Room Not of One's Own

Day 274 of the "What are you reading?" project and Garnett has been reading Room, by Emma Donoghue. She says it's "a real page-turner, a chilling story and amazingly fresh 5-year-old narrator who manages to sound poetic without sounding too cute or contrived."

It really is about a room, a life trapped in a room, and you can enter the Room of the book here, if you dare. I think I am as scared of all the clicking and dragging--at the book's website--as I am of the plot. A bad man has stolen a young woman, kept her there, raped her, impregnated her, and now she has to keep her son safe.

But if you enter the website, you can see the layout of the room. And at the home page, you can read what Audrey Niffenegger, author of Time Traveler's Wife, has to say about Room:  "Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days."

Garnett had a similar reaction. She said, "There were parts of Donaghue's book where I forgot I was reading."

I'd be a little afraid to enter that room, via technology or imagination, but it sounds like quite a powerful reading experience. You can read about it more conventionally via the New York Times book review here.

To follow up on a previous post, Barry Silesky has “entered” the conversation about his spiritual reading and questing and said, “No, you're not wrong. Only for sake of any clarification, I mean atheism literally--absence of anything ordinarily involved in the concept, 'God.' There may be a supra-human force; but I doubt any entity; whatever it is I suspect is our imagination. Which (imagination) might be, and I suspect is, the only divinity there is.”

I think he may still comment to speak for himself, but for now I’m quoting from his email. His follow-up email said, “If only I knew what to pray to. The trouble with this atheism is, I'm stuck with myself.” 

Quite a dilemma.