Bulgarian Literature Month, or, Jean writes a guest post

By -
June is Bulgarian Literature Month!  Thomas of My Two Stotinki has hosted events in June before, and this year he is hosting an entire month of posts at the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative, which is an organization encouraging....global literature in libraries!  I've been following them for quite some time, so when Thomas put out a call for people to review Bulgarian books, I was both excited and very intimidated.  I took a deep breath and volunteered to read and review Everything Happens As It Does.

Take a look and read the other articles too!  There's a lot of neat stuff happening over there this month.



My post went live over a week ago, but I've been overwhelmed with the end of school.  It turns out that getting a freshman and a senior through finals (and graduated!) is way more work than I was expecting, and WAY more work than homeschooling them.  Massive final projects, frazzled nerves (theirs and mine), and endless ceremonies and gatherings took over my life.  But look, now I've got a high school graduate!


I've been missing my blog and my reading time, so I'll try to get a few posts up before I go out of town in a couple of days.  I'll have plenty of reading time in the car, I hope!  We'll have four adults driving, which is luxury.  (And two of them are much better long-distance drivers than I am; I get sleepy.)  The rest of my family will be home; I'm going to LA with my parents and brother.  I have not been to LA in a very long time.


Comments

  1. Kristen M.June 11, 2018 at 11:05 PM

    Congratulations to the graduate! And have fun in L.A. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. ThomasJune 23, 2018 at 7:52 AM

    Thanks a lot for participating in #BulgarianLiteratureMonth - I am very grateful that you provided a review, Jean!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more