Friday, March 1, 2024
Spring break hours
Friday, February 23, 2024
Friday Reads: Normal People
The novel follows Marianne and Connell, both from the same small town in Ireland, who forge a strong, short-lived, and very secret relationship in high school, then meet again the following year in Dublin, where they both attend Trinity College. They drift in and out of each other's romantic lives, always drawn magnetically back to one another. I'm about halfway through the book right now, and their increasingly self-destructive behaviors give me the growing sense that deep troubles lie ahead.
Stylistically, this book is different from anything I've read in quite some time. For one thing, Rooney writes her dialogue without any quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy or Bryan Washington. For another, her prose is very spare. I'm usually a sucker for lush, descriptive language, but this novel doesn't have that. I think it's one of the things that lends the novel such a powerful sense of intimacy. It's almost like the stripped down prose strips away the barrier between me and the characters. It's a 180-degree turn from the last novel I read, a big, sprawling sci-fi epic.
Friday, January 19, 2024
Friday Reads: Midnight Sun
Happy Friday, Griffins! As Friday Reads fans know, Kelly's literary tastes are quite highbrow, and this week's selection is no exception. Read on for sparkly vampire drama as she tells us about Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer.
I was a bit busy when Twilight came out in the fall of 2006; I had just started working here at Seton Hill! Since I was a few years older than the target audience, it took me a while to get around to picking up a copy. When I did, I liked it enough to drag my then-boyfriend/now-husband to watch the film in the theater alongside a lot of squealing teenage girls. (He spent the whole movie slouched in his seat with his hat pulled low, apparently in pain, and would occasionally mumble "Bite her neck!")
Midnight Sun is the same story, but as seen and experienced by Edward. It turns out that he is every bit the tortured drama queen we always thought he was. It's a feature, not a bug, folks.
I read an electronic copy, but the print edition runs 832 pages, compared to Twilight's 544. I guess when you are immortal and are awake 24 out of every 24 hours, you don't feel the need to be concise to save time or space. Edward's account of every event runs longer than Bella's because he spends even more time in self-loathing than she does.
Edward also intersperses a lot more backstory, which is fun; we learn more about the Cullen family and how its members all found each other and embarked on their "vegetarian" lifestyle. Now I want a Twilight retelling from Carlisle's perspective... or Emmett's. I bet Emmett's version would be pamphlet-length.
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
J-Term Hours
Library hours for J-Term (January 3rd - January15th) will be Monday-Friday, 8:00 a.m. - 4:50 p.m., except for Thursday, January 11th (closed for the SHU employee winter workshop) and Monday, January 15th (closed for MLK Jr. Day).
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
Winter Break Closure
Happy holidays! The Library will be closed from December 21st through January 2nd and will reopen on January 3rd. Have a safe and happy break.
Friday, November 3, 2023
Friday Reads: The Woman in Me
This week's Friday Reads is a bit predictable; Kelly tells us about her recent audiobook listen, The Woman in Me by Britney Spears.
As a woman who was born in America in the 1980s, I am legally obligated to read Britney Spears' just-released memoir, The Woman in Me, and to give you my opinion about it.
I grew up in the woods listening to country music, so I missed a lot of the Britney hype at its zenith, but I do have fond memories of bopping to "One More Time" in my Girl Scout leader's minivan. Even I, however, knew that Britney was a phenomenon; there was Britney Spears, and then there were all of the other female singers. Many of them would even make caustic references in their own songs and interviews about the impossibility of being held to her standard.
Britney's memoir reveals that a lot of that image was smoke and mirrors, and that all of the pop-princess success came at an impossibly steep price. The book's juicy "reveals" that have made headlines are shocking and heartbreaking, but I was most saddened by the way she described her day-to-day life under her father's conservatorship. The monotony and degradation of that existence sounds unbearable, and I have so much respect for what she endured to maintain the "privilege" of time with her children.
I don't have any formal psychology training, but it doesn't take any to recognize that she has been though a lot of trauma, beginning in her early childhood. While I believe that Britney is telling her truth, I'm not sure that all of it is the truth. And honestly, I'm not sure how much that matters. What is clear from public record is that, over and over again, the people closest to her viewed her as a meal ticket rather than as a person deserving of love and respect. I truly hope that she is getting the therapy, love, and support that she needs as she tries to pick up where she left off in her late teens and works on becoming her own woman.
Friday, October 6, 2023
Friday Reads: Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
This book, by critic and memoirist Claire Dederer, dives deep into all of these questions, and more, embracing all of the complexity and nuance of this dilemma that many fans must face. At its core, the book addresses one question: How do you balance the greatness of the work against the badness of the deed? Dederer is clear right from the start that her goal is not to offer a definitive answer (as she notes, there's no magical calculator that lets you plug in one value for artistic greatness and another for deed heinousness, and then tells you which one trumps the other). Rather, her goal is to explore in depth what it's like, and what it means, to grapple with this dilemma. Each chapter focuses on a different facet of this issue, allowing Dederer to explore all the sticky elements that make this such a complex topic. Does our conception of what it means to be a "genius" lead us to be more forgiving of bad behavior among those artists who have earned that descriptor? How does gender play into this dilemma? Does a monstrous act later in an artist's career retroactively stain all of their earlier work? Dederer is a brilliant writer, and it's a real pleasure reading her insightful, funny, and sometimes self-critical examination of these questions.