Sunday Musings |
Hello friends
Do you remember me being obsessed with organization videos? I am out of it. I feel like I have seen every organization video out there and I can tell you everything you need to know about it. Oh, do I follow any of them? Absolutely not.
A friend from real life, you stumbled my blog (am lying I sent her the link WHEN SHE ASKED ME FOR IT) told me that I should be posting more posts with my personal thoughts and talk about them.
What do you guys say, is it alright to add in more thoughtful posts on relationships, adulthood, that may lean more than a bit on the rant side, in my book blog? Or should I have a different platform?
What I read this week:
The Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
I am still reading this and I have not finished reading it.
What I watched this week:
I finally saw the Nun in Cinemas and it was not too gory. I didn’t love it but it was kinda okay-ish. Sorry am definitely not a good movie reviewer. I also saw two other regional movies on the cinemas (yes all this week) and there were pretty decent too.
On Netflix I watched
- Chesapeake Shores – S1 & 2
- Brooklyn 99 – re-runs S1
And I kinda guessed that Chesapeake shores would be an adaptation and you know what? I was proved right.
On the blog
I made a repeat on last week success on my blog. Yes I posted 4 articles this week and I am feeling good about myself. If you have not checked it out yet, please do right away.
Around the blogosphere
I may or not have visited everyone’s blog but hey I tried my best to do it. I think I covered pretty much most of them. And here are picks for the week from the bookish blogger world.
- If there is one anticipated October releases post you have to read, then read Karla’s post here. I promise you it covers everything you and I need to know.
- I know we all love our bookish community, but let us hear it from Clo, a not so new blogger, on her view on the book blogging community.
- Looking for new bookish apps for you book clubs? This list from Bookriot will keep you updated.
That is all for this week, people.
I will be linking today’s post with Caffeinated reviewer’s Sunday post Meme.
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Do you want me to rant right here? What has been happening at your end? I would love to hear. Leave a link so that I can do more blog hops.
Classics, Thriller |
Last year I read the Handmaid’s Tale, another one of Atwood’s masterpieces and it ended up being one of the best books I have ever read. So when I saw that Netflix is adapting another of her tales, I promised myself that I will read the book before I watch it, as any sensible bookworm would do.
Unfortunately it took me a while to get to it because let us face it, Atwoods aren’t the easiest read, especially considering that these are and I had easier books to read. So finally when I actually got to read it, was it worth it all? Read on by Book review of Alias Grace!
About Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Book Name: Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Genre: Fiction – Thriller, Literary, True Crime
Characters: Grace Marks, Dr Simon Jordon, James McDermott, Mary Whitney
Setting: Ontario, Canada, Ireland, the UK
Plot Summary of Alias Grace
Grace Marks has been imprisoned since she was 16 years old for the murders of Mr Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery along with the fellow servant James McDermott, who was hanged. A select group of gentlemen and ladies who are convinced that Grace is innocent try to acquit even after an almost a decade has passed since her imprisonment.
They request Dr Simon Jordon, a doctor of the mind, to interview her and build a report to support their cause. Dr Jordon is fascinated by Grace and is more interested in understanding the levels of her sanity than worry if she is guilty. Thus Grace starts recounting her tale from her impoverished childhood in the Northern Ireland to her incarceration.
Born in a family that had too many mouths to feed, Grace was the one to look after her surviving siblings. They sail to Canada when their father becomes a person of suspicion in a local arson and a related murder. Her mother passes away during the journey and their father’s ways soon make her the only working member of the family.
Grace joins Mrs Parkinson’s household as a help where she meets Mary Whitney, who becomes her trusted friend. Mary’s death in ‘abrupt circumstances’ causes Grace to search work in other places and finally she ends up at the Richmond Hall. Within a few weeks, her life is turned upside down and she is sent to the asylum and later the penitentiary on being convicted for the murders.
Dr Jordon is baffled without being able to tell whether Grace is as innocent as she tells him or he is being played. He also struggles through his own battles trying to ward off his desire for his landlady and his mother’s pressure to settle down soon.
