Vote

Let me start off by saying that being the avid reader that I am, I enjoyed this class more than any other college course so far. Before taking this course, you could say I was stuck in a rut, reading books all from the same genre and needed something to shake me out of it. Here, I have been introduced to a wide variety of recent material, and I've enjoyed nearly everything along the way. The final project to promote a book that your group read was really fun, and I had the pleasure of becoming thoroughly engrossed in My Sister's Keeper, a book I probably never would have read otherwise. I loved this book because it dealt with real issues that could happen today and makes a good critique of the American family, current medical issues, and the judicial system. It is thought (and emotion) provoking, and generated great discussion topics for my group. Each time we met everyone was able to participate enthusiastically. And aside from how well it would fit into the course, it is a book I'll be recommending to my friends and family as a book they can read easily whether they only have a few spare minutes at a time or want to read it all in a day.
Watching the other groups present their books to the class and listening to how each person felt about it after reading was interesting. It wasn't hard to figure out who was really passionate about their book and who ended up feeling like they should have chosen something else. I think everyone did a great job though. The books that I found the most interesting (besides my own) were The Road, and My Most Excellent Year. They both sounded like books that would fit well into this class and get students thinking about what makes great literature. Also, the group that did My Most Excellent Year did a most excellent job presenting. I think they deserve kudos for organization and enthusiasm.
I know that I have a natural bias for the book my group read and presented, but it would be untrue of me to say that I felt any other book was better for this class, so my vote goes to My Sister's Keeper. The switching perspectives, surprising plot twists, and real life issues it presented drove me as a reader to read as much as a could at a time, not just to "get through it" but because I couldn't wait to see what happened. If my vote for best presentation was counted separately, I would vote for the group who introduced My Most Excellent Year. I plan on reading that and The Road soon, because they both had me craving to know more about them.

My Sister's Keeper

When my group decided to read My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed because I wasn’t sure I wanted to have to recommend a book about a girl dying of leukemia. However, by the time I got 20 pages into the story, I realized I had it all wrong. What I mean is, the novel is sort of developed around a sixteen-year-old, Kate, who is dying, but the story is not really about her death. With its multiple first person narratives, it takes the reader into the daily lives of the family members who have had to live with the possibility of her death every day for fourteen years and how it has affected them all as a family and each one as an individual. It causes you as the reader to experience what life is like for Anna, Kate’s younger sister and genetic match, who has been used all her life as an organ donor to keep Kate alive. It examines the intricate relationship between sisters and the complications that can arise to disrupt the delicate balance when one is constantly overshadowed by the other. You see what a day in the life of Sara, the mother, entails, with nearly every moment engulfed in the desperation to keep her sick daughter from dying, to the point of neglecting her other children. The other characters involved also share their first person narratives each day during the two week period over which the book is written. The medical emancipation hearing Anna has begun in hopes that she can make the decision not to donate her kidney to Kate is a huge source of grief to her parents and is one of the main storylines in the book. It exposes the emotional and personal aspects to issues like quality of life and designer babies (babies who are genetically engineered for specific traits), challenging the reader to try and imagine how they would react to such complex situations. It dares you to choose somebody’s side, but as soon as you do, the perspective changes and you end up second guessing yourself. By the time you’re halfway through the book, you realize that the lines between what’s right and wrong, between what’s justified and what’s unfair, are so blurred and convoluted that they may not exist at all.
This book took me completely by surprise in how easily it sucked me in and made me care about each character and what was happening in each of their lives. I’ve read so many books over the years that anymore it takes a really good writer telling a really captivating story for me to get as attached to a book as I did to this one. That being said, when I got to the end, I was so emotionally invested that I had to stay in my room and reflect for awhile before getting on with my life. I realize how cheesy that probably sounds, but I admit it because a book that has that big of an impact on me is the kind I will be passing on.

