Category: Books & Learning

I like books, as you know. I don’t have a collector’s personality, but I collect books like old women collect Hummel figurines and Kinkaide paintings. It’s a somewhat shameful, obsessive thing. I get away with it fiscally because I never buy any clothes. That’s sort of the trade-off. Some people like going into their greenhouses [...]

lyzadanger’s review: “The dust jacket calls this novel: "…a masterstroke of American realism and Shakespearean consequence. It is an American tragedy, and a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today."

American, yes. Tragic and Shakespearean? OK. Shocking? Sorta. "True picture of the country we live in today"? I’m not quite buying it.

I knew what I was in for when I picked this up off of my to-read shelf. I’ve been told. It’s depressing, it’s a rough time. I spent the first half of the novel kind of hating the characters, and the second half scratching my head and waiting for the nightmare’s outcome. And what a fantastic nightmare! This book’s denouement lasts a good third of the book and never really lets up.

What drove me to distraction was the characters, the exposure of what was their inner voices and motivations. There’s Kathy Nicolo, our female protagonist, who plays lassez-faire with her life and seems continually surprised when things happen in the real world. There’s the cop, who I just can’t quite believe: leaving his wife and kids and effectively going on a crime spree (I’ll leave the resolution to the reader here).

The Iranian family in the middle of this represent the most interesting characters to me, though the ex-military, honor-obsessed father figure is not who I’m really talking about. The sweet teenage kid and the wife–whose role as both Iranian wife and American resident are pretty much an impossible combination–make parts of this book glow with humanity.

But back to "shockingly true picture of the country we live in today." I, naive as I may be, don’t feel this is the case. Two things. One minor: this book seems markedly dated. I kept looking back at the flyleaf to verify that it was indeed copyrighted 1999. It felt like it was from the 80s, repeatedly talking about "cassette tapes" and really bad outfits. But the thing that blew me over was how quickly every major character in the book devolved into class and ethnic hatred at the drop of a hat. Perhaps I’m just "enlightened", but that, uh, never happens to me, or anyone I know. I guess I’m over-simplifying here, but maybe I’m living in a different segment of American reality?”
W. W. Norton & Company (1999), Hardcover, 365 pages
tags: fiction, novel, national book award finalist, read, readin2007, 50 book challenge, california, tragedy, immigration, iran, iranian

I’ve been a customer of Amazon.com since about whenever they were born. They have an awful lot of history on me. Recommendations. Purchases. Wish-list items. General idiocy.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifShould I worry that, today, the Amazon.com home page is recommending the following to me?: * Richard Scarry’s “A Day at the Airport“* The Extant Odes of Pindar Those [...]

Try this game and see if you can name all of Shakespeare’s plays. I got 35 out of 38 on my first try (remember that I read what I think probably counts as a “lot” of Shakespeare–I’m reading Julius Caesar right now). After two tries I got all 38. Whoo hoo! But, really, who’s ever [...]

From my LibraryThing review: Comforting and agitating simultaneously, Brooks’ tangle on the classic “Little Women” flaunts idealism and its consequences, pitting the moral cleanliness of protagonist Mr. March against the travesties and reality of the Civil War. Intended to fill the gaps of Little Women’s patriarch during the time he spends away, fighting down south, [...]

I finished this book this week. Quoting from my LibraryThing review: ‘m not sure if I found this book amusing because of its inherent goodness or because I dated a Russian for five years, and–boy howdy–this really has certain things about that culture dialed in, at least from a humor vantage. Part “Borat,” part “Everything [...]

I’m still aiming for 50 books read this year (I have a friend who is trying for a hundred, which I can only shake my head in awe at). I just finished Do You Speak American?, a pop linguistics book about the controversy over the evolution of spoken English in America. I didn’t like it [...]

OK, what happened to this book? It started out exactly what I want, and what I want is, as a complete Plymouth Colony newb, an explanation of the whole general hoo-hah that was the Mayflower voyage and subsequent colonization within a modern historical context. And from an author I’m fond of to boot. And it [...]

It should be a testament to the complexity of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion that, when I started a Shakespeare play the following day, it seemed easy in comparison. Having read The Merry Wives of Windsor a few months ago, I found King Lear to be superior, both in oomph and heartstring effect. Roundabout [...]

(Editor’s note: I’m behind on my book blogs) I read this book for my book club. First of all, let me admit that this book is better than me. Every page was like a drawn out boxing match by the end of which I was spraying blood-flecked literary saliva. Brutal is a modifier that comes [...]