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When I read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, I felt as if I had been invited into a private room where every story carried a soft echo. J. D. Salinger writes with a closeness that made me feel more like a listener than a reader. Both novellas revolve around Seymour Glass, yet he appears mostly in absence, shadow, or memory. That distance stirred something in me. I found myself searching for him in every line, just as the characters do.

The first novella follows Buddy Glass during Seymour’s abandoned wedding day. The awkward carriage ride with guests who misunderstand Seymour left me tense. I felt Buddy’s loyalty pressing against their confusion. His voice is observant, careful, and at times surprisingly tender. As he sorts through the fragments of the day, I sensed how love for a sibling can be both grounding and painful. I caught myself feeling protective of Seymour, even though I had barely met him.

The second novella deepened that feeling. In Seymour: An Introduction, Buddy tries to capture who his brother truly was. The attempt feels raw, almost unfinished, and that vulnerability held my attention. Buddy circles around Seymour’s brilliance, humor, and strangeness, admitting how impossible it is to contain a person on paper. I recognized that struggle. Writing about someone you love is its own kind of exposure. As Buddy sifted through memories, notes, and impressions, I felt the weight of admiration mixed with grief.

What moved me most was the sense that Seymour’s complexity challenged everyone who knew him. He was gentle, intense, and unreachable in equal measure. Reading about him made me think about the people in my life who resist simple explanation. Salinger’s style, pared down but charged with feeling, carried me through both novellas with a steady pull.

By the time I closed the book, I felt a lingering quiet. The Glass family had drawn me in with their honesty and their fractures. The experience left me aware of how memory holds its own truth, shaped less by facts and more by the ache of wanting to understand someone fully, even when you know you never will.

Reading Absalom, Absalom! felt like trying to understand a storm by studying the debris it left behind. William Faulkner tells the story of Thomas Sutpen through tangled voices, shifting memories, and competing explanations. As I moved through the novel, I felt both challenged and strangely compelled, as if each retelling pushed me deeper into the soil of the Sutpen family’s past. The structure demanded patience from me, but it also rewarded me with a feeling of discovery every time a detail snapped into place.

The rise and collapse of Sutpen’s grand design, built on ambition and blindness, made me uneasy. I could feel the strain of a man trying to construct his own destiny without considering the lives he would break along the way. The voices of Quentin, Rosa, Mr. Compson, and Shreve layered the story with doubt and emotion. I often found myself shifting my own judgment as their perspectives collided. In those moments I felt the weight of history pressing against personal memory, blurring the line between truth and interpretation.

The South in the novel felt haunted. Its traditions, silences, and wounds shaped every character, and I reacted to that heaviness with a mix of sadness and frustration. The racial and moral implications of Sutpen’s actions stood out sharply. They shaped the tragedy more than any single decision he made. As I followed the unraveling of his legacy, I sensed how tightly the past can cling, even when everyone wants to escape it.

By the time I closed the book, I felt drained but more alert to how stories can fracture when too many people try to hold them. Absalom, Absalom! left me with the lingering awareness that understanding a life, or a nation, requires facing the shadows it would rather hide.

When I read Love in the Time of Cholera, I felt as if I were moving through a world slowed by heat, longing, and the stubborn rhythm of memory. Marquez builds a love story that stretches across decades, and I found myself pulled into its patience. Following Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza felt like listening to two hearts that never learned the same beat, yet somehow kept echoing each other across a lifetime. At times I felt frustrated with them, then strangely protective, as if their hesitations were my own.

Florentino’s early devotion struck me with its intensity. I remember feeling both touched and unsettled by his romantic persistence, especially as he carried that promise through years of loss, wandering, and countless distractions he tried to pass off as love. Fermina, on the other hand, felt grounded in a way that made me breathe easier. When she married Dr. Juvenal Urbino, I sensed her desire for order, and I understood it. Watching her build a life with him gave the story a steadiness that made Florentino’s vigil feel even more fragile.

The world around them is painted with detail that made me stop more than once. The riverboats, the humid afternoons, the sharp humor, and the slow decay of the city all formed a landscape that felt alive. I often found myself drifting with it, as if the setting itself held its own breed of longing. When Urbino died, I felt the shift in the air. Florentino stepped forward again, older but unchanged at his core, and I was surprised by how much emotion that moment stirred in me.

By the end, when the two finally choose each other, I felt a mix of relief and an odd melancholy. Their love did not arrive shining. It arrived worn, tested, and honest. Closing the book, I carried a quiet respect for the way love can wait, transform, and still reach for one more beginning, even when the world insists it is too late.

When I finished The Witches of Eastwick, I felt as if I had stepped out of a storm that kept changing shape. Updike’s novel follows three women in a small Rhode Island town who discover their own strange power after their marriages fall apart. As I moved through the story, I kept feeling a mix of amusement and unease. The magic in the book never felt light to me. It carried weight, and I sensed the loneliness sitting under each spell.

I followed Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie as they tested their strength, and I caught myself smiling at their confidence. At the same time, I noticed how their freedom unsettled the town around them. Updike captured the texture of boredom, desire, and small town gossip in a way that made me pause more than once. I felt the tension build when Darryl Van Horne arrived, a man who stirred all their ambitions and insecurities at once. Watching their world bend around him left me uneasy, as if I could see a crack forming long before they did.

