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Review: God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

     I read this book courtesy of my friend Shanille, who purchased it for a class on the novels of Toni Morrison (!!!) and lent it to me when she was done.  Thank you girl!      As usual, this book did not disappoint.  It is about a beautiful, successful, dark-skinned woman named Bride who sets out on a journey to confront an ex-lover, and by extension the many traumas she has experienced both as a child and an adult on account of other people's perceptions of her skin color.        My favorite aspect of the story is its characters, because they are drawn in such precise and lush detail.  Bride, for example, has constructed her outward appearance in order to thrive .  For example, she goes by 'Bride' rather than her given name, Lula Ann Bridewell, and exclusively wears white clothing, in accordance with the advice of a lifestyle consultant.  At one point, she refers to herself as "The [woman] driving a Jaguar in an oyster-white cashmere dress and boots of br

Best Reading from my Third Semester

An irrelevant picture of me and my friends this past semester      Once again, this semester's schoolwork took precedence over this blog.  It had to happen, but now I'm back to let you all know about the wonderful books I read in my classes.      On an unrelated note, feel free to add me on LinkedIn!  I made an account but I only have four connections so far, it's very sad. Novels 1. Cane by Jean Toomer - A gorgeous genre-blending novel which describes the lives of black people in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. 2. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - The greatest self-love story of all time. 3. Passing by Nella Larson - A novel which examines the complex friendship between two wealthy black women, one of whom passes for white. 4. Smoke, Lilies and Jade, a Novel by Richard Bruce - A semi-autobiographical, experimental text peppered with ellipses and the names of great Harlem Renaissance artists. Short Stories 1. "The Clos

Book Review: This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

    Hey! Before we start the review, I want to address two changes that I've made to this blog.  You might have noticed that the blog's title has changed from "The Book Thieves" to "The Book Bum," while the web address has not changed.  I made this alteration because I feel like I've outgrown the old title, plus I think it's lowkey plagiarizing a book with a similar title?  So I picked a new one and I may change it again in the future.  I kept the web address the same because I'm not sure how changing it will affect the people who already follow this blog.  Will everybody be confused?  I'm not sure, so I'm keeping it for now.      The second change is that, from now on, guest bloggers are welcome to write for The Book Bum!  If anyone is interested in writing a review, comment on this post or let me know in person.  My first guest blogger is my boyfriend, Elijah Logan, who wrote today's book review. Elijah's Review    Looki

Book Review: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinenberg

Click here to read the book.      Stone Butch Blues can be downloaded for free by anyone with internet connection.   This is not made possible by an illegal website, but rather by the author herself.   The book’s accessibility seems to be an extension of its political purpose, for, in Leslie Feinenberg’s words, “I wrote it, not as an expression of individual ‘high’ art, but as a working-class organizer mimeographs a leaflet – a call to action.” I’m in awe of hir commitment to hir political convictions.        However, I have to disagree with hir assertion that Stone Butch Blues is not a work of art.   It absolutely is.   Every word of it burns with pride, shame, rage, and purpose.   The novel tells the life story of a self-identified stone butch from Buffalo named Jess, stretching from the 1940s to the 1980s.   The label stone butch, as it applies to Jess, means that she is a very masculine-presenting woman who is attracted to feminine lovers and doesn’t like to be tou

Book Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

     This is one of those books that demands to be discussed.  I know because after my boyfriend lent it to me and I finished it, I called him immediately.  I wanted to talk about two aspects of the story in particular - its tip-of-the-iceberg character development and its web of seemingly random but of course meaningful details. Me and the boyfriend who lent me the book      Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki follows the title character's quest to understand, in his early thirties, why his four beloved high school friends cut him off while he was in college.  Their rejection of him was sudden, mysterious, and brutal, casting him into a suicidal depression.  Years after the depression has ended, Tsukuru still feels scarred by the rejection.  He believes in his heart that he is empty, isolated, colorless, and unable to fully connect with others.  But when he meets Sara, a woman to whom he feels inexplicably drawn, he realizes that he must confront his past and his four former friends in

Book Review: Che by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon

Featuring the random electric outlet in my dorm hall      I'm back with another graphic novel!  And this one isn't about zombies - it's about Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, better known as Che Guevara.  This beautiful, color-illustrated comic book is a biography of the revolutionary figure, from the famous motorcycle trip he took through Argentina partway through medical school, to his success as an Argentinean communist fighting for Fidel Castro in Cuba, to his capture by government soldiers while aiding rebels in Bolivia, and subsequent execution without trial.      A good fourteen pages of the novel are spent describing in brief the history of every country in South America.  I admit that I found this section boring at first.  But honestly I benefited from it, first of all because in high school I learned very little about South American history.  World Wars I and II got a lot of attention in my history classes, but the revolutions of Latin American countries did not.

