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Review: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

September 28, 2019 ~ The Book Habit ~ 1 Comment

"The story that follows is one I never intended to commit to paper. Recently, however, a shock of sorts has prompted me to look back over the most troubling episodes of my life and the lives of the several people I loved best. This is the story of how as a girl of sixteen I … Continue reading Review: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

My name is Laura and I am a book addict. The Book Habit is a chronicle of my literary adventures, indulging my decades-long love affair with the written word. Here I post reviews, as well as anything else related to the literary lifestyle.

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September has been quite the month. Aside from contending with a nose-dive in my mental health, I also turned 31. Now officially ‘in my 30s’, September has demanded some quiet contemplation as I look to the year ahead. I always enjoy the timing of my birthday. It comes just as autumn unfurls itself with the subtle grace of falling leaves and the misty augurings of dropping temperatures. More than the obvious calls to start afresh that come with the spring, I’ve always connected with autumn’s invitation to reappraise and embrace those small, yet significant, changes that the season brings. It feels appropriate that I get to welcome in a new year at the same time. In combination with the reassessments demanded by life with panic disorder, depression, and the many symptoms that come from these two conditions coexisting, it’s been a significant month. Not least because of the books that have helped me to carve a meandering path through the psychological wilderness that operates hand-in-hand with mental illness. I discovered Angela Carter at a time when I required the silent soothing that only luminously poetic prose can bring. And I was whisked away to a thrilling escape through the historical, Dracula-inspired mystery of Elizabeth Kostova’s ‘The Historian’. That fiction can provide us with a wordless sense of well-being and comfort in times of profound distress is something that I have experienced in my lifelong struggles with mental illness. September has been no exception. For more on my month in review - including my favourite articles, interviews, and new releases from the literary world - click the link in my bio! And, whatever September held in store for you, I hope that fiction has served your needs as well as it has mine. 🍂 . . . #selfcare #bibliotherapy #booksandtea #booknerd #bookish #bookworm #bookstagram #bookphotography #booklover #igreads #booknerdigans #bookblogger #booklove #bookstagramfeature #instabook #reading #bookstagrammer #instabooks #books #booksofinstagram #book

“The flowers cupped in the garden with a midnight, unguessable sweetness, and the grass rippled and murmured in a small voice that was an intensification of silence. The stillness was like the end of the world. She was alone. In her carapace of white satin, she was the last, the only woman. She trembled with exaltation under the deep, blue, high arc of sky.” . . . In many ways, Angela Carter is a key part of our millennial inheritance. As we work toward an entirely necessary reexamination of the stories embedded in us from youth, Carter’s novels are some of the most successful attempts to take traditional cultural narratives - embodied in the performance of gender and sexuality that we see everywhere in fairytales and classic gothic literature - and introduce a new perspective. ‘The Magic Toyshop’ begins from a familiar premise - a teenage girl, Melanie, flush with the earliest expressions of puberty, orphaned and forced to live under the omniscient oppression of an unknown uncle, Philip. Into this narrative, however, Carter brings an authentic exploration of sexuality and a gripping examination of power. Philip’s traditional notions of femininity and control are everywhere - in the toyshop populated with his favourite wooden puppets, in his wife who has lost the capacity to speak, and in his determination to rob Melanie of her emotional and physical autonomy. The novel is creepy and distressing but with the perfect sense - for childhood lovers of fairytales - of coming home. It is a mournfully beautiful book and one that flips traditional storytelling on its head with an understanding of the flawed vibrancy of humanity. Click the link in my bio to read a full review! And a big thank you to @aileaux for pointing us all to this incredible book - if you’re in the mood for some truly sublime content, be sure to check out her YouTube videos! ✨ . . . #bookreview #booksandtea #bookrecomendation #booknerd #bookish #bookworm #bookstagram #bookphotography #booklover #igreads #booknerdigans #bookblogger #booklove #bookstagramfeature #instabook #reading #bookstagrammer #instabooks #books #booksofinstagram #book #cozy

“It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.” - William Styron . . . Given my own experiences with depression, anxiety, and self-harm, it’s no surprise that I’ve grown increasingly interested in fictional portrayals of mental illness. Where literature has started to move away from the ‘mad woman in the attic’ syndrome of portraying mental illness as the worst kind of social deviance, representation still has a long way to go. While there have been many applaudable efforts to write the details of psychological disorders into fiction, it is also the case that many of these accounts come from those who’ve witnessed illnesses such as OCD, depression, and bipolar as second or third hand observers. And although fiction must have a door open to narratives that diverge from the first-hand experience of an author (what, after all, would be the point of fiction otherwise?), it does an undeniable disservice to literature when we ignore the absence of mentally ill voices in fiction. Much as we refuse to call it representation where most fictionalisations of the female experience are written by men (a balance that continues to shift), it is not true representation when mental illness is written almost exclusively by those who have not suffered it. On The Book Habit today, I’m looking at the history of mental illness in fiction and asking where exactly the right to representation lies. Click the link in my bio to have a read! . . . #bookstagram #bookphotography #bookblogger #bookblog #books #booksandtea #booksofinstagram #cozy #mentalhealth #bookaesthetic #reading #read

