Practice

by Rosalind Brown

Six o'clock in the morning, Sunday, at the worn-out end of January.

In a small room in an Oxford college, cold and dim and full of quiet, an undergraduate student works on an essay about Shakespeare's sonnets.

Annabel has a meticulously planned routine for her day - work, yoga, meditation, long walks; no apples after meals, no coffee on an empty stomach - but finds it repeatedly thrown off course. Despite her efforts, she cannot stop her thoughts slipping off their intended track into the shadows of elaborate erotic fantasies.

And as the essay's deadline looms, so too does the irrepressible presence of other Annabel's boyfriend Rich, keen to come and visit her; her family and friends who demand her attention; and darker crises, obliquely glimpsed, all threatening to disturb the much-cherished quiet in her mind.

Exquisitely crafted, wryly comic, and completely original, Practice is a novel about the life of the mind and the life of the body, about the repercussions of a rigid routine and the deep pleasures of literature.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novella, Audiobook, 21st Century, Novels

199 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 14, 2024

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Notable for being both intensely annoying and incredibly dull. Rosalind Brown’s highly-acclaimed debut novel is set over one Sunday – although it felt like a lifetime – in which wealthy, Oxford student Annabel tries and fails to finish her Shakespeare essay due the following day. Scratch a would-be philosophical, would-be subversive surface and what lurks beneath, in my opinion anyway, is an ultra-trad, culturally conservative novel. The perfect gift for the Tatler reader who wants to appear just that little bit edgy.

[rachy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here we go again, a celebrated debut that has pretty overwhelmingly positive reviews, accidentally met me, apparently the most critical person on the planet. I really loved the idea of ‘Practice’ when I picked it up, with those novels where essentially nothing happens being some of my favourite ever. This one takes place over a day in the life of Annabel, Oxford student with a looming essay deadline, and the distractions of her ordinary life that hit her along the way. Unfortunately for me, it held nothing of the usual magic of these kinds of novels and was ultimately a pretty pretentious, pointless and unconvincing offering.

There was no real emotional or actual journey here at all, no bringing together of complimentary moments to make the story full, or even like a story at all. The threat of her essay existed very loosely throughout as if it mattered, but never really felt important either to the character or as a narrative tool. At certain points it seemed there may be some tension with her relationship however that just concluded very simply by the end in a rather lukewarm way. All the other details felt entirely inconsequential, which they of course were. It really just felt like nothing was going on here, no larger point of interest, and none of the smaller ones were done well or differently enough to hold interest either.

The Seducer/Scholar sections were some of the better ones here, but they still felt oddly slotted into Annabel’s own story, given that they were quite detailed but still essentially did not pay off in any kind of way. I couldn’t help but feel it would have been better off to include less, keeping it as a vague concept tied directly to Annabel’s state of mind, or as more detailed and somehow reflective of and parallel to everything else (not that there was much of that). Honestly, it was more interesting on its own merit and I’d much rather these two were what the book was actually about, losing Annabel entirely. It would have been more successful, I’m sure.

The prose itself was fine, while there was nothing ever particularly wrong with it, equally it never showed any especially beautiful construction or interesting insight. There wasn’t a single sentence I highlighted to remember later, but I rarely thought it was bad.

I think I really ended up kind of hating this novel by the end because I ultimately came to believe that ‘Practice’ actually had nothing to say and really, was a complete waste of my time. Equally, it’s another of those books where the blurb is closer to a lie than the truth, with this book offering the barest fraction of what it has been billed as, which is another real pet peeve of mine.

I’m really not sure why this one is getting such overwhelmingly positive reviews, while I might agree that no particular quality (except for plot and I guess that at least was deliberate) was especially poor, I felt like the novel committed the worse sin - not of being bad, but of being pointless. Hollow. It seemed so desperate to execute beauty in the mundane a la ‘Stoner’ or ‘A Whole Life’, but failed to actually include any of the qualities that make them so successful. Instead it ended up offering very little, and I felt swindled. Maybe my least favourite feeling when finishing a book.

