the book bum

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 . ...