Name: Grace Tumblr Name: som-nambulist Nickname(s): Gray-Gray, Shark Attack. Relationship Status: I am lonely loner, on lonely road, alone. But generally comfortable with this because I’m a strong, independent woman with major intimacy problems. Hello ladies. Random fact about you: I wear vanilla perfume because I want people to think of me while they bake. Hobbies/Interests: Obsessing, film, American literature, feminism, comedy, being pretentious. Do you smoke/drink: Usually at the same time. Why Tumblr?: My blog is, entirely and unequivocally, my soul expressed in pictures of attractive people. I shit you not.
Okay. So I am only up to page 204 (of 562 pages) so some might say it is too early to be writing a review or what have you, but whatever. This is my blog, I’ll do what I like.
Anyway. Freedom is this big fucking deal. It won all these awards and Oprah put it on some list and blah blah, but seriously guys. This book. This fucking book.
At my family Christmas do, my lovely aunt asked me what I was going to do in my three months off uni. I told her that I was going to “read big books”. I was going to read East of Eden and Infinite Jest and possibly even War and Peace. And later at dinner, after I told her sweet as pie second husband (and co-owner of their book shop) that next year I was taking 20th Century American Literature he told me I just had to read Freedom. He assured me it was a Big Book.
That, combined with the fact that one time Jesse Eisenberg said he liked it in an interview, was enough for me.
So I bought it and I can’t put the fucker down. I couldn’t tell you why though. It’s bizzare. It’s funny and smart and moving and well done, but so are most decent books.
It’s just true. It’s just good. It’s great. I don’t know why. But it is.
In some ways it reminds me of Jeffery Eugenides’ Middlesex. I think Freedom does what Middlesex (which won the Pullitzer and I quite liked) couldn’t. I can’t remember who, but someone said Middlesex is “almost impossible to dislike even as you’re bored by it.” Freedom could be boring. It almost is. But it isn’t. I keep expecting it to get boring, but isntead, it makes me laugh out loud on public transport and compels me to underline passages that I want to stitch into the lining of my socks and carry with me forever.
I don’t know. I’m completely entranced by the thing. Not in a “I must know what happens” kind of way, either. I think I need to know what it’s trying to tell me.
Because I think it very well might change my life.
I generally like to communicate my thoughts and feelings exclusively in screencaps and pictures of attractive people, but today dear, sweet Tumblr, I offer you bullet points straight from my life to you. This is so that you and I may get to know each other a little better. And so I can talk about myself, which I truly enjoy.
-Grace is my name. This is what I looklike, if you were wondering.
-I attend the University of Sydney. Stalk me if you like, but I am but a needle in a haystack of hipsters.
-I’m a Philosophy major. I sit on the sandstone and talk with well dressed people about what it all means, man.
-I also take English, Gender and Cultural Studies and Film Studies. Sometimes I accidentally use words like “hegemonic” and “normative” and “phallogocentrism” in the real world and I feel like a wanker.
-I don’t do anything you didn’t expect I’d do. I read good books and watch good movies and the shit I like will change your life.
-I live in the worst house on a nice street with my conservative 68 year old father who likes Benny Hill and P.J O’Rourke.
