nomadreader

The basics:   The Marriage Plot  is the story of a love triangle of sorts. Madeleine Hanna is an English major at Brown in 1982. She falls hard for Leonard Bankhead, while Mitchell Grammaticus falls hard for her. Madeleine's senior thesis addresses the marriage plot in classic literature and ponders if it's still relevant today: "in the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely." My thoughts:  This novel has three of my favorite attributes: an academic setting, travel, and it's character driven. I have a soft spot for novels set in academia, and The Marriage Plot utterly immerses itself in it: "College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people droppe...

Happy Sunday! Despite the unseasonably hot weather (I am not a fan of having the air conditioning on in October!), I am starting to feel the anticipation of fall I adore so much. Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming in a few months, and I adore both holidays. But first, the next two weeks are filled  with literary excitement.  1. The Marriage Plot  comes out Tuesday, October 11. Since I read The Virgin Suicides  in high school, I've been a fan of Jeffrey Eugenides. Somehow I've never gotten around to reading Middlesex  (I know, I know), but I'm eagerly awaiting The Marriage Plot . I've pre-ordered it for my Kindle , and I'm planning to wake up early Tuesday and get a head start on it before work. I'm fascinated with stories of academia and marriage, so the plot of this book coupled with its author makes it one of the fall releases I'm most excited to read. I'm carefully planning my reading to coincide with its release, so I'll be spending thi...