Book Review: The Spanish American Short Story, edited by Seymour Menton

     I love the cover of this book.  Look closely - it's a little skeleton man clasping his hands over a cup of black coffee.  I don't know what it means, but it's delightful.      Anyway, I read this collection of short stories in Spanish - El cuento hispanoamericano - for a class I am taking this semester, but it is also available in English.  According to my professor, it's a unique book in that it offers the best representation of Latin American short stories throughout modern history, with details about literary movements and authors as well.  I liked some stories better than others - "The Tree" by Maria Luisa Bombal and "The Ruby" by Ruben Dario were my favorites - but even the ones I disliked, such as "Secret Love" by Manuel Payno, were included because they were representative of a certain movement or regional style that was worth acknowledging.        My only issue with this book is that a story I just mentioned, "The

Book Review: Love by Toni Morrison

     When I finished this novel, I wondered, as I always do when I finish a Toni Morrison novel, why I ever read anything else.  I read it over break, and after months of reading for school rather than pleasure, it was a relief to bury myself in beautiful writing.      Love follows the Cosey family through three generations, from the start to the end of the twentieth century.  The Coseys are a wealthy black family whose wealth comes from a beachfront hotel owned by Mr. Cosey, the grandfather and patriarch.  The story has various narrators, including the women who lived under his roof and his influence - his daughter, granddaughter, cook, and young wife, as well as the unstable teenage girl who feels his presence in the house long after his death.      That detail particularly struck me as I was reading - the apparent immortality of his influence.  Mr. Cosey was a great man - a Black American who enriched himself in the face of violent racism, who quietly paid for the weddings and

Book Review: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The only way to read during a blizzard :)      Beautiful writing and intensity of feeling were the major traits of this novel.  It is set in an abandoned Italian villa after World War II.  The villa is inhabited by a Canadian nurse, Hana, and a war patient whose entire body has been burned black.  Hana has chosen to nurse him alone rather than return home.  The patient is erudite and appears to be English.  Two other men, an Italian thief and a Sikh sapper, stumble upon and move in with them eventually.      These five characters slowly reveal the traumas of their lives to one another.  But the most captivating story of all is that of the English patient, who narrates in bits and pieces his life in the desert and the love affair that changed it.  The speaking style of the patient is tense, intimate, and precise.  For example, while at the edge of a great loss, he "feels that everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke.  All that is alive is the knowledge of f

Book Review: The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore

             You're reading my first review of a graphic novel!  Yay!  This will be the first of many because a) I want to read more graphic novels and b) sometimes I don't have time to read and review a novel every week.          Anyway, I'm a fan of the Walking Dead TV show (despite being woefully behind this season) so I thought I should try reading the comic book series on which it's based.  I picked up the first volume at the library and read it in an hour.  It was so , so good.  The premise of the book is that while the protagonist, a sheriff named Rick, was in a gunshot-induced coma, some kinda zombie epidemic broke out and he must now find his wife and son.      However, the story is less about the shock value of a zombie apocalypse and more about the impact of life-threatening circumstances on human behavior and civilization.  The book got me thinking about issues like private property, gun control, and women's rights.  Specifically, it challenged my

Best Reading from my First Semester

         Ok, my only excuse for this long-ass hiatus is that I started college, and what with exams, essays, friends, newfound independence, and minor dramas, I nearly forgot I had a blog until this week. But I'm back now, and here to tell you about the best books and stories I read during my last semester. Novels 1. Citizen: An American Epic by Claudia Ward - A multi-media masterpiece about modern racism, with a particular focus on microaggressions. 2. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward - The story of a young girl coming of age in an impoverished area of Mississippi, on the brink of one of the great natural disasters of the last decade. 3. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - A classic allegory of the racial justice movement in America. 4. Beloved by Toni Morrison - Possibly my favorite book ever, Beloved is based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her children and, when recapture seemed inevitable, killed her children to their being returned to s