[Yahaira · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda boring tbh

[Jaylen]

A “woman thinking” novel of the highest caliber. I think this will make a huge splash this summer, and rightfully so. PRACTICE is playful, warm, funny, and thoughtful, yet also sexy, intimate, and relatable. It brilliantly toes the line between brevity and expansiveness in its structure and prose. This formal inventiveness is used to explore selfhood, literary scholarship, procrastination, the peculiarities of consciousness, and the simultaneously delightful and arduous mundanity of moving through a day when lost in thought and occupying a body. The book follows a day in the mind of a student at Oxford in 2009, trying to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet is about so much more. It’s one of the those novels that reminds you why you love novels. It has shades of some of my favorites: The Novelist, The Guest Lecture, A Horse at Night, Alphabetical Diaries, Couplets, Painting Time.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

She shakes out the blanket, wraps it around her middle, and sits down. Takes her marker out of the book: Sonnet 49. Against that time (if ever that time come). Against that time do I insconce me here. That time being, for her, to-morrow afternoon when the essay is due. Soon she will have to make conversions, into propositional knowledge, But for now she will read, and continue to read, without hurry, searching herself for a theme. When an idea begins to inflate itself she will become purposeful, but until then she will just read.

Rosalind Brown's Practice is a fascinating debut novel. In reductive terms one might say it's a campus novel of a student with an essay crisis, but Brown's formulation makes it so much more interesting than that.

Our narrator, Annabel, is indeed a student, of English Language and Literature at Oxford, and is having an essay crisis - a piece on Shakespeare's sonnets is soon due for submission.

The book covers her thoughts, and rather limited social interactions, over one late winter day, as she attempts to start her essay, reflects on the sonnets (and other literary works, including those of Woolf, Rumi and the Gawain Poet) and also engages in fantasies, including sexual ones involving her 30-something boyfriend from home.

In the author's own words at the time the book deal was announced:

Practice emerged from a few images of stillness and winter gloom, and from the seductive but slippery world of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel is a character hedged about by thorny questions: how to live as a scholar, how to balance the richness and risk of fantasy, how to enjoy the social nourishment she needs but doesn’t always want, and how to respond to other people’s suffering.

Rather than try to answer these questions, I wanted to explore – with equal sympathy – both the appeal of her beautiful, solitary life, and her unease with the morality of living this way.

The novel is formatted with episodic thoughts and activities, each starting on a new page. An example - the reference to the brown mug an incident earlier in the day when the handle of her favourite coffee cup broke off:

She notices a nudge of unhappiness from somewhere else. Ah yes: the brown mug. Sometimes these nudges turn out to be nothing, a wisp from a text, or a hostile memory, and she can locate and dispel it quickly. Not this one. The little brown handle, suddenly alone in her hand. It is upsetting. 'I am upset' she says aloud, calmly. She depended on its hard dark-brownness, its narrowness of shape. On being kept company by it: which makes no sense, she knows this even as she thinks it. But it was an obscure alliance. As if she had decanted some of her own earthen self into the object. Or as if, upon finding the mug, she had found a true flavour of something which she had thought existed only in her im-agination, and which one day she would be able to pursue. Now the mug will always have to be left behind, it will have to live out a kind of beautiful retirement on a shelf, never being asked to hold anything.

Anyway she had a plan, didn't she, just before. 'Come on then Annie' she says to herself. Final push.

She sits down, opens the laptop, creates a blank document, finds the centre of the page. Takes up her book and starts to page through. Selects, on a whim, six of the love triangle sonnets — three to the Young Man, three to the Dark Lady — and types them out. Six narrow rooms out of the great big labyrinth. That thou hast her it is not all my griefe. So now I have confest that he is thine. Even just typing them she is stirred, like grass.

A particularly recurrent fantasy, perhaps her own literary equivalent of the sonnet's love triangles, is a story she imagines of a Scholar and a Seducer, who she situates in Oxford as she walks the streets:

They have been with her for years now, these two. They the grain of her. Naturally she hauls herself in front are in of her own beady eyes about them from time to time. What do they imply about her. What does it mean that they are constantly going in and out of courtyards with cloaks billowing. That the SEDUCER has a wife, of course he does, and any number of mistresses, but will happily send apologies and excuses and gifts if the opportunity arises for an evening with the SCHOLAR. And what does it mean that the SCHOLAR is unattached, that he is thin and angular, that he keeps himself wound very tight, dosing himself with concoctions of his own invention to keep his mind sharp.

Distinctive and a possible Goldsmiths contender.

