The Pumpkin Eater | 
pick4⭐️ I don‘t hate this book but I don‘t love it, either. The writing is wonderful eventhough the tone and theme is soooo depressing I don‘t know why I chose this to start the new year. She probably wrote this to cope with her mental issues. I‘d love to know if she wrote it to let the world know how bad her husband had been to her.
Starting this novel today… first title in 2024 for NYRB Classics Reading Society 🥳 I didn‘t expect this IRL bookclub to last so long (since Sep 2018). To make things easier, I rule it with dictatorship and choose all the titles 🙊
pickPeter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn‘t keep her,
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.
This book was an unexpected surprise. Although It captures the brutality of marriage and motherhood for some in 1962, I feel that it is still relevant today in parts. The devastation of having a breakdown. The struggle to carry on. The sense of duty, expectation. The feelings of love and also the absence of feeling.
pickI think I would subtitle this book “Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. It‘s all in the head of the self involved narrator who would be extremely unlikeable except for the hints about past traumas. I found it compulsively readable & frequently blackly funny, although I couldn‘t help but worry about the emotional well being of the numerous, anonymous children the narrator apparently enjoyed producing far more than actually engaging with.
pickThis was a selection from #newyearwhodis with @emilyhaldi Pretty sure she was scared I would hate it. I thought Mortimer‘s autobiographical narrator was very compelling though. This is one of those books that you just know you‘ll glean things from with every reading, so I plan to keep it as part of my personal collection.
Pictured is our grandma on her wedding day in the early 1940s.
Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.
🎃🎃🎃
this book is delightfully dark thus far...
Love finding old Penguins 🧡 As @andrew61 has pointed out, Anne Bancroft's face on a book makes for one compelling cover.
Though I'm not sure when I'll actually read it 🙈
Housework done while listening to an audiobook now settling down for a bit with this one ☕️ #readathon
pickAn interesting tale about a woman who struggles to deal with the suffocation of her life, as her screenwriter fourth husband deceives serially, she becomes pregnant again despite having several children, and her parents age. She engages in therapy and we learn about her life from childhood to adulthood and her frustrations. An interesting portrayal particularly given the coming advent of social and sexual changes of the 1960's.
#firstlineofcurrentread #anditsaugust
"Well,' i said, 'i will try. I honestly will try to be honest with you, although really what you're more interested in is my not being honest, if you see what i mean '
I have had this book on my radar for a while but couldn't resist an old penguin volume with Anne bancroft on the front- i hadn't known it was a film with peter finch and James Mason screenplay harold pinter so will have to find.
so-soA woman gets depressed because het husband is unfaithful, all of her children get older and she won't have any other. She feels she is not needed anymore and has to face life as it is.
I do like the theme but I could not relate to the woman. All those nameless children, her distance to them all. Very good writing, I cannot even describe why it didn't hit me like I thought it would.