The story carried a rhythm I found hard to shake. I felt sympathy for the women even when their choices turned sharp. Their magic became a mirror for the emotions they tried to outrun. When the novel closed, I was left with a faint sadness and a sense that freedom can feel heavy, especially when the world keeps trying to shrink it.

Reading The Wretched of the Earth wasn’t easy—it was urgent. Though written by Frantz Fanon, the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre hit me like a warning shot. From the first page, I knew this wasn’t a book meant for passive consumption. It demanded something from me.

Fanon writes about decolonization not as a metaphor or academic idea, but as a necessary, painful, and violent rupture. His voice is fierce, grounded in lived experience, and impossible to ignore. I felt both captivated and uncomfortable—especially as a reader coming from privilege. He speaks directly to the psychology of oppression, and how colonial violence doesn’t end when the flag is lowered.

What moved me most was the clarity with which he describes rage—not as chaos, but as a response to centuries of humiliation. His words made me see how dignity, when stripped for long enough, doesn’t ask politely to be returned.

This isn’t a text that consoles. It confronts. And in that confrontation, I felt something shift.

The Wretched of the Earth lit a fire I wasn’t expecting. It gave shape to injustices I thought I understood, and then showed me I didn’t. I finished it feeling shaken—but more awake. Some books challenge your thinking. This one dares you to change.

Reading The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque was like stepping into a cigarette-lit memory—one laced with desperation, war, love, and a city waiting at the edge of exile. It begins with an unnamed narrator, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wandering the streets of Lisbon in 1942. Then, out of the shadows, a man offers him a lifeline: two boat tickets to freedom and forged passports. The price? One night of listening to his story.

What unfolds is not just a tale of escape, but a confession—one haunted by loss, urgency, and impossible choices. I was completely pulled in. The man, Josef, recounts his love for Helen, their flight across Europe, their brief moments of peace constantly shattered by borders and brutality.

Remarque’s writing carries the weight of someone who has seen too much. It’s precise, but full of feeling. Every line feels like it matters. As I read, I felt a quiet ache growing—a sorrow that wasn’t loud but relentless, like watching smoke curl up into a darkening sky.

This is a war story, yes, but not about battles. It’s about survival. About the quiet heroism of keeping your humanity when the world demands you surrender it.

I admired how Remarque makes room for love, even in ruin. Josef and Helen’s relationship is tender, but never naïve. It’s a love that knows it’s on borrowed time—and that’s what makes it real.

When the sun rises over Lisbon, the story ends—but the feeling doesn’t. The Night in Lisbon left me thinking about how little time we’re given, and what we do with it. It’s a novel of twilight hours, told with grace and gravity. And it stayed with me like a whisper I couldn’t quite forget.

Reading Franzen’s What If We Stopped Pretending? felt like someone turning on the lights in a room we’ve all agreed to keep dim. In this short but provocative essay, Jonathan Franzen argues that climate catastrophe is no longer a possibility—it’s a reality. Not a future threat, but a present collapse already in motion.

At first, I resisted. I wanted to disagree, to cling to hope. But as I read, I recognized the strange relief in what he was doing: saying the quiet part out loud. Franzen doesn’t call for despair, but for realism. He suggests that instead of imagining we’ll "fix" climate change, we should focus on preserving what we can—local communities, democracy, decency.

His tone is sharp but not cynical. He writes not to scare, but to reframe. That made me uncomfortable, then thoughtful, then oddly calm. I didn’t feel inspired exactly—but I felt grounded.

This essay doesn’t offer solutions. It offers clarity. And that, I think, is its power. Franzen isn’t asking us to give up; he’s asking us to grow up.

When I finished, I sat with it for a while. I’m still sitting with it. Because sometimes, the first step toward real action is finally telling the truth.

Reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende felt like stepping into a dream woven from memory, myth, and political trauma. From the very first page, I knew I wasn’t just reading a family saga—I was witnessing generations being shaped and shattered by forces larger than themselves.

The story traces the Trueba family across decades, beginning with Clara, a mysterious girl who speaks to spirits, and her volatile husband Esteban. Their lives, and those of their children and grandchildren, unfold against the backdrop of a country that closely mirrors Chile—its beauty, its corruption, its collapse.

What gripped me wasn’t just the magical realism—though Allende’s world glows with ghosts and premonitions—it was the emotional weight each character carried. Love, revenge, power, silence: these aren’t just themes, they’re weapons and wounds. I found myself especially moved by the women in the novel, who endure so much with strength that feels both mythical and heartbreakingly human.

Allende’s prose is lush, but never soft. There’s brutality here—political violence, betrayal, torture—and she doesn’t flinch. I was stunned by how she balanced the intimate with the historical, how the fall of a country could feel as devastating as the collapse of a marriage.

By the end, I felt as though I had lived a dozen lives. The House of the Spirits doesn’t offer clean resolution. Instead, it leaves you holding a thread of memory—fragile, sacred, unbreakable. I closed the book in silence, grateful for the spell it cast and the truths it refused to hide.