[ritareadthat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa. Wtf did i just read? Did Rosalind Brown just reach into the inner machinations of my own mind? Did she latch onto my psyche, pull out my incoherent thoughts and then transfer them to paper in a most coherent fashion? This woman is a wizard, a master at noticing everything there is to notice - feelings, thoughts, physical sensations. She delves deep into what I can only state as the curse of overthinking and the calming nature that is routine. As someone with bipolar disorder, I suffer highly with the overthinking, and rely heavily on the routine. I wonder if she intended these tendencies for Annabelle, her main character. Curious thoughts...

Routine. Habit. Daily rituals. The things we notice everyday. The thoughts we think (and overthink) daily. The subconscious idiosyncrasies that we DON'T think about that contribute to who we are as individuals. This makes up Practice.

Yes, there is more than that. We spend a single day in Annabelle's life while she is attending Oxford. She is assigned to write an essay on Shakespeare's sonnets, and this girl is struggling to get through this assignment. Contrary to her task at hand, we find her procrastinating instead of focusing, daydreaming, getting lost in her daily habits. This book is an ode to procrastination. Plot is minimal here, purely character driven and man do I love it. Annabelle's thoughts dwell on bodily functions, her 2 main characters in a book she is writing in her head (she doesn't know she is writing this book, but they definitely sounded like the start of a book to me) - and her boyfriend, among many many other things.

This book is expertly written, with extraordinary prose and precision to the thought and intention behind the writing. There were also some rather lovely references to A Wizard of Earthsea, The Hobbit, Virginia Woolf, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Excellent excellent book - highly recommend for anyone who really enjoys character driven novels with much time spent in the protagonist's mind.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was such a fast read, something about it just scratched my brain the right way

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! Rosalind Brown hones into a single day from the POV of Annabel, a college student, as her mind wanders towards and away from her essay about Shakespeare's Sonnets. The form of Practice is made up of short vignettes which mirrors the Sonnets in a very lovely way. There are moments of deep relatability where I could see myself in Annabel so clearly - particularly in her long musings about peppermint tea.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...she knows the essence of the poems she would write: small, opaque, complex. About nothing in particular: Producing not so much a meaning as an effect." And indeed, this debut novel is small, sort of opaque, aiming for complexity, about nothing in particular - a single day in the life of Oxford student Annabel, who unfortunately goes by the nickname Annie - though it is rarely used - about nothing in particular - except for the way that Annabel assesses everything in her tiny world, comprised, for a good portion of this slim novel, in her room at college at Oxford, in the winter, with an essay about Shakespeare's Sonnets soon due. We are nearly entirely in Annabel's mind and body - as she wakes, prepares for her early morning work, reading various of the sonnets, contemplating all that that means, jotting down words as she searches for what her essay topic might be, aware of her thoughts, and of her body, needing to pee, arousal, and more, and the way she turns nature to her own purposes. A scholarly setting and work, it was quite fascinating to be with Annabel's thoughts as she contemplates the deep meanings of the sonnets she reads, considers Shakespeare not as long dead, but alive and hungry and lustful and perhaps bisexual. The compelling minutia of a hardworking university student who has far more access to her thoughts than perhaps most at that age - what comes across later is that perhaps she's not a natural student, that she is training herself for this life of the mind, that she is, if not secretive, than close to it, keeping her phone off while she works (everyone should really do this!), interacting nearly not at all with those in her hall, texting only when she must, avoiding the question her older boyfriend has asked her - whether he should come to Oxford for the upcoming weekend, rent a hotel room. She has either learned or naturally wants to keep her worlds, and her thoughts, compartmentalized, wanting the life of the mind even as her body wants more. It is something more than mere self-consciousness at work here. She eats healthfully, but perhaps wishes she could lose a few pounds, does yoga, does not drink much, or socialize much, seems to doubt the intentions of others - perhaps Ciara, a fellow student also writing the essay on the sonnets, would actually like to be friends with her. What is compelling about the book is its quotidian focus, bringing to life the muchness of it when we actually pay attention to ourselves and our minutes and hours, our ways of doing things. Whether her imaginary characters - perhaps two sides of herself - that she labels the Seducer and the Scholar - two homoerotic men whose lives she imagines on her long afternoon walk, or in her room - either work or are needed, I'm not sure - I found they took me out of the story, even as their story, that she has fabulated, was fairly interesting - their purpose, though, in such a short novel, I haven't figured out. Perhaps the study of the Sonnets leads to her many sexual fantasies, perhaps Annabel, who seems rather lifeless, even as she heeds every aspect of herself, has always had such sexual fantasies - and for a young woman who seems to want to live a life of her own devising, it is interesting that the fantasies were submissive-dominant ones, she as the submissive. It's a lonely place that Annabel lives, even as it gives her pleasure, and I both enjoyed being there with her, as well as knowing that being there with her would only last 208 pages. What I especially liked about the book is this - while it's more traditional than perhaps the subject matter might lead one to believe - it didn't have stunts, and the author stayed true to her belief that a reader would find Annabel interesting enough, or her actions and thoughts interesting enough, that the reader would be willing to remain there with her. I look forward to what Brown writes next.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for the arc.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A joy to read. Rosalind Brown is one of the best out there. Unfortunately, she has also chosen, like so many others, to use her powers for evil. (Evil in this case being, long descriptions of piss).

