Books I read in February 2024

Life of your own by Joanna Biggs is a mix of literary criticism and mini biographies of eight women authors and how they carved creative freedoms for themselves, along with Biggs’s personal thoughts on her attempt to go through divorce in the 1930s and lose her mother from the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago. In this book, she explores the life and deeds of Mary Wallstonecraft, George Elliott, Zora Neal Herson, Virginia Wolfe, Simone de Bovour, Sylvia Platt, Tony Morrison and Elena Ferrante. The Biggs demonstrates its skill in PEN portraits in her book in 2015. All day long for people at work, and she is astute and collapsed in her analysis of how their hard -to -win independence is reflected in their work.

The head of Simone de Bovover in the “life of your own” brought me In the existential cafeteria from Sarah Baykwell Which has been on my shelves for several years. Starting with the early influence of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, the usual charismatic suspects in the form of Simone de Bovour, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are all, along with less well-known figures such as Maurice Merle-Ponti. Most of all, I avoided existentialism when I studied French, but the enthusiasm of Bakewell on the topic and the obscene explanations of philosophical ideas, combined with biographical details of key figures in influential movement, makes this book very read and much less discouraging to cope with.

Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill is an extremely honest memoir about his Gospel Baptist Education in South Wales and drug abuse as an adult. After a scholarship in a well -known boarding school, Hill began to question his faith and first accepts heroin as he studied at the University of Oxford while trying to unravel the impact of many religious parents. Hill is frank about his shortcomings and the selfish lengths he often went to to feed his addiction. The book follows some familiar arcs of the addiction story – the terrible event that ends with a long stay in the Mental Health Department, followed by repeated attempts to clean – but told with a crooked eye for pathos and dark humor. The episodic and novelist style allows some particularly memorable pieces, including the starting head, where Hill attends a friend’s funeral and his attempts to get drugs into Palestine. This is an excellent memoir and the continuous depiction of addiction is one of the best I came across.