Goodreads Review: The Robber Bride

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yep, another Margaret Atwood book that is essentially literary perfection. She is an absolute wordsmith, and I especially enjoyed seeing themes in this work from the '90s that are echoed later in her MaddAddam series. The four main characters in this book seem to embody characteristics tied to interrelated themes of food and consumption, spirituality, history of civilization, and destruction. I am just completely enamored by Atwood's entire oeuvre, and found this to be a compelling, fast-paced book about women who are strong and feminist in very different ways.

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2018 Goodreads Reading Challenge

In 2017, I read 18 books. This doesn't seem like much to me, but then I think about all the proposals, manuscripts, journal articles, and monographs I read for work, and then I feel better.

In 2018, my goal is to read harder and finish 24 books.

Here are the first books I am looking forward to reading in 2018!

Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride

Paul Beatty's The Sellout

Alexander Chee's The Queen of the Night

Gayl Jones's Corregidora

Jaroslav Kalfar's The Spaceman of Bohemia

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian

Nnedi Okorafor's The Binti Trilogy

And, ReadosaurusText is now on Goodreads!

my read shelf:

My Top Book Pick of 2017: Julie Lekstrom Himes's Mikhail and Margarita

2017 was a trash fire

Well, 2017 was a trash fire, but you know what wasn't trash? Julie Lekstrom Hime's Mikhail and Margarita, published by Europa Editions. This novel is a treasure, and it was my favorite book this year. I wasn't alone in my appreciation: it won the 2017 First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, which is awarded to the year's best debut novelist.

I admittedly have a weakness for all things published by Europa Editions, and in fact have an entire bookshelf devoted to the press, but this book also appealed to one of my other bookish weaknesses: Stalin- and Soviet-era literature. One of the most classic Russian texts is Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov--a political commentary written as magical realism satire to subvert Stalin's censors and regime, and published in an uncensored version posthumously. Himes's book takes the author's life and his titular character, the beautiful Margarita Nikolaevna, and weaves a lovely historical fiction story about their relationship. I don't know how big the Venn diagram overlap is for people who like Master and Margarita and general Soviet history, but I am smack dab in the middle of it!

Timely in its subthemes of authoritarian regimes, censorship, and the power of satire and the arts, Mikhail and Margarita is a wonderfully written novel. While much Soviet literature speaks to the triumph of the human spirit, Himes's book seems to speak more to the inescapability and perpetual cycles of authoritarianism. Conceptually, this book made me feel like someone crawled into my brain and tailor-made a novel to my liking. I cannot tell you how much I dorked out about this novel when I discovered it, and without remorse I broke my 2017 resolution not to buy new books (with the intention of making a dent in my ever-growing TBR pile). While there was one rather graphic scene that I could have done without, the novel really is impeccable in its pace, vivid writing style, and literary calibre. Both entertaining and impactful, Mikhail and Margarita is truly a fiction gem, and I look forward to reading what Julie Lekstrom Himes writes next.

Himes, Julie Lekstrom. Mikhail and Margarita. New York: Europa Editions, 2017.