Tag: f. scott fitzgerald

The Classics Book Tag!

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Classics Book Tag (1)

Hello lovely readers! Today I’m here with a type of blog post that’s a bit new for me – a book tag. I know that book tags are extremely popular and extremely common in the book blogging world, but I personally have never done one here on Reflections of a Reader. There’s a first time for everything, however, and when the lovely Lauren from Where There’s Ink There’s Paper tagged me to do the Classics Book Tag I simply knew I had to do it. You can find the link to Lauren’s post here, and you can find the link to the original post here if you’re interested. 🙂 Continue reading “The Classics Book Tag!” →

Bookshelf Tour, Part One – Featuring Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and More

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Hello lovely readers! As I’ve spent this morning reorganizing my bookshelves rather than writing blog posts, like I was supposed to do, I thought now would be the perfect time to give you a quick tour of my shelves. 🙂

To give you a bit of overview, I have two bookshelves in my bedroom – a large, pretty white one from Ikea, which is my main bookshelf and the one that gets featured on my Instagram account quite frequently, and a smaller, brown bookshelf that is extremely messy and serves as a place to put all the books that don’t fit on my main shelves. My second bookcase is extremely disorganized, so I’m not going to show you that one, but I am rather proud of my white shelves so that is what you’ll see on this tour today.

My main bookshelf has six shelves, and as I don’t want this post to be massively long I will be breaking my bookshelf tour up into a six part series, one part for each shelf. By breaking it up this way, I can give you an overview of the shelf and talk a bit about all the different books on that shelf without feeling like I’m bombarding you all with information. Without further ado, let’s get to the books!

shelf one

Continue reading “Bookshelf Tour, Part One – Featuring Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and More” →

A Hemingway-Inspired Reading List

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hemingway

On July 21, 1899, a baby boy was born to a couple named Clarence and Grace Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois. Named after Grace’s father, the young boy was called Ernest Hemingway, and he would grow up to become one of the greatest American writers of all time.

As one of the most notorious names in literature, Hemingway arouses a multitude of feelings among readers: some praise his genius, others detest him, while others just think he’s plain boring. Like him or not, however, you have to admit that Hemingway has left a profound impact on the way we think, write, and read literature. In honor of Hemingway’s 117th birthday this Thursday, I’ve put together a list of books for those who wish to celebrate the day by reading about the man himself, or just for those folks looking for a good bit of scandalous literary history (and let’s be honest, Hemingway’s life was full of scandal). Continue reading “A Hemingway-Inspired Reading List” →

Fitzgerald Follies: Z by Therese Anne Fowler

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Title: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Author: Therese Anne Fowler

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

Pages: 371

Summary (from inside flap): When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant. Before long, Zelda has fallen for him, even though no one else believes that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. When Scott sells his first novel, she optimistically boards a train to New York, to marry him and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald legends in their own time. In New York City, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera, they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible, but not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous – sometimes infamous – husband? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

It seems that for the past couple of weeks all I’ve wanted to read is historical fiction set in the first half of the 20th century (see my review of A Touch of Stardust here), and Z has been sitting on my shelf since Christmas, so I decided that now was as good a time as any to pick it up. Z, as it says in the summary I’ve included above, is a historical fiction novel that follows the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, from her early years as belle of the ball in Montgomery, Alabama, to the endless parties of Lost Generation Paris alongside her rather famous husband, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. This novel is often compared to The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, which many of you may know is one of my favorite books, so I was worried going into this that it wouldn’t live up to my high expectations. I am very, very happy to say that I was wrong. This book was utterly, completely, 100 percent fantastic. Continue reading “Fitzgerald Follies: Z by Therese Anne Fowler” →