeterminate number of years ago, those two pillows billowing upward from Rey’s encircling arms like two plump, inflatable breasts, soft but firm, would have suggested to Gavin the real breasts, equally soft but firm, that were hidden underneath. He might have hammered together a clever metap...
Which river?) (You said you tookthe boat, you forget too much.) I locate you on streets, in citiesI’ve never seen, you walkagainst a background crowdedwith lifelike detail which crumbles and turns greywhen I look too closely. Why should I needto explain you, perhapsthis is the right place for you...
She wanted some support. Support was what the women she knew said to each other, which had once made Rennie think of stretch stockings for varicose veins. Firm support, for life crises or anything else you could mention. Once Rennie had not intended to have life crises and she did not feel in nee...