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Ina

@inaeclecticreader

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‘I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.’
📖🎧
#readersincurrentreads

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Ali Smith, How To Be Both (2014)
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A teenage girl in present day Cambridge that recently lost her mother, an Italian painter of early renaissance working on frescoes in Ferrara that the girl went to see with her mother some 500 years later.. The book consists of two interconnected stories that as a chance wants you read as the first or the second (my copy happened to start with the girl’s story).
I wish I could read this book again starting with the other one. But as it is, it worked wonderfully for me. I enjoyed reading How To Be Both immensely. What surely helped is having seen the frescoes in that palazzo of Not Being Bored (Schifanoia in Ferrara), I happened to know about that artist and so was hooked from the beginning.
I’m not going to repeat what was already said about this amazing literary work of art, this “textual hall of mirrors” challenging “the binary notions governing our existence”.
Only a small tip if you mean to read it: find all the artworks mentioned to enhance the reading experience.
I felt like restarting it again, but I didn’t. Maybe later.

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#finishedreading #alismith #whatiread #amreading #englishliterature #bookrecommendation #readit #readitagain #penguinbooks by @inaeclecticreader

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36

6 years ago

“I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea - of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated - was strangely seductive, until you realized that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy.”
— Rachel Cusk, Transit (2016) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I loved the second book in the trilogy as much as the first. The title Transit refers to the prediction of an internet astrologer “too obviously based on a human type to be human”. The narrator, Faye, after separating from her husband, moves back to London, where she buys a part of a house, which she renovates and in which basement lives a couple of neighbors who hates and tries to sabotage her. She goes to a reading where she shares the stage with two male autofiction authors that hardly let her speak at all. She runs into her ex, goes to the hairdressers, meet a friend and visits her cousin in the country. And every person tells his or her story, like in Outline, each voice adds something to the whole. It’s mesmerizing to see how the author weaves the narrative. It’s a very literary book, and it’s not the drama that keeps you reading but the language, the writing, where “sentences hum with intelligence, like a neural pathway.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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#rachelcusk #rachelcusktrilogy #faberandfaber #whatiread #ourshelvesareourselves #readingfrommybookshelf by @inaeclecticreader

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30

7 years ago

Julio Cortázar, Rayuela / Hopscotch (1963) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
“The reader has to be an accomplice”, wrote Cortázar, and Rayuela is not one book but two, depending on reader’s decision to take one reading path or the other. It’s one of those not so many books intimidatingly called hypertext fiction, anti novel, or counter-novel. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I confess, I’m a bit skeptical towards postmodern experiments in literature, and in Rayuela I half expected a kind of unreadable and unenjoyable text that wouldn’t keep my attention. I was wrong. I actually enjoyed the wandering story Cortázar spins - I chose the second reading path: the chapter jumping method - not every little chapter (out of ‘Expendable Chapters’ that aren’t meant to be read if one decides on the first, linear, reading path) contributes to the story in a traditional sense, but the events, moods, ideas, pictures of the story flows into each other smoothly, some puzzles of the main narrative are solved in the ‘expendable’ chapters. I personally liked Cortázar’s frequent, and quite brilliant art connotations, though they may slow down or discourage not versed in the subject reader. Anyway, I would encourage you to try and read it if you’re interested to get know this author, and decide for yourself. In my opinion, it’s a perfectly readable work open to a multitude of readers.
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Listen to the master himself: “I’m going to tell you something... I don’t believe I’ve ever written anything intellectual. Some works lean in that direction; for example, Rayuela emerges from a concrete fact and the characters begin to talk, so they launch into theories. Well, you and I can also theorize now if we like. But it’s always on a secondary level. I wasn’t born for theorizing.”
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#theunreadshelfproject2019
#juliocortazar #juliocortázar #rayuela #rayuelacortazar by @inaeclecticreader

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21

8 years ago

Gilion @gilioncdimas tagged me a while ago to find and share #tenofmytbr books. She’s been highlighting her unread books alphabetically by author, and she was at P when I took this photo. Here are my ten. Sorry, Gilion, I didn’t start with A. Which one would you start with? Tagging a few of you, just in case you’re down for some fun browsing your shelves 📚