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ugh. I’m going to exhaust myself saying this yet again. But… I think this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. There. Take it or leave it. But oh my God this is an incredible book.

[Claire]

I was a bit seduced by recognizing myself and Oxford in this book, and of course that likeness also made me more critical of it. It’s about an undergraduate English student who, on a Sunday morning, begins work on a Shakespeare tutorial essay due the next day. (Points off because I think our heroine actually is not desperate or frantic enough; we’re told she’s a good student but I don’t leave the novel with the convinction that she will even finish her essay.) We see her foraging for ideas, and I haven’t read a better description of the snatches of thought, the glimmers of promise, that emerge in the prolonged, time-defying brainstorming process but haven’t yet expanded into true meaning—and how exciting that feeling is. She reminded me of myself: her obsession with routine, her reputation (however reluctantly maintained) to others as work-driven, her inability to be done with schoolwork and draw meaningful and self-preserving boundaries between literature and life, her deep desire to read everything (which I mercifully feel I have outgrown, at last). I too have stepped into that same meadow in the cold, feeling the same self-importance and latent dread and excitement. There’s a vague sense of wanting that permeates the book, and I liked how she depicts this regimented listlessness—you think you know what’s good for yourself, but really you have no idea what it is that you want (the epigraph is a Wordsworth poem, about Souls who have “felt the weight of too much liberty.”) I found myself annoyed at how sensitive she is though—how influenced she is by yoga, walking, shitting. I get it, the attention to the quotidian, her porousness to the world whatever. But it makes her seem very frail. I also found the recurring “scholar” vs “seducer” scenes extremely annoying.

***
Of the sonnets: “The trouble is keeping them apart. Each one seems to annul the previous one: no longer that, but this.”

“There is a perfectly reasonable nine-to-five day to be worked in the library if only she, et cetera. But this conviction of it all being one realm: the Sonnets, and the room in which the Sonnets are read.”

“Rich the reliable barometer, he likes to let her know how she is coming across to him, it seems a perpetual fascination.”

“She has already pulled apart somewhat the tight weave of her routine. It frays now of its own accord”

“Ted Hughes, where did she read this, while he was at Cambridge he read a Shakespeare play between six and nine every morning. This thought hangs open like a door: for re-weighting her whole routine”

“She puts the word shame into the Shakespeare concordance, she looks at all the places he has mentioned shame, she finds a couple of articles and realises there is a muscular history and theory of shame that she would need weeks to think herself into. She abandons this line”

“If she can write this essay she will be like a small snail successfully climbing a blade of grass. She will see clearly perhaps twelve or fifteen more blades of grass around her, and beyond that an undifferentiated mass of green, and above her the summery darkness which she vaguely understands to be trees”

[Sophia Eck · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about procrastinating, perfect to read when you’re procrastinating. Our main character starts the book endeavoring to write a college essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and (not a spoiler) is getting about as far as Spongebob in that scene where he tries to write and just gets the first letter.

In the span of a day, Annabel lets her mind continuously wander, and we wander along with it, becoming enlightened to her family dynamic, her relationship with an older man, and a fan-fiction like storyline between two unknown men that she cultivates strictly in her head, among any other worthwhile thought that is more important to her at the moment than the essay she cannot for the life of her begin to write or imagine.

Short and quiet, the book is the perfect low maintenance read to pick up when you are avoiding thinking about something else but also don’t want to work to hard to read either. It does not present as intensely entertaining or plot driven, it’s definitely more of a stream of consciousness novel, and while it didn’t wow me, it was a comforting yet interesting audiobook to have on in the background, the calm nature of it definitely contributed to by the narrator who had a very soothing voice and cadence.

thank you to netgalley for an arc of this audiobook in exchange for a review!

