Links I love

 

Happy Valentine's Day!  I hope that everyone enjoyed the day and watching the Super Bowl.  

1. Ten Self Help books ranked.
2. The best books on being kind to yourself and others.
3. Murder in the Blue Mountains
4. Ten offbeat terms of endearment from history.
5. Margaret Atwood has a memoir!

Links I love

 

This past weekend we went skiing here. We had great weather but it was cold! 

1. Brain rot vs. books
2. Romantic gifts for the romantic in your life.
3. Some Disney hotel room essentials.
4. Magic, the Gathering Live Action movie is in the works. Also a Little House on the Prairie reboot.

Review: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

 

This novel is the re-telling of the Illiad through the eyes of 19 year old Briseis, the Queen of Lyrnessus who’s taken as Achilles’s “bed-girl”, his “prize of honour” for mass slaughter.  It seems that Barker's specialty is gender in wars, so I guess it should not be surprise that she's good at it - her descriptions of blood and war and the camps and its inhabitants brings them to life. However, her focus really seemed to be the women's camps, that were behind the army - commonly known as "rape camps." The women are looked at as property - the spoils of war mainly. Breisis is both - initially she's taken as property but then Achilles and Agamemnon fight over her. 

Achilles plays a roll in this novel, but he never becomes THE focus of this novel. While the author did an impeccable job describing what it was like to be a woman during this novel, I had a really hard time getting into the book. It moved fairly slowly for me. I did appreciate that this novel draws attention to the often silent victims of the wars that men (still) wage. I don't know that I will add this one to my library but it is an important book - get from your library. 

Links I love

 

I hope that everyone had a good week! We headed up to ski this week. 

1. This book looks super interesting.
2. How caffeinated coffee helps heart health.
3. Lin Manuel Miranda crashes SNL as Hamilton.
4. The most popular Super Bowl snack by state. 
5. You can now buy ebooks on Bookshop.org.
6. The most anticipated book club reads of 2025.

Have a great week.