Sunday, February 4, 2024

Lovely Books and Things - 2.4.24

Lovely Books and Things
My Books and Films Update

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HAPPY THINGS:

1. February is Loveuary Jane Austen movies at the Hallmark channel (details)
2. A yummy cannoli from Mara's Italian Pastries on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
3. New York city themed collage piece using The New Yorker magazine images for art club
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Library: audiobook
Leslie F*cking Jones
by Leslie Jones
Memoir, Comedy | Published: 2023
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Library:
American Mermaid
by Julia Langbein
Literary | Published: 2023
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To Be Featured:
The Blueprint
by Rae Giana Rashad
Dystopian, African American | Published: February 13, 2024
courtesy of author -Thanks!
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The Secret of Lillian Velvet
by Jaclyn Moriarty
Fantasy, Middle Grade | Published: 2023
courtesy of publisher -Thanks!
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~*~

AND watched: HBO Max
True Detective (2024)
Night Country; season 4
Director: Issa Lopez
Stars: Jodie Foster, Kali Reis
Crime, Drama, Mystery | imdb

In Ennis, Alaska, the men that operate a research station vanish. To solve the case, Chief Danvers and Navarro will have to confront the darkness themselves, and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.

AND watched: theatre
American Fiction (2023)
Director: Cord Jefferson
Writers: Cord Jefferson, Percival Everett
Based on book: Erasure by Percival Everett
Stars: Jeffrey Wright
Comedy, Drama | imdb

A novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from "Black" entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.
Zone of Interest (2023)
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Screenplay: Martin Amis, Jonathan Glazer
Based on book by Martin Amis
Stars: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel
Drama, WWII | imdb

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.

AND watched: Kanopy
Four Daughters (2023)
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Stars: Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui
Documentary, Tunisia | imdb

Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses to fill in their absence.
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Linking up with:
Sunday Post (details)
Mailbox Monday (details)
Sunday Salon (details)

Thanks for stopping by :-)

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Happy release: The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad

The Blueprint
by Rae Giana Rashad
Dystopian, African American | Published: February 13, 2024
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In the vein of Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood, a harrowing novel set in an alternate United States—a world of injustice and bondage in which a young Black woman becomes the concubine of a powerful white government official and must face the dangerous consequences.
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Solenne Bonet lives in Texas where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman’s occupation, spouse, and residence. Solenne finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who’d been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana. But history repeats itself when Solenne, lonely and naïve, finds herself entangled with Bastien Martin, a high-ranking government official. Solenne finds the psychological bond unbearable, so she considers alternatives. With Henriette as her guide, she must decide whether and how to leave behind all she knows.
Inspired by the lives of enslaved concubines to U.S. politicians and planters, The Blueprint unfolds over dual timelines to explore bodily autonomy, hypocrisy, and power imbalances through the lens of the nation’s most unprotected: a Black girl.


First sentence:
The men called her Henriette, but it wasn't her name. She promised herself she would never think it, never say it, never answer to it. It wouldn't be her name.

Saturday, July 1, 2023

Rabbit rabbit: The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
by Edmund de Waal
Memoir, History | Published: 2010 | Goodreads

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie's Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined.

From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de siecle Paris, from occupied Vienna to Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke's journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.


First sentence(s):
In 1991 I was given a two-year scholarship by a Japanese foundation. The idea was to give seven young English people with diverse professional interests - engineering, journalism, industry, ceramics - a grounding in the Japanese language at an English university, followed by a year in Tokyo. Our fluency would help build a new era of contacts with Japan. We were the first intake on the program and expectations were high.

Thursday, June 1, 2023

Rabbit rabbit: Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
by Emily Austin
Contemporary, LGBTQ | Published: 2021 | Goodreads

Gilda, a twenty-something lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.

In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. She can’t bear to ignore the kindly old woman, who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can’t bring herself to break the bad news. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence.


Monday, May 1, 2023

Rabbit rabbit: Rabbit Island

Rabbit Island
by Elvira Navarro
translated by Christina MacSweeney
Short stories, Horror, Spain | Published: 2021 (first 2019) | Goodreads

Combining the gritty surrealism of David Lynch with the explosive interior meditations of Clarice Lispector, the stories in Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island traverse the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called “non-inventor” conducts an experiment on an island inhabited exclusively by birds and is horrified by what the results portend. “Myotragus” bears witness to a man of privilege’s understanding of the world being violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere, an unsightly “paw” grows from a writer’s earlobe; a grandmother floats silently in the corner of a room.

These eleven stories from one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” are psychogeographies of dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards. They act as microscopes fixed upon the regions of our interior lives we often neglect, where the death of God and the failures of institutions have given way to alternative modes of making sense of the world. They are cracked bedroom mirrors. Do you like what you see?


 
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