the book bum

        The stories in this heart-rending anthology open windows into the lives of women from various places and socioeconomic classes, of various races and sexual orientations, with various BMIs and occupations.  Despite their differences, these women share one trait - men tend to find them 'difficult.' They are difficult because they are any combination of frigid, argumentative, gay, promiscuous, angry, melanated, fat, and kinky.  None these traits are flaws, and should actually be celebrated or at least respected.  But instead, these women are regarded as difficult rather than complex.     My favorite story was probably "La Negra Blanca," because it's the story that upset me the most.  It's about Sarah, a biracial, white-passing woman who strips to pay her tuition, and William Livingston III, the wealthy white dirtbag with jungle fever who lusts after her.  The specifics of Livingston's jungle fever are categor...

Laughing hard @ nothing      This groundbreaking novel was praised (and criticized), at the time of its publication in 1973, for the unapologetic spirit of its heroine, Molly.  As a working-class woman who is attracted to other women, she is rejected by her family and marginalized wherever she goes, from the South to New York City.  Despite these obstacles, she insists that she doesn’t give a damn what anyone else thinks of her.  In fact, she rattles on for paragraphs at a time about how little she cares for the opinions of others.      At the time of Rubyfruit Jungle ’s publication, this was probably the heroine that the lesbian and queer community needed - audacious, unflinching, irreverent, and indestructible.  These are qualities which queer women have historically aspired to in order to survive.  However, as both a modern reader and a modern queer woman, it seems to me that Molly possesses these qualities in unbe...

     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 "Th...

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 artist...

    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...

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-prese...

     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 realiz...

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 r...

     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 ...

     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 hi...

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, f...

             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 go...

         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 ...

     This is the kind of book you have to read as neutrally as possible.  It is told like the memoir (I really want to know if it's a thinly disguised memoir; I've done some digging and Schlink's life bears some similarities to that of his protagonist) of a fictional German man, Michael Berg, who grows up during World War II and who, at the age of 15, has an affair with a thirty-year-old woman named Hanna. Hanna is manipulative, tender, distant, playful, and guarded.  One day she disappears, and years later, when Michael is a law student, he discovers that she is on trial for hideous crimes.      There is so much guilt in The Reader  - Michael's guilt over his small betrayals of Hanna, the guilt of Germans who tolerated the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors' guilt for having survived when others did not, etc.  Most central and mysterious of all is Hanna's guilt - does she repent?  Should she repent? Can she ever be absolved? ...

Me + gingham + book      Sex and solitude.  This book primarily occupies itself with these topics.  Not that I mind, of course - both are interesting, and Marquez does it so well .       Solitude  chronicles several generations of a family, the Buendias, living through political unrest, wars, and technological advancements in an unnamed South American country.  Each family member's life and character is precisely and tenderly captured.  This careful character-building impressed me because there are so many family members.  But attention is paid to practically every aunt, relation-by-marriage, adopted daughter, illegitimate son, concubine, and parent.  I loved all of them.  Additionally, I love the book's magical realism style.  It gives the story new and enchanting depth - for example, yellow butterflies cling to one character, and another is pursued by the cloc-cloc-cloc sound of her parents' bon...

     Hey guys!      So my English teacher assigned the book Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko for homework over spring break.  The book is set in the American Southwest, which by chance is where my family spent this break.  Specifically, we are in Arizona.  Reading Ceremony while exploring its setting was an enlightening experience - I've never had my reading material fit my location so well, except for the occasional NYC-based novel. Visiting Native American ruins and museums was especially helpful because the book's protagonist is  a young Pueblo World War II veteran.      From now on, I think I'll make an effort to match my travel novels to my travel destinations.  Here are a few ideas:      - The Dubliners by James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland      - Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov on an American road trip      - The Odyssey by Homer in Greece      - Carpe ...

Preach, Arianna Huffington!     I owe the New York Public Library $4 thanks to this book.  I returned it a couple weeks late.  But whatever, it was worth it!      This book read like a horror story, but it's actually a well-researched non-fiction investigation of "the problem that has no name" - basically, sexism in the 1960s'.   Mystique has the distinction of being one of the catalysts of the American second-wave feminist movement.  It explores how women were conditioned - through advertising, women's magazines, phony college courses, pseudo-Freudian psychology, peer pressure, etc. - to expect marriage and child-rearing alone to fulfill them.  Even wealthy, college-educated women were encouraged to find a man ASAP and embrace domestic life at the expense of personal identity.  But Friedan noticed that women who did so became depressed and destructive, so in this book she argues that women need intellectual pursuits outside th...

Tragedies make me so happy      Merely reading and reviewing Lolita was not enough for me...I had to go and write a 10-page senior project about the book, as well!  Writing this paper has obliged me to research and read Nabokov-centric literary criticism, interviews, annotations, and more. So if any of you are looking to learn more about Lolita , here is a list of resources I've used in the process of writing my paper. Enjoy! (Or don't...not everyone likes MLA citations.) Books Nabokov, Vladimir.  The Annotated Lolita.  Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Criticism Hall, Chris. “The Significance of Names In The Fiction of Martine Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Will Self, Umberto Eco: Waiting for Go.Dot.”  Spike Magazine . Spike Magazine, 1 Aug. 1996. Web. 29 Mar. 2016. Lemay, Eric. “Dolorous Laughter.”  Zemlarchive . Zemlarchive, n.d. Interviews Br...

I've never had such a pretty book!      You probably know the story more or less, so I'll summarize it quickly.  Three British children, Wendy, John, and Michael, fly away one night with Peter Pan, a boy who never grows up, to have adventures on a magical island called Neverland.      What fascinates me most about this book is what it conveys about the time period in which it was written.  It is in many ways a satire of middle-class British families in the early 20th century - the Darling family has a dog for a nurse, for example.      However, the book also betrays the flaws of the era unconsciously.   Peter Pan is pretty prejudiced. For example, the native people of Neverland - whom the narrator calls "redskins," ugh - are portrayed as simple-minded and inferior, and Wendy, one of the only female characters, delights in being Peter Pan's housewife.  All of the female characters seem to be in love with Peter Pan, c...

    The picture is blurry, but you get the idea      Wuthering Heights is a gothic novel about two English estates and the tortured people who inhabit them.  The families are related, but that doesn't stop the cousins of Wuthering Heights from falling in love with the cousins of Thrushcross Grange only to marry other, wealthier cousins, and vice versa.      In case you couldn't tell, I didn't love this one.  I thought many of the characters were flat or unsympathetic, especially the housekeeper Ellen Dean, who was important to the story but seemed to care for nothing except the well-being of her employers. I was also annoyed by the abundance of exposition.  The story's narrator is a Wuthering Heights tenant named Lockwood; however, he spends most of the book listening to Ellen Dean explain the estates' history.  So much backstory!  So many quotations marks!  It irked me.      Additionally, some ...