Sophie Benbelaid writes movingly about her relationship with Josie Silver’s novel The Two Lives of Lydia Bird, ‘the book I wish my younger self had access to as reassurance that the turmoil I felt inside of me was normal’.
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style: Monsters Are Made, Not Born
Sophie Benbelaid looks at Gaston Leroux’s Gothic mystery The Phantom of the Opera and argues that in the case of Erik, monsters are made, not born.
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style: The Mania of Dark Academia
This week, Sophie Benbelaid explores the rise of the dark academia genre through the lens of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style: Fourteen Days of Solitude
Sophie Benbelaid compares her solitude during a fortnight of quarantine in Moscow with that of the Buendía family from García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Must Read Voraciously To Improve Style: The Power of Imagination
In this week’s instalment of her column, Sophie Benbelaid admonishes us to read Anne of Green Gables, and reflects on its theme of imagination.
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style: The End of an Era… The Beginning of the Next…
Sophie Benbelaid takes us through her comfort book, Midnight in St Petersburg, and why it has lost its shine.
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style: The Travel Murder Trope
In this week’s instalment of Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style, Sophie Benbelaid draws on her own experience of travelling to Moscow to asses the travel murder trope in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.
Must Read Voraciously To Improve Style: The Dead Never Truly Die
“Of course, continuing to feel close to a departed loved one is a natural human reaction to the brutal and often unfathomable idea of them being gone forever. However, other than for the devoted Mrs Danvers, Rebecca was not loved…”
Sophie Benbelaid gives her thoughts on Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic mystery novel.
Must Read Voraciously To Improve Style: The Collins Conundrum
Sophie Benbelaid discusses her love for Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Collins in the latest instalment of her column, Must Read Voraciously To Improve Style.
Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style: Chocolat – a pleasure worth sinning for
Inspired by Joanne Harris’s novel, Sophie Benbelaid discusses chocolat in the second instalment of her column, Must Read Voraciously to Improve Style.