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 Closing Door" by Angeline Grimke - This story demonstrates with intimate, heart-breaking clarity the effects of white supremacy on black families, and particularly on black mothers.

2. "Sea Oak" by George Saunders - A dark satire of economic mobility in the United States, involving male strippers and the undead.

3. "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" by Jhumpa Lahiri - This delicately detailed story presents the narrator's childhood memory of Mr. Pirzada, a Pakistani botanist who befriends her Indian parents and privately fears for his family back home in war-torn Dacca.

4. "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" by Mary Gaitskill - A story of traumatic disconnect between a father and his queer daughter.

Can't Forget About...
Fire!! - A literary magazine which was founded by writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce during the Harlem Renaissance. Fire!! was badly received at the time and ended up printing only one issue, but now it's a collector's item. It contains, among other works, an short play by Hurston which was never performed (!!!). If you're a fangirl like me and want to learn more about the magazine, watch the 2004 movie Brother to Brother.

Comments

Book Review: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Alex's drink of choice is milk spiked with drugs. Classy! This book left me conflicted and disturbed, as all good books should. It's set in a future world where teenage gangs terrorize the streets while the Government attempts to control and reform them. The protagonist, who refers to himself as Your Humble Narrator, is a rat bastard named Alex who spends his free time looting and raping with his friends. (Keep in mind that there are lots of graphic and violent scenes in this book. Don't read it if this will upset you.) At the tender of age of 15, he is a proud sadist and his society doesn't know what to do with him. His story is a meandering answer to several tough questions: Is it better to choose to do bad or to be obliged to do good? Can the price of goodness ever be too high? The best part of this book is probably that it dares to deal with such controversial questions. The next best part ...

Junkie Metaphors and Books About Our Inner Crazy

So, recently I was doing a spot of (mandatory) community service for my gym teacher when I experienced a rare instance of karmic payoff. Me and a bunch of other temporary bond-slaves were unloading this huge file cabinet onto the gym floor, sorting everything from Dance Revolution DVDs to pamphlets on Your First Visit to the Ob-Gyn! into neat piles, when I uncovered quite by chance a crumbling copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Elated, I carried it around for the remainder of the period until my teacher took pity on me and offered to let me borrow it. It's falling apart before my very eyes I swear... I fell in love with this book the moment I heard its title quite a while ago - Naked Lunch ? What the hell kind of weird awesome twisted name is that? I am only now realizing how twisted it really is. The book is a compilation of notes that Burroughs took while under the sick influence of heroin. ...

My Irrelevant Opinion on Teen Dystopias

I read books indiscriminately. I am just as happy reading Beowulf, a crusty old Scandinavian epic poem, as I am reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. So I'm not a snob who only reads first-edition classics bound in leather or anything like that. But I do have one requirement when it comes to the books I read and recommend, and that is that they be good . And I do see a problem emerging in one of YA's most popular new genres, the teen dystopian novel, and that is that many of these books are not good. The dystopia craze started, I believe, with the success of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (a book that I very much adore) . It's hard to make it as a writer, so when people saw how well her parable of futuristic teen angst and bloodshed did, they understandably thought Aha! Here is the formula for success!! And ten seconds later, the front display tables of every Barnes a...

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