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#bookchallange #tbrchallange #bookstagramchallange #homelibrary by @inaeclecticreader

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16

17 days ago

Peter Grandl, Reset: Die Wahrheit stirbt zuerst / Reset: The Truth Dies First (2025)

Read this earlier this year and never posted about it. October 2024: a passenger plane is about to be shot down over Munich, deepfake videos flood the networks, and calls from familiar voices turn out to be machines. Then the internet itself starts to collapse. A British counter-terrorism officer, a German detective, a cyber expert from Tokyo, a New York publisher. Each trying to make sense of a world where nothing can be trusted.
Almost 500 pages of what would have been sci-fi a few years ago. Now it reads like a scenario for tomorrow. There’s no English translation yet as far as I know.
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#petergrandl #deepfakes #technothriller #germanliterature by @inaeclecticreader

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6

22 days ago

Juliet @owlbookhouse tagged me to do the @oldskoolchallengeclub #lowercasetitlestack challenge. It’s been a while since my last #bookchallange and I forgot how fun it is to browse the shelves just for the fun of it, mixing anew the #tbr piles and wanting to drop everything and just read.
I’ve tagged some book friends from my early bookstagram days. Maybe you’ve missed doing this too 📚

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#oldskoolchallengeclub #alismith by @inaeclecticreader

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38

a month ago

A summer revisit to A Midsummer Night’s Dream 🌌
From the poetic (Lysander):
“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
To the painfully relatable (Titania):
“Methought I was enamoured of an ass.”
400 years later, and Shakespeare is still 💯 on point🎭

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#shakespeare #amidsummernightsdream #englishliterature #classicliterature #williamshakespeare by @inaeclecticreader

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6

2 months ago

Colette, Chéri (1920)

#currentlyreading Colette in French. First time, I started to read this on vacation in a house full of Italian speakers and couldn’t concentrate, my French being rusty. But at least I took a bunch of pictures. Now, it’s going quite smoothly.

Chéri is a spoiled and capricious young man, living with Léa, his older lover, in the gloriously decadent setting of the late Belle Époque… Enjoying it so far.

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#colette #cheri #frenchliterature #bellepoque by @inaeclecticreader

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15

5 months ago

Just finished A Woman’s Story, my 6th Ernaux.
I already read about her father, her sister who died before she was born, and now her mother. All slim books. This one, 88 pages. No Proust, no Knausgaard volumes. But Ernaux does in 100 pages what others need 600 for.
I underlined so many passages that reminded me of my own mother. The differences between Ernaux’s mother and daughter are my differences too. In some ways. In others, not.
She calls it a “literary venture”, the search for a truth that can only be conveyed in words. Not photographs, not memories, not family stories. Words.
“It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to freeze her in a series of images unrelated to time.”
Writing about someone that close means choosing between freezing them and actually seeing them. Ernaux chooses to see. Now I want to drop everything and write about my own mother.

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#annieernaux #awomansstory #frenchliterature #nobelprizeforliterature #whatiread by @inaeclecticreader

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7

5 months ago

Two and a half centuries of wit, irony, and quiet rebellion.
Happy 250th Jane Austen!

I first met her at 12, reading Pride and Prejudice in translation, too young to grasp it all, yet completely taken by Elizabeth’s wit and Austen’s quiet brilliance. Her words have stayed with me ever since.

#JaneAusten250 #PrideAndPrejudice #AustenForever #janeausten #englishliterature #readwomen by @inaeclecticreader

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10

10 months ago

“There is so much to read and the days are so short.”
George Eliot

Happy #stacksunday with my #sundaystack of those beauties, read and #tbr 📚☀️🌸
See any favorites?

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#bookstacks #whatiread #whattoread #readinglist #readinglife #readingfiction #nonfictionreads #alismith #olivialaing #wgsebald #anthonytrollope by @inaeclecticreader

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23

a year ago

Happy Bloomsday with some pictures from Martello Tower ☘️🌊

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

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#bloomsday2025 #bloomsday #jamesjoycetower #martellotower #jamesjoyce #ulysses #jamesjoyceulysses #jamesjoycecentre taken in James Joyce Tower and Museum by @inaeclecticreader

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14

a year ago