the book bum

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...