How far will he go to find the truth, especially when the truth is too close to home and he is facing the same dilemma himself? How does his scientific mind fare against her faith laden beliefs? Is he a worthy opponent for Grace at all? You will have to read Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood yourself.
Book review of Alias Grace
Atwood’s writing is as expected hard to get into but once you do that, time will fly while you read through those 450+ pages. Much like the Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace speaks much about the gender and the class discrimination. I was hooked to reading about symbolism on the quilt pattern that I had to Google more about them.
I loved the story of Dr Jordon interwove with that of Grace’s personal story without pacing it down. His relationship with the landlady, how he succumbed to it after much resistance and then his dreams about him murdering the estranged landlord showed how much common he had with Grace than he realized.
Alias Grace is dark and melancholic and yet Atwood’s fictionalized version remained true to the facts, as per her afterword where she discusses the known facts of the case. My stance on whether Grace was guilty, or not, changed every time a new part of the puzzle was revealed
Only a seasoned writer can have that ability to make the reader do that even when they know how it was gonna end (thanks to the reviews I had read earlier).
Bottom – line
I can’t now wait to see the Netflix adaptation of the Alias Grace and hopefully I will feel as great as I do after reading the book. If you like true fiction and/or the Handmaid’s Tale you need to read this without fail. I loved it.
Similar Book reviews you might like
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Have you read Alias Grace or any of Atwood’s other books? Do you like the book to TV/movie adaptations and have any of them lived up to the book? Let us chat.
Authors |
Love him or hate him but you can not get enough of him. He is everywhere these days – cinemas, Netflix and of course his books. We love his films as much as his books. We adore his quotes and novellas as do we his chilling book. Yes, I am talking about the one and only Stephen King. He turns 70 today, September 21, 2017. So what better way to celebrate his birthday than talking about my experience with him and sharing some of his quotes that I love.
My relationship with the King of Horror has not been smooth. I read my first King, Gerald’s Game when I was about twelve. Yes, yet another of those books I had laid my hands when I was not supposed to. I had just then ventured out of the Sidney Sheldon‘s, and the book was something I was not prepared for then. Or ever would be. I thought the plot was grotesque and horrifying. But the writing stuck to me, and I willed my way till the end courageously and was smart enough to avoid any of his works for a long time.
Years later, my then boss gifted me a copy of the Four Past Midnight, a collection of novellas for my birthday, and I used it as a bookend, terrified of the size of the book as well as the possible nightmares it might evoke for a while. As my fate would have it, someone placed a bet daring me to read the book. I read the first one One Past Midnight and had to drop off the challenge thanks to the terrifying nightmares.
It took another three years to convince me to try another King and this time the greed of getting more books pulled me in. A friend of mine, an ardent King’s fan, offered to give me some of his books if I read one of his favorites, Rose Madder. Read this to find what I thought about the book. And like they say, the rest is history. From then on there was no stopping me, and in the past two years I have read quite a few of his seventy, yes you heard it right 70, books.
Until I read Rose Madder, I had associated Stephen King to the horror and supernatural elements and the nightmares that follow, but this book made me fall for the writer that King is. I feel in love with his writing style, his attention to details and more than everything else, the way he can captivate the attention of the reader all through his crazy imagination spell. I admire the way he can make us adore a character that is necessarily sinister and make us realize it is the human nature that is more sinister than the supernatural elements.
With his success as a commercial writer who has a large following, his take on writing and writers have become even more famous than some of his books. His book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft should be on the compulsory read list for any budding writer. Here are some of my favorite quotes of his:
The road to hell is paved with adverbs. – On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on. Bag of Bones
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die. Christine
It ain’t the blows we’re dealt that matter, but the ones we survive. Rose Madder
Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. Skeleton Crew
Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map…A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. Hearts in Atlantis
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the tools to write. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
God grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the tenacity to change what I may, and the good luck not to fuck up too often. ‘Salem’s Lot
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
For a King fan, it is a good time to be. This year has been great with the IT and The dark tower on the cinemas and The mist and Gerald’s Game (soon to be) on Netflix. So let me know what you think of the king of horror. Did I include all your favorite quotes? Wanna add anything? Share in the comments please.