[Elizabeth Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like it! The synopsis absolutely pulled me in and then … nothing? The story just lacked umph. And the writing was … ?? I found it extremely confusing at times, especially when the main character jumped between the Scholar and the Seducer. I don’t even know what the author was trying to do with that storyline.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the concept behind this, but it’s *all* concept, and that generally doesn’t play well in a novel.

I liked Annabel and wished for more about her academic work, which is the best part of the book. I loved the unique way she thinks through what she’s working on, and I thought the academic sense of place was solidly done, especially for a shorter novel.

I was less enamored with her relationship with Richard, and that took over too much of the narrative. I found myself enjoying the book more when she was interacting with her friends and fellow students than anything relating to the central romantic relationship.

In all, worth a read for the setting and scholarly concept despite its shortcomings, especially because it’s a quick read.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[cass krug · Rating 3 out of 5]

thank you to fsg and netgalley for a digital copy of this, releases june 25th! practice follows a day in the life of annabel, a student studying english at oxford. we’re with her as soon as she wakes up early in the morning on a winter sunday in 2009, until she goes to sleep. she has a deadline for an essay on shakespeare’s sonnets looming over her her head, an older boyfriend she needs to make a decision about, and a routine that she is desperately trying to stick to.

the novel is a brief yet intimate look at what it means to be in a body, how the forces of desire and productivity influence what we do with our days, and how easy it is to get distracted. i typically love a no plot just vibes book and i really enjoyed how detailed and descriptive the writing was, but felt a bit detached from annabel’s personality at times, maybe due to the third person perspective. i did really relate to the way she strives to stick to a routine and enjoyed her appreciation for the small, mundane habits of every day life (making coffee, taking a walk, doing yoga). i can understand the comparisons to martin riker’s the guest lecture, but in my opinion practice didn’t have quite as much interiority.

parts of this reminded me of the fantasy scenes in claire-louise bennett’s checkout 19 - the imaginary characters of the scholar and the seducer accompany annabel throughout her day. i preferred the sections that were focused more on annabel’s activities and writing process than the sections about those two characters, but i understand that they demonstrate her struggle to balance academics with desire. my personal tastes as a reader just always tend towards more literal depictions of what’s going on rather than metaphorical ones.

overall, shows signs of a promising writer but not quite the book for me!

“And every day she has to catch and deal with little wisps of resistance: but broadly, there it is, the routine is well established, it gathers and directs all her various strengths and susceptibilities.”

[Suus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a bit divided on this book. On the one hand, I really liked reading this. It felt like a comfortable read to me, including some beautifully written sections, descriptions and familiar thoughts. I’ve realised that I quite like this writing style, the detailed description of the protagonist’s thoughts, emotions and actions. In this sense it reminded me a bit of Intermezzo, from Sally Rooney.
What captivated me most were the protagonist’s fantasies of two fictional characters, the Scholar and the Seducer, and the way in which these fantasies took hold of the protagonist throughout her day. What I’m feeling disappointed about is the ending of this book, which felt quite abrupt to me. The book feels incomplete to me, as if this story could be carved out way more, and therefore be much more profound and interesting.
I’d say a 7.3 overall, rounding up to 4 stars.

[Frazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living takes practice.

This book merges Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and the modern turn to temper the mind through mindfulness.

Set in Oxford, following an undergrad trying to write a tutorial essay about Shakespeare's sonnets, Brown's Practice transported me straight back to university days.

I was blown away by how compelling the story was. The prose had an intensity, a clear-eyedness, perhaps a poetic sensibility. Despite very little objectively happening plotwise (we follow our protagonist for a day and she has only a small handful of interactions) I was swept up in the story.

On reflection, I didn't walk away feeling much at all towards the main character, but the storytelling and narrative voice were so rich I didn't miss this.

A brilliant, genre-bending read!

[Bardfilm · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel is about a graduate student not writing her essay on Shakespeare's sonnets.

That's all.

Well, there are many vivid descriptions of trips to the bathroom, long and confusing fantasy sequences, and miscellanea.

There was some interest in the thoughts of a procrastinating student, but it really doesn't add up to anything worth reading.

And there's not much Shakespeare here, either.

