Month: March 2018

More by T. M. Franklin | Book Review

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I don’t know if I’ve seen a worse cover. I don’t like that look at all

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Every time I thought this book would get better, the plot took another predictable turn. I really wanted this to be good, but it just fell through too many times.

Synopsis

It starts out with the usual. Ava’s a college student and when she was younger she claimed to have magic powers. She could make things happen that should’ve been impossible. In college, Ava’s struggling with physics and gets help from this guy called Caleb. Turns out he’s more than a regular college student and is there observing her, he’s a Protector for this ancient race. Cue the cringy standard fantasy names with capital letters. Guardians, Council, it’s all there. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and “random” attacks for Ava to find this out. Even with dreams and weird memory losses she can’t seem to connect any dots whatsoever.

My thoughts

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The book goes slowly downwards from there, except for a few surprises. I’m not going to get into the things that annoyed me, except for *SPOILER* Caleb gives up everything to protect Ava although it’s told he’s given up other suspected untrained Race members to be executed. Why? Is the next book’s plot how he’s been good from the beginning or something? I can’t say if some parts are predictable or just bad. This book had it’s good points, but as a whole it seemed unfinished.    

Upstream by Mary Oliver | Book Review

aquapages // eline4 Comments

Genre: essays, poetry

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“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someoone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”

 

I’ve only recently fallen in love with Mary Oliver’s writing and poems. Upstream is a collection of eighteen lovely essays about how Oliver fell in love with poetry as a child, drawing inspiration from nature and simply seeing things throught her eyes. She talks about the poets she likes; Whitman, Emerson, Poe and Wordsworth, and how they’ve contributed to her understanding of the world and of poetry as an art. It’s all incredibly fascinating, I especially loved the bit about Poe.

 

It’s a book for someone who is interested in poetry (you don’t even have to know a lot, just look at me) or have read and liked any of Mary Oliver’s poetry. There’s a few good lessons in here, but also a lot of beautiful writing. I still prefer her poems, but I would definitely say these essays gives more insight into her thoughtprocess and person. The cozy, calm feeling I got when I looked at the cover was the same feeling I got when I read the texts inside.

Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems vol. 1 | Book Review

aquapages // eline2 Comments

Genre: poetry

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It was my birthday a while ago and I wished to read poetry on my daily hour-long busride, even with only a couple hours sleep. So I read this collection from my current favourite poet. Might be the lack of sleep, but I’m pretty certain it’s was literally magical. Like the sun was out for the first time in months. 

Short disclaimer: I haven’t read as much poetry as fantasy books, but still more than romance novels so here we go.

Mary Oliver’s poetry is nearly always connected with nature: animals, forest, bodies of water, plants. It creates this really lovely atmosphere as you read, and then you can go over again and try to catch the meaning and slowly dread sets in. Not really, it’s mostly light poems, soome with an darker or more serious undertone. Which fits me perfectly.

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The poems feels very tied to the author, and I can’t stop myself from trying to figure this person out. Mary Oliver is a bestselling poet and this collection contains poems from different times in her over eighty years of life. I liked to notice interests tied to specific periods as well as commonalities. It that threw me a bit off having read only her “recent” ones. She writes at one point that no one wants to hear about her childhood and I’m sitting there saying “NO IT’S WHAT I AM HERE FOR”. To be honest, I’m really here for the detailed descriptions of various flowers, but it’s a close second. I just needed stories about people who knows how horrible life can be, but still see beauty in it, just a little bit of hope. And this collection is that, along with weird descriptions of eating animals, but generally talks about how nice the sun is on her skin and various description of how the waves crashes against the shore.

If anyone has recommendations for poets who write a lot about nature/detailed descriptions of anything really or simply favourite poets, send them my way! I just need beautiful words in my life, and when they come with interesting, intelligent thoughts that’s a bonus. 

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Crush by Richard SIken

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I don’t get it and I’m so confused.

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Synopsis

Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken’s voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”

My thoughts

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Usually, when I don’t understand poetry or other fiction, I know there’s a deeper meaning and I’m simply missing some connection that I need to completely understand it. Not with this book. The great goodreads ratings (4.3 average) tilts towards me being the one left out in this scenario, but I’m not sure everyone else is not just playing along (jk).

I get that it’s good poetry, somehow. It has a nice flow, and some phrases that paints very endearing and engaging pictures. I even like and understand some poems. But suddenly I don’t get how one part of a poem connects to the next? Or what it’s about, always? heeelp. The poems are mostly about love and obsession, as the synopsis says, along with being gay and crushing on guys. There’s also a “burn it all or die” feeling to some, where the promised apocalyptic theme comes in.

So, besides the all over the place feeling, the rows of rewritten lines all saying the same thing, angsty images of everything ending in bodies, death and twisted love, besides all that it has some beautiful moments. And I have to say I enjoyed a bit of the angst and death as well, it just flowed too much together and was repetitive in a way I can’t say I prefer. Maybe I will like it better the third time I read through? Hmm. He’s undoubtedly a brilliant writer and I think I’ll rather check out other of his collections to see if they fit me better.

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My favourite poems of this collection: scheherazade, little beast, unfinished duet, wishbone and you are jeff. There’s something in all of them I don’t understand, in “wishbone” that part is almost everything.