the book bum

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

The book + my sweaty post-jog self      I stepped outside my comfort zone this month and read... another Nabokov novel!      This book messes with you.  The overall feeling is one of creepiness.  It begins with a death sentence and ends with a beheading, and in between, the protagonist, Cincinnatus C., wrestles with the suspicion that his world isn't real.  There is lots of evidence to back up his suspicion - the crime for which he has been sentenced, "gnostical turpitude," defies any definition, and his fellow characters are ridiculous.  For example, his jailers are offended when Cincinnatus doesn't express gratitude for their hospitality.  There are a lot of funny moments throughout the story, but even the humor is unsettling.      Much of this creepiness comes from the fact that Nabokov makes his influence as the writer known within the story.  He does something similar in Lolita , but here the invo...

     Nights at the Circus is a brain-splitting ideal-smashing feminist fairy tale.  It follows the adventures of Sophie Fevvers, a woman with wings who becomes a famous trapeze artist at the close of the nineteenth century, and of the reporter who must transform his worldview in order to love her.      Fevvers is the best thing about the story.  She's described as a "giantess" - six feet tall, buff, and curvy, with huge wings - and her personality is as big as she is.  She eats, drinks, talks, and farts a lot. She has a thick Cockney accent and a strong body odor.  She is also a world-famous sex symbol.  I love the way Fevvers challenges my understanding of what a beautiful woman is, and why a woman's beauty or femininity is considered her most valuable trait.      There are a million delicious characters in this story - an activist ex-prostitute, a Princess who trains tigers, and a chubby capitalist who wears a...

     Now that I've finished applying to colleges, I'm back to blogging!  Sorry for the hiatus.          I read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, the tragic story of a pedophile's obsession with a little girl, this fall and it blew my mind.  I read it twice before purchasing an annotated version, which revealed to me how intricate the book really is.  I picked up on the protagonist's manipulation of language in order to warp the truth on my own, but not until I read the annotations did I notice Nabokov's use of involution or literary allusions.  This may sound a bit pretentious, but it was so satisfying to understand all the tricks at work in the writing.  So I've compiled a cheat sheet/list of some motifs, devices, and patterns to look for when reading  Lolita.     1. Colors: Especially patterns of colors surrounding certain characters or emotions. 2. Quilty: It's an important name and it appears in dif...

One of those books where the author is bigger than the title...      I read this book for the title.  How could I not?  I want to be as informed about the afterlife as possible, since someday I'm going to spend quite a lot of time there.        This book has a very interesting conception of the afterlife.  There's a God and a Heaven, but God doesn't make an appearance and Heaven is not a place of eternal rest and harp music.  Instead, Heaven is where the deceased meet with five people who influenced their lives.  From these people, the dead learn why their lives played out the way that they did.   Five People  follows the journey of just one man, an amusement park maintenance employee named Eddie, through Heaven.      I like Albom's Heaven, and the book's ending was satisfying.  But I didn't love its overall tone .  It felt preachy.  You know, everything happens for a reason . ...

     (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...

Criminally pink       This is probably the sappiest-looking book I own.  It's small, thin, and pink.  The cover is stamped with gold curlicues and gold lettering.  And the title could not be more straightforward.        All that aside, damn .           I'm not sure what makes these poems so good.  They surprised me by not being cryptic. Normally, when I read poetry, I have to annotate to get the full meaning.  But at no point in this book did I find myself knee-deep in symbolism and in need of a pencil to pull myself out.  (Not that puzzling out a poem isn't fun too, haha.)  I guess the simplicity is part of it.  Neruda wrote these poems to talk about love, not to show off his skills.        I loved that, in this edition of the collection, each poem was printed in both Spanish and English.  I liked comparing the English translations to the...

     I just realized that I'm reading Maya Angelou's autobiographies WAY out of order.  I read the first one, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , last summer, and this summer I read the fifth one.  I am not reading them out of order on purpose.  I happened upon both books by chance (I found Traveling Shoes at a secondhand bookstore in Cincinnati) and bought them with no knowledge of the series' sequence.  Luckily, I was able to enjoy this book despite my ignorance.      This book was most interesting for its exploration of the yearning of some African-Americans to return to Africa in the 60s'.  Over the course of the book, Angelou creates a life in Ghana and struggles with her suspicion that slavery has left African-Americans without a home country: they are oppressed in the United States and out of place in Africa.  She desperately wants to feel at home in Ghana, but because of the centuries of separation and abuse that he...