Happy B’day Uncle Stevie!
review, Thriller |
I don’t like people telling me to do something that I was already gonna do anyway. I am sure this one would irk everyone. Most of the time, the reinforcement is well meant, but it seldom works in the intended direction. Do you remember the joke about keeping a secret? Warn them not to tell anyone and you will have people hearing about very soon. Newlyweds Alice and Jake face such a conundrum. Read the review of Amazon’s bestselling psychological thriller The Marriage Pact to know more.
Author: Michelle Richmond
Characters: Alice and Jake, Vivian, Declan and Diane, Orla Scott, Finnegan, JoAnne and Neil Charles
Everything seems perfect for the newly-wedded Alice and Jake. The perfect couple receives the almost perfect gift from an acquaintance. An invite to join an exclusive and secret club called the Pact. The goal of the pact seems very simple: to keep their marriage intact, with few simple rules and a little help from their like minded ‘friends.’
Jake and Alice accept that they both want their marriage to last and accept to be a part of the Pact. When they are presented with a manual with bylaws for their ‘happy marriage,’ the couple take it in a stride. Some of the rules ask them to pick the spouse’s call whatever may be the circumstances, gift each other every month, get away on holiday once in every three months, etc. This practical prescription works very well for both of them very well for a while, and then life happens.
Alice’s firm requires her to put in long hours, and she faces the consequences of neglecting her marriage and the bylaws of the Pact. The ‘punishments’ make them reconsider their allegiance to the Pact, only to realize that ‘no one ever leaves the Pact.’ They work hard to follow the rules, which does help their marriage but the pressure to follow the rules gets overwhelming. How far would you go to keep up your commitment? Give up your marriage? Or the Pact? Grab The Marriage Pact from here, right away.
First off, the premise is entirely new and made so much sense – what could go wrong when you have friends to fall back on to keep your marriage on track? Well, we Indians do know how that works. The family replaces friends in case of our arranged marriages. So yeah, I kept drawing parallels until I read the part about the bylaws. Oh, families are much better – at least they don’t punish. But the comparison stopped right there; the story moved in a fresh direction that I hadn’t expected at all (Yes, I don’t read the blurb before I picked the book). For once I was not predicting all the twists, that came out of nowhere.
The fast paced writing is well appreciated, making The Marriage Pact last in the top 20 of the Amazon bestseller charts for more than ten weeks now. The book with 400 pages could have been cut shorter, but the racy narration mostly made up for it. The statistics from Jake’s work (he is a therapist *eye roll*) could have been avoided, all it did for me was to wonder why he was not doing a better job with his marriage.
At about 3/4ths of the book, I couldn’t wait for the book to end because I felt the story went off the rails and there were too many things making it a mumble jumble. It somehow turned from a psychological thriller to a sci-fi action to self-help(?) in about 100 pages.
There are a few questions left unanswered, and the ending left me wanting for more and better. But of course, either of the ending that was possible would have left me asking more. There were times that I wanted to push the manual against their faces to make them read it. Yes, they had signed off the documents without reading the terms and conditions, and one of them was a lawyer, for God’s sake. If you overlook these flaws and take the plot as such without questioning its credibility, you might enjoy this psychological thriller better.
Bookish talks, discussion, write |
I have made it clear to everyone around me – on online and in real life, that I am besotted with The handmaid’s tale, both the book and Hulu’s teleseries. I have not stopped talking about to anyone who would listen about it. You can read my thoughts about the book version of The handmaid’s tale here. Yeah you heard it! There is a book version and a TV version, and there are a lot of differences between them.
In the Hulu version of Gilead most things are the same as in the book. It is essentially about the fertile women called handmaids who have been rounded up and sent to the houses of its high ranking officials to bear the barren couple a child. With Margret Atwood herself on board as an Executive Producer, this tale of feminists’ nightmare has made a few but significant changes. Read on to know what Hulu has done to one of our favorite classics. Plenty of spoilers ahead, be warned.
