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SenLinYu Recommends Great Books for Holiday Gifting
All hope seems lost for Helena, a prisoner of war grappling with a dreary world of death and dark magic — and an inexplicable case of amnesia. Epic and engrossing, Alchemised is the gritty and Gothic read we’ve all been waiting for.
Read on for three exclusive recommendations from Sen. When you stop by your local B&N to grab your copy of Alchemised this holiday season, be sure to check out these great giftable reads.
Reading a new book is much like opening a door; sometimes leading to places you never imagined, and other times to corners of yourself you had put away, or perhaps not looked at squarely. My favourite books have always been the ones that crack me open in some way, that linger once I’ve finished them, living like an echo inside of me. For me, gifting a book is not a destination but the beginning of a journey and conversation, a way of saying ‘come with me, tell me if you see what I do, I do not want to travel alone.’
This year’s preoccupation has been with narrative, with the stories we’ve been told, told ourselves, or chosen not to tell, and how they have brought us to where we are now.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
Sophie Gilbert
Hardcover
$30.00
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A summary of how the flattening of modern feminism is the result of thirty-five years of cultivated viciousness towards women. What makes this book particularly compelling is the way Gilbert documents the pop-cultural rise of female degradation as a reactionary backlash to feminist progress, and how that has steadily eroded how women are perceived to the point that modern feminism has become little more than a new variety of capitalist consumerism.
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Hedges examines the way in which war is turned mythological, offering illusions of meaning and heroism that will only reveal their hollowness once it’s too late. Observing the way that narratives are twisted until all complexity is flattened, and othering grows so stark that differences become something to kill or die for. Written in the early aughts, the observations remain true and relevant today.
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I found this book deeply compelling because of the way it took the familiar and frequently retold myth of Troy and reframed it, turning its narrative away from the siege and the many heroes of old, instead choosing to remind readers of who the truest casualties of war are. That it is women who are the ‘spoils’ in wars they have not chosen, left to endure the consequences of men’s hubristic pursuits of legacy. Barker’s retelling confronts the reader with how accustomed we are to overlooking the stories of women, even the ones threaded through the myths that have built our literary canon.