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...

Starring aliens, cow inseminators, and children named for ancient scholars!      I know this book is good because I shook with silent laughter while reading it on the subway.  I was so enraptured that I did not mind the silent judgments of my fellow passengers - all that mattered to me was the madness I was reading.        Quesadillas  is called  Quesadillas  because that is all that the protagonist, Orestes, and his impoverished family can afford to eat.  The setting is Mexico during the 1980s', a time of economic and political turmoil for the country.  The endless inflation, corruption, and poverty which Orestes's family is forced to endure is so extreme (though true) that it seems absurd.  But instead of trying to piece together a traditional narrative with this absurdity as a backdrop, Villalobos gives the absurdity free reign and allows it to run the story.  UFOs, hysterical pilgrims, a Polish cow inse...

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 ...

     Remember when I said I was going to read more short stories this year?  Well, I'm keeping my word, because this is a collection of short stories!      Initially I was disappointed that the stories in this collection were written by famous authors and not by students of Gotham Writers' Workshop, because I liked the idea of supporting new writers.  I guess some Gotham teachers just picked from the general pool of published short stories?  Anyway, they made some excellent selections.      I especially liked "For a Long Time This Was Griselda's Story" by Anthony Doerr. It describes the very different life paths chosen by two sisters and makes you wonder whether one is better than the other.  "After the Plague" by T.C. Boyle is a hilariously realistic post-apocalyptic tale in which the antisocial survivors of a plague really, really can't stand each other.  "Crazy Life" by Lou Mathews was my favorite, though.  ...

     Shout-out to my friend Isabelle for lending me this book!  We have started an informal book club, meaning the two of us lend each other our favorite books and discuss them at lunch.  Anyway, I probably would not have read past this book's detailed and dull beginning   if she had not recommended it so strongly.  And I am so glad that I did!      Yes, the beginning is dull - a description of a murder trial, which I had no emotional connection to at first - but after that things pick up nicely.  We learn that the trial takes place on an American fishing island not long after World War II, and that a Japanese man has been accused of murdering a man of German descent.  Both are American veterans, but the islanders don't see it that way because of the accused man's race.  This would be a fascinating story in itself, but Guterson weaves a billion other story threads around the central cord of the trial.  These thr...

     I have good memories of biographies.  My elementary school classrooms always had a set of biographies (the condensed kind that are about a quarter inch thick), and I was probably the only kid in class who enjoyed them.  I still remember random details about the lives of Milton S. Hershey (of confectionery fame) and Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb.  For example, when I'm feeling hopelessly scatterbrained, I like to remind myself that Edison once forgot his own name for several hours after spacing out in a long line.  Clearly my forgetfulness is a mark of genius.  Right?      Despite these fond childhood associations, Anne Sexton is the first biography I've read in years. But I'm so glad I did read it!  Anne Sexton was one of the first poets to write "confessional" poetry about her own life, as opposed to the third-person, universal idea-centered poetry (think T.S. Eliot) that was preferred up until the late 60s'...

     I'll start with my one and only complaint about this book.  My complaint is that the entire time I was reading the story, I thought that it was true.  I thought, because of the title and the tone of the book and the   Translator's Note, which is narrated by a (I assume) fictional author/historian, that a geisha named Nitta Sayuri had dictated the story of her life to the author, who had simply massaged her memories into a plot arc.  (Ew, was that phrasing creepy? Massaged ?)  Only when I read the Acknowledgments, at the end of the book, did I realize that Sayuri is a made-up character with a made-up life story.  The actual author, Arthur Golden, did extensively interview an actual geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, in order to write the book, and I realize now that the cover professes itself "a novel by Arthur Golden," so I can't be too mad at him.  But I did feel betrayed when, after 428 pages of rooting for the captivating, resourceful, ...