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Reflections

International Women’s Day Recommendation List

Happy International Women’s Day! Being as we are two women who run this blog, we are very unsurprisingly huge advocates of female representation and celebration. Too often we find ourselves writing posts about the lack of women in many fields of the media. Recently we talked about the lack of female creators and actors at the Oscars, along with a generally dismal lack of diversity of any type.  Though we are resistant to the idea of reserving the recognition and acknowledgment deserving by women to just one day, we are not opposed to using the opportunity to spam the world…

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Books

2019 Booker Prize Winner(s): A Cop-out?

On 14th October 2019 the Booker Prize was awarded to signify a work of outstanding literature as it has been done annually for the last 50 years. However, this year prize was awarded to not one, but two winners: Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. Though not the first time that the prize has done this, the last time was over two decades ago, when a regulation was put in place stating there could only be one winner. When announcing their decision, the panel stated that this unique circumstance did not come from an…

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Books

‘The Testaments’ by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has become a household name, widely recognisable and revered, increasingly so after the production of a TV adaptation of perhaps her most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. In September of this year, Atwood finally released the widely anticipated and requested sequel, entitled The Testaments. Written 34 years after the first, the novel similarly takes place some years after the events of the previous, specifically 17 years later. Moreover, prior to its release to the public, the novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel returns us to the patriarchal nation of Gilead, a state born out of…

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Books

Canongate Myth Series: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is one author whose name every Canadian child will hear about growing up; I am no exception. She is frequently touted in schools, dinner parties and every bookshop you walk into will be sure to have her books in prominent view. Probably best known for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s writing has always taken on topics of complexity and import, and The Penelopiad is no different. From the previous Canongate Myth Series novellas, I have read, I had begun to recognise a pattern. They were not, as is their most usual identifiers, simple retellings of Greek…

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