Recent reads & experiencing a reading slump
Reading slumps often creep up on you, leaving you entirely defenceless. You lose the comforting feeling of sinking into a good book, the spark that normally pulls you is gone and you’re not focusing. And then, in a panicked state, you try recapturing that spark. You wan’t to read, consume books with the same ferocious intensity you’re used to but… it’s just not there.
I feel as if i’ve been succumbing lately. But how do you combat it? I normally read short books, novellas, memoirs anything between 50 and 190 pages are normally a great way for me to regain the sense of hunger I have for reading. I also suggest reading romance books, a light love story that hardly requires your full attention is always a good way to get back into craving more.
Since the new year began and I set my 2024 Goodreads challenge to 50 books (ambitious, I know), I have seen several BookTokers and Bookstragrammers do their monthly wrap, one having read almost 30 books. How on earth do they manage that? I barely have the capacity to focus on two a month.
But in the last two months, I have read and wholly obsessed over three books.
Here they are
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This book was described by some reviewers as “devastating” and as always I’m drawn to tragedy like a moth to a flame. White Nights is an 1848 short novel, told in four parts by a nameless narrator, wondering the streets of Saint Petersburg in deep solitude and desperate for human contact. He meets Nastenka, a young girl trapped by her overbearingly cautious guardian and they embark on a brief but bittersweet friendship. For those who are stuck in a melancholic dream state, White Nights will feel as if Dostoyevsky is speaking to your soul.
“I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I regard such moments as this one, now, to be so rare that I can’t help repeating these moments in my dreams. I will dream of you all night, for an entire week, all year long.”
Dostoyevsky explores with pinpointed accuracy, the disparity of loneliness and how it can often feel at times that dreams are our only solace. White Nights is a beautiful tale of a short-lived love and the fleeting nature of human connection.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Probably a kickstart to one of the strangers books I’ve read in 2024 so far, The Stranger had me questioning my own sanity a lot. The book is split into two parts - Part One is before the protagonist, Meursault, randomly murders an Arab for no real reason, and Part Two is afterwards. Frustration is expected while reading this book. Through Meursault's apathetic, monotone demeanour, Camus explores the complexities of existentialism with skilful prose. Camus’s tenets of philosophy are laid out bare throughout the book and the readers are confronted with ‘truths’ about the arbitrary nature of morality.
I’m a fan by Sheena Patel
I had deeply conflicting feelings about this book - a mangled mixture of anger, frustration, understanding and at last complete respect for the author. I’m a Fan is Patel’s twisted, blistering debut novel that tells the story of an unnamed female protagonist who embarks on a relationship with a married man while also in a relationship. She develops a unbridled obsession with the married man’s other mistress - an insufferable cookie-cutter instagram influencer. Somewhere in the narrators anguished, sporadic thoughts, are Patel’s glaring social critiques on cultural access, male entitlement, generational wealth, social media and obsession with status. It’s totally unhinged, but you’ll never be able to walk away from it.
“I thought time stretched out forever. I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision. But I realized I am on a clock and it runs differently for me. I am female. There was never much time and I have wasted so much already.”