Kokoro
he plot of Kokoro centers around two characters that are never named. The first two parts of the novel consist of a young student getting to know an older man whom he refers to only as ‘Sensei’.
Bandersnatch
Bandersnatch is a scruffy orange tabby with a big, bossy personality. She is loud and demanding and never takes ‘no’ as an answer.
Adopted a year after Jabberwocky, Bandersnatch is the second youngest cat. Despite having been taken from a barn to a very nice shelter, she was a tough little biter. Just what we needed to play with Jabberwocky.
She does get along well with her sisters — especially Wesker.
Bandersnatch is Hargrave’s second little monster. You can usually find her running laps around the house, climbing up the wrong side of the tallest cat tree, balancing on someone’s shoulders, or dead asleep inside a cushy cat bed. She loves attention, and will literally climb you like a tree to get it.
Some other things she likes include margarine, feathers on a string, winning at wrestles, and folding her paws. Because she has such an attitude, Bandersnatch takes a great glamour shot.
Chernobyl Prayer
Chernobyl Prayer is one of the most difficult books that I have ever read. It even took me a year to read it due to stopping and starting and the time I needed to take just to breathe through the amount of raw hurt and fear that she painstakingly documents.
Sweet Days of Discipline
aeggy’s starkness has an edge almost of brutality. She doesn’t mince words, she doesn’t dance around what she is trying to say. A confidence and absolute assurance resonates in her work that I rarely see in other authors.
The Country Girls Trilogy
Though the inside flap copy describes the trilogy as ‘Dickensian’, I have to disagree with that description. There’s a reason these books were censored in Ireland when they were first published and implying that these books have any ‘quaintness’ of tone is really not capturing what O’Brien is attempting to say.
The Blood of Others
I think it’s obvious by this discussion alone that this is an incredibly complex concept to even touch on, let alone explore in depth, but de Beauvoir does just that in a way that is accessible to the reader and tied to the driving plot. If you’re interested in the mechanics of building conceptual narratives into concrete storylines, this novel is definitely a must-read.
Ariel
Plath’s lyrical prose made it obvious that her poetry would be just as lyrical, and she excels at using language and a sparsity of words to express powerful concepts and themes.
Juneteenth
Ellison’s use of language to create complex tapestries of themes and concepts is hard to put into words, both because his style is so unique and because his skill is so profound.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
he doesn’t shy away from what happened to her, but neither does she use it to shock the reader. Instead, she writes of the horror with blunt honesty, and brutality tempered with careful sentence level consideration and a language that is powerful, yet never gratuitous.
The Setting Sun
The Setting Sun presents a Japan that has lost its sense of identity as its population tries to pick up the pieces after the end of the second world war. It is a setting that has the sense of being in flux, but not in a positive way.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
They are clothbound and beautiful with the perfect size of margins and type. Both books nestle into a sturdy slipcase with gold type and a full colour illustration of Sawyer tricking one of his peers into doing his chore for him, painted by Norman Rockwell.