“Even in death the boys were trouble. The secret graveyard lay on the north side of the Nickel campus, in a patchy acre of wild grass between the old work barn and the school dump…The discovery of the bodies was an expensive complication for the real estate company awaiting the all clear from the environmental study, and for the state’s attorney, which had recently closed an investigation into the abuse stories. Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue.” . . . In ‘The Nickel Boys’, Colson Whitehead has once again lent his profound narrative skill to the exploration of America’s shadowed history. Where he played with genre, time, and place to bring unique authority to bear on the story of the Underground Railroad, ‘The Nickel Boys’ offers a straight, albeit expertly fictionalised, historical account of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys. Told through the experiences of Elwood Curtis, a teenager sentenced to time at the Nickel Academy reform school (the fictionalised version of the Dozier School), Whitehead unpicks the systematically-enforced (and systemically-ignored) history of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse perpetrated by school overseers on its young victims. In many respects, ‘The Nickel Boys’ feels like a natural successor to Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Underground Railroad’. Exploring slavery’s legacy and racism’s determined inheritance in the era of civil rights, ‘The Nickel Boys’ is an incredible example of what literature can achieve when written at the limits of its humanistic potential. Click the link in my bio to read the full review! . . . . #bookstagram #booksandtea #bookblogger #bookrecommendation #bookphotography #booksofinstagram #reading #read #books #colsonwhitehead #bookblog #booknerd #booknerdigans #booklove

“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . Although usually associated with the drama of teenage first loves or the self-indulgence of a real-life Bridget Jones, heartbreak is one of the most complex and misunderstood of emotional challenges. While often the product of romantic rejection, heartbreak can be as much a consequence of altered or lost circumstances as ended relationships. Resulting largely from our attachment and identification with the thing that we’ve lost, heartbreak’s symptoms can range from melancholy and disrupted sleep patterns to severe depression and diagnosable heart conditions. Even at its least severe, heartbreak can pose a real challenge to those who have found rejection in something to which their self-worth and visions of the future were intrinsically tied. Given the commonality of heartbreak, it’s no surprise that literature deals copiously with the matter of a broken heart. In this month’s post for The Book Habit’s bibliotherapy series, I’m exploring the ways in which fiction can help us to navigate heartbreak - whether we’re preparing for its inevitability or already knee-deep in its symptoms - and making some recommendations for books to help. Click the link in my bio to have a read and let me know whether you’ve ever used fiction to combat heartbreak! 💖 . . . . #bibliotherapy #booksandtea #bookstagram #booknerd #booklover #bookish #bookphotography #bookstagramfeature #booknerdigans #booklove #bookstagrammer #books #bookblogger #book #reading

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that great age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.” . . . In my ongoing to attempts to combat homesickness and the fallout of displacement, I’ve been turning increasingly to fiction as a place to work through my feelings. Not only has literature proved a worthy comrade in my efforts to find my footing in a new country, it is also full of critically important insights on what ‘belonging’ truly means. I turned to John Steinbeck’s travelogue ‘Travels with Charley in Search Of America’ expecting to access some new revelations on US culture and history from the perspective of one of its most authentic literary voices. While this is certainly part of what I found, ‘Travels with Charley’ proved to be so much more than I anticipated. Written by Steinbeck to document the 10,000 miles he travelled in an effort to reacquaint himself with his own country, the book is an intensely moving and passionate reflection on what it means to feel displaced within one’s own country. Dealing with the ramifications of the Cold War, the cripplingly public presence of racism in the Civil Rights era, and the journey of a culture toward increasingly dismissive consumerism, ‘Travels with Charley’ is a call for us to uncover the full range of our nation’s voices - however vitriolic and challenging - if we are to truly understand our own. Click the link in my bio to read a full review! . . . . . #booksandtea #bookish #bookworm #bookstagram #bookphotography #booklover #igreads #bookaddict #bookblogger #booknerdigans #ilovebooks #booklove #bookstagramfeature #bookaholic #instabook #reading #bookreview #bookstagrammer #instabooks #books

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