[K. Daley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more than I did in the end. It takes place in one day - echoing Mrs. Dalloway. (Woolf is the author that Annabel, the protagonist, most admires.). She, Annabel, is a young Oxford student struggling to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. She tries, she stops to go for a walk, she fixes a cup of tea and tries again. She meditates on her relationship with her older boyfriend. There is a long extended metaphor about mind vs. body. She has sexual longings. She goes for another walk. She has dinner. She finally makes up her mind about her boyfriend. The day ends. Despite my feeling of dissatisfaction, I admire Rosalind Brown’s writing and her experiment. I am looking forward to her next effort.

[Dídac Gil Rams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un dia en la ment d'una estudiant de literatura anglesa d'Oxford entrellaçada amb el contingut dels sonets de Shakespeare. La idea és més que interessant i l'execució més que satisfactòria, però l'estil no m'ha acabat d'atrapar, per al meu gust, un pèl massa acadèmic.

[Ashley Marilynne Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating novel that explores – with considerable poetic justice – interiority, procrastination, sexuality and sensuality, and the fine line between fiction and reality.

[Emily Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. Also the narrator has ADHD

[Lexie Tyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is this book plotless, meandering, and at times far too descriptive of going to the bathroom? Yes. But did it also make me introspective in an unmotivated and sort of unsettling way? Also yes.

[Sarah Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading writing about writing and reading

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's best to read this book in as close to one sitting as you can to best feel the flow. Basically, do the exact opposite of what I did smh. This is a very contained story (singular day spent at university in Oxford) filled with lush, erotic prose. While it is fiction it is giving autobiographical, but i can’t prove it. The author overlaps her own fantasizing with her reality, living half in a made-up world as a way to avoid or postpone the real world (relatable!). Definitely recommend this read for fans of Sally Rooney and/or Louise Kennedy.

Special thanks to FSG for providing me an advanced copy of Practice, on sale 6/25/24.

[claire]

haters said it couldn’t be done 😤

thanks to fsg for the arc!

practice is set over the span of one day, following student annabel as she attempts to write an essay about shakespeare. "attempts" is the key word, as annabel finds herself distracted by a myriad of outside forces as well as her own internal wanderings.

despite taking place in only a day, i read this over the span of four months...because i am broken. the plot is fairly simple, allowing the writing to really shine. on one hand, i feel this book was disadvantaged by its release date. this is not a summer novel. this book is meant to be read during the winter to get really immersed in the academia of it all. on the other hand, i don't think i would have been in the headspace to read this book at any other time. truthfully, had i read this during my finals, i probably would have had a panic attack because of how real the procrastination felt to me, a tried and true procrastinator.

to that extent, god did the procrastination ring true. i felt so seen by this aspect of the novel, the desire to do literally anything other than write (here i am writing a review when i should be doing finals prep, because of course). i did find the seducer and the scholar characters a little superfluous. i understand what the author was trying to do there, i just didn't find it very successful.

this book gives a lot to hope for out of rosalind brown in the future, and i am excited to see what she does next.

[Masha · Rating 5 out of 5]

We take a journey into a girl’s mind over the course of two days during which she has to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets… during which her mind thinks about absolutely everything except that fucking essay.
The writing gets you into a kind of trance but it’s not disorienting, I would say it’s a very natural stream of consciousness of someone avoiding academic work (wouldn’t i know lol). Sometimes there’s a short sentence that makes a whole long passage very funny, I kept reading for those.
Felt very reading-pilled after Chihaya’s Bibliophobia, feeling very close reading-pilled after this one. Both books are about how academia fucks with your brain though.

Loved this quote:

“She finds, in Helen Vendler:
A theory of critical reading might begin: Know your texts for decades. Recite many of them to yourself so often that they seem your own speech. Type them out, teach them, annotate them. A critical ‘reading’ is the end product of an internalisation so complete that the word reading is not the right word for what happens when a text is on your mind. The text is part of what has made you who you are.”

What about close reading of some k-pop copypastas?.. cause when we’re jumping and popping we’re jopping 😔

+++One of the most elegant description of pooping!

Read because it’s recommended by the booksellers of London Review Bookshop as their “favourite debut for ages and ages”

[Chanel Chapters]

DNF

No plot just vibes. Whilst it was relaxing to read o just wasn’t in the mood for it.

[Will Porter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish it were more about writing the essay tbh