the book bum

Again, I'm all sweaty. Why do I always blog after I run?      I'm going to name my next cat Toni.  I don't think I'll ever have time for children, but I'll always have time for cats, so I'll bless a cat with her holy name.      The protagonist of Song of Solomon is Macon "Milkman" Dead, the son of the wealthiest Black man in his town.  His father, Macon Dead Sr., believes that money is freedom and nothing else matters, least of all family.  He hates his wife, disdains his daughters, and values his son only in that he hopes Milkman will carry on the family real estate business.  The family of Macon Sr.'s estranged sister, Pilate, is the polar opposite - there is no domineering patriarch, no money, and no interest appearing "decent." Pilate, her daughter Reba, and Reba's daughter Hagar run a winehouse.  Both Milkman and Hagar grow uncomfortable with their families and find an escape in each other.  But when Milkman finally...

     (I know, I know, my blog posts have not been very varied lately - too much Toni Morrison.  I'll find a new writer to fixate on soon, I promise.  In the meantime, here's a review of another one of her flawless books!)       Beloved  is set in post-Civil War Cincinnati, Ohio.  More specifically, it takes place at the address 124, in a house haunted by the "spiteful" ghost of a baby girl who died a horrific death.  The baby's mother, a former slave named Sethe, and her remaining family continue to live at 124 for years after the tragedy. This story explores the effects of the baby ghost and of the memory of slavery on the men and women who are connected to the house.        This book is disturbing, desolate, tender, audacious, and gorgeous.  Can I just give you a sample of the writing?  I don't trust my words to do hers justice.       And in all those escapes he could not...

Smiling cuz this book exists!      I'm on a Toni Morrison kick and I am NOT sorry.  Seriously, she's incredible. She has this way of flooding a page with the feeling of a place or character.  She identifies and writes down the tiny dust mote details that make life.      Anyway, Sula.   The story is set in Ohio during the first half of the 20th century and focuses on two African-American women who choose very different lives, although they were childhood friends.  I didn't get the impression that Morrison wants the reader to favor one woman's choices over those of the other.  She honestly describes their lives in all their courage, arrogance, smallness, ecstasy, and heartache.  She also explores the lives of the people around the women (she does something similar in  The Bluest Eye ): mothers, grandmothers, husbands, lovers, etc.  She precisely describes how race and gender influence her characters' rela...

     The best part of this book was its structure.  I've never read a book whose structure served its message so perfectly. The narrative of  Bluest Eye  is built around Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American girl living in Ohio in the late '30s, early '40s.  The story is never told from Pecola's perspective, however.  It is told from the perspectives of the people around her who destroy her.  I won't say how she is destroyed or what these people do to her.  But I will say that they are ordinary people, neighbors and friends and family members, whose acts of racism eventually tear her apart. Many of these acts are not drastic or unusual, and their very ordinariness forces the reader to reflect on the effects of his or her own actions and prejudices.       Morrison chose to write each chapter from the point of view of a different character.  Only one narrator, one of Pecola's friends, recurs in multiple chapte...