1) The tale is timeless
Hulu’s series is set in the present age with current technologies like access to Tinder and Uber. The handmaids have a red tag on their ears which serves as a GPS tracker. This makes the series more relatable to us, the . The technologies used by the Atwood’s dystopia set in 1980s like Compubanks, Compucounts (read as electronic banks and credit/ debit cards) etc are pretty usual for us. Of course there are lot more swearing and nudity involved considering the again the age we are in.
2) Gilead is a diverse society
Atwood’s book starts with Gilead where the children of Ham have been relocated and the sect war had solved the problems of the Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Quakers, and other religious sects. Our present day Gilead is a multicultural society. They still are against the gender traitors, ie, the LGBTQ but there are a lot of openly gay and non whites characters in the series including Moira, Nick and Luke.
3) The bolder, less rigid Offred
The difference the two Offred begins with their name. While the readers are left to make their own deductions about Offred’s before name, Hulu’s Offred makes it clear from the start that she was June. Another drastic change is in the character of June/Offred is that bookish June was a passive character who craves for language, books and words, she never took part in any protests before she was captured and whatever we learn about herself and Gilead is through her strong inner monologues. But Hulu’s June, portrayed by one of my favorites Elizabeth Moss of the Mad Men fame, is a bold lady who even attempts to manipulate the Commander. The Season Finale even shows her as a rebel when she defies Aunt Elizabeth against stoning Janine.
4) We know The Commander
Like June, the Commander’s name in the book had been left to the speculation of the readers. But the Hulu’s Commander is introduced as Waterford and is repeatedly mentioned. Oh, the new Commander doesn’t look anything like the ‘Midwestern banker’ we were used to, he is leaner, younger and much better looking. The Commander is nicer to Offred, letting her meet Moira at the Jezebels and even is a little remorseful when Serena is not let to make her speech, making us like him more than his counterpart from the book.
5) Serena Joy is nothing like we read
The character of Serena Joy gets a complete overhaul by the Hulu’s team. She is nothing like the old, limping, detached ex-televangelist that Atwood had in mind. She is an ex-marketer much like her husband and she played a mighty role in creating Gilead. Hulu’s Serena is not passive about Offred, she is indignant that Offred is taking her place. She is not the one who takes his husband’s affair with June slightly. She gives him a piece of her mind and physically hurts Offred, until she learns she is pregnant. She is passionate, strong and woman who knows to get things done.
6) Ofglen is a gender traitor
How could we forget the brave Mayday supporter Ofglen? In the book the last we hear about her was that she hangs herself when the vans were coming to get her. But Hulu has turned her into a gender traitor and has her even punished for that. She is punished for that severely for having an affair with a Martha. She even drives a car around the market. The show ends up saying more than Ofglen than the book and she is taken in a van much like Offred and her fate is to be certain.
Pic credit
7) Luke survives, so does Hannah
Yes Luke lives in Canada in the Hulu series, whereas his whereabouts are unknown in the book. He is a colored man who divorces his wife to marry June. While the latter fact remains unchanged, the diverse world of Gilead is new. The series also doesn’t speak about the reason behind June’s marriage with Luke is invalidated. Also June’s meeting with Luke has a cutesy story involving Moira and Tinder. I like the TV series’ Luke better than the book’s.
8) Moira escapes the Jezebels
In the book Offred gains her strength from Moira. Moira is a rebel by heart and escapes from the Red Centre alone, not with June as in the series. One of the major change from this theme in the TV series is that Moira is broken down and has lost hope while at Jezebels and Offred is the one who is strong. Moira is seen lastly at the Jezebels by Offred according to the book, whereas Moira escapes to Canada and reunites with Luke.
9) What else has changed
June’s mother plays a bigger part in making up for the courage June lacked, in the book. She is a feminist who fights the system and sent to the Colonies. Cora is a friendlier Martha who finds fainted Offred. Both of these characters are missing in the television series. Likewise Janine’s character is a lot more developed than it is in the book. The time lines are also a bit changed to make it more interesting. Even Aunt Lydia seems to have a heart for Janine, unlike the book.
Have you watched the series? What do you think of it and did you like the changes made by Hulu? Let me know in the comment section.