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 brushed rabbit fur the color of the moon," a description which I find both delicious and disturbing (80). It's delicious because of words like cashmere and Jaguar and oyster and rabbit fur. The whole line drips with luxury and texture. But it's disturbing because Bride is describing herself through the things around her rather than the things that she is, as if she has lost track of her self. Perhaps that is the cost of the constructions she erected, first to protect herself from insults targeting her dark skin, and later to succeed in the overwhelmingly white world of business. Morrison's first contemporary novel beautifully exposes the ugly forces which caused Bride to make these sacrifices, and the power which Bride must wield to transform these sacrifices into affluence, admiration, and glamour.

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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. ...

Lessons to be Learned From the Princess Sara Crewe

Have any of you read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett? It was the book that made me love books. (Does every book-lover have one of those? Do you?) I first read it when I was very little and have spent the last two days rereading it, as I tend to do every few years. But the thing that struck me about the story this time around is that the story's preteen heroine, Sara Crewe, seems to have life completely figured out. Even when she loses both her father and her fortune and is working as a hated scullery maid at her London boarding school to pay off her debts, she never sacrifices her virtues of benevolence, hope, and grace. Her secret is that she considers herself a princess in spirit, even when she is no longer as wealthy and privileged as one. Sadly, I have not yet gotten my life philosophies together and lack Sara's ability to gracefull...

Book Review: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

The book + my favorite reading chair Reading this book made me remember all the thousands of reasons why I love to read. It is a memoir, but it could also double as Sparknotes - if Sparknotes were about 1000 times more tantalizing and thought-provoking - for classic novels such as Daisy Miller by Henry James, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and, yes, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. This makes sense because, in this memoir, author Nafisi chooses to remember a book club she created and nurtured during the early years of the Islamic Republic in Tehran, Iran, after quitting her second university job since the Revolution. In case you didn't know - and my own knowledge of this time period was embarrassingly sparse before I read this book - Iran became a theocracy in 1979 after religious leaders overthrew and ushered out the old Shah monarchy. Many Iranians hoped that the new government would be an improvement over th...

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