In the Shadow of No Towers

In the Shadow of No Towers was probably my least favorite reading from the class. I say this not because I dislike graphic novels, but because I don’t feel like Art Spiegelman’s critique of Americans after the events of September 11^th is really fair. With every plate that he created in the first half of the book, it really felt like he was criticizing everyone in America for not acting as though September 11^th was being repeated every day. I know I can’t compare my grief over the atrocities that took place to someone who lost a loved one to terrorism that day or witnessed the collapse of the towers in person. However, I can say that the outrage I felt that day has not diminished over time. It still brings me to tears whenever I see footage of the falling towers. My heart still goes out to the families who said goodbye to each other for the last time that day not knowing they’d never have another chance to see each other again. It still angers me beyond words to know another person, let alone a group of people, is capable of such mass devastation. It’s hard to know exactly how to feel about the war on terrorism that came afterward because, let’s face it, who knows if anybody is telling the truth about it anymore? The picture of sleeping Americans that Spiegelman depicts ignoring the crisis still at hand makes it seem as though everyone has forgotten how awful it was or doesn’t care. This just isn’t true. It’s that people like me don’t know where to look for answers anymore in this country. We can’t trust the media to make unbiased reports about what’s going on here, let alone overseas. After the attacks on the towers and the pentagon, we’ve lost faith in our own government’s ability to keep us safe. We can hardly trust our own neighbors. So we do what we have to do in order to get by; we go back to living our lives the way we know how to. We can’t live in constant paranoia that our car will explode when we turn on the engine or avoid going out because a terrorist attack is more likely to take place in public. We have to move forward in spite of the horror that has taken place. I can only speak for myself, but I know that I carry the events with me as much as I can without it crippling everything I do, and that’s all I can do.

Fight Club

This is by far one of my favorite movies. It’s not very often when there’s such an unexpected twist in the end of a story that I think “holy s**t! I have to watch it again right now!” It caught me completely off guard. And it’s one of those that you can watch multiple times and find a new hidden message or clue to Tyler’s identity every time.

In regards to Edward Norton’s (or rather his character’s) obsession with IKEA, I think it had something to do with his desire to fit into what the imagined American lifestyle is. His character represents how consumer driven America gets wrapped up in the accumulation of material possessions. It highlights the issue that consumers buy into what our society dictates people should possess to make their lives feel complete. When the character’s personality essentially splits and he begins living with Tyler, he unknowingly starts heeding to the other part of his psyche: the part that isn’t manipulated by what society and other people think or expect of him. By following a stronger person, like Tyler, he is able to accept the possibility of another way to live that he may not have been able to accept on his own. This is a reflection of the consumer’s sheep-like tendency to be easily influenced by those who appear to have more control over their lives. Without realizing it, Norton’s character was desperately searching for a different life and grasping for control, but in his current state of mind, he was too weak to change anything, and probably had no idea how. It makes me wonder how many more people find themselves slaves to their own possessions or desire for “things.” I wonder how many choose to accept themselves as consumers and how many actually do something extreme to change.

A Happy Death

First of all, I'd just like to point out that I thought it was ironic that on the title page of this graphic piece, it says that it was taken from Fun Home. I don't know if that is a magazine or another work by Alison Bechdel or if it is intentionally part of the satire of the piece, but I couldn't help but to realize that the majority of the story takes place in and around a f-u-n-eral home.

The tone of the story and the constant look of boredom/annoyance on the main character's face seemed to add to the dark humor it provoked in the reader. Even though this piece examines death and how the characters deal with the death of a family member after living their lives around the subject, I found it quite comical at times. I’ve managed to live my life without being affected very closely by death, so protocol for how to act and how much to show your emotions when someone has died is quite foreign to me. I appreciate that the mood it portrays is dark, but not necessarily depressing. It brings up the idea that when a person dies, people don’t always feel the need to follow the expected grieving process. It considers the possibility that our society makes such a huge ordeal out of the proper way to mourn that people become swept away by the ceremony of it all, making it hard for them to move forward. It also makes it more difficult for those who move on quickly to do so without being made to feel guilty. “If only they made smelling salts to induce grief-stricken swoons, rather than snap you out of them.” For the girl and her brothers, death was all part of the family business, and a fact of life they came to terms with at a young age. Just because they weren’t hunched over the casket bawling their eyes out doesn’t mean they weren’t grieving or that they didn’t understand the gravity of their father’s death. They just had a different way of dealing with the loss because seeing death as a natural part of life was something they were already so familiar with.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

From the very beginning of this book, the narration style has a very intriguing element to me. Sometimes it feels rather obvious as to who is telling the story, but then I go and start a new chapter, and just like that, the storyteller changes. Or maybe it just seems to change. It was a bit easier to tell the chapter(s) where Lola was speaking, and then again when Yunior took his turn. As I’m reading, it’s as though I’m listening to an audiotape where the story is told by many different people, each beginning his/her section like an interview, speaking into the recorder, me listening to each perspective after it’s all over, never knowing for sure who is telling which part or which piece my come next. In fact, that’s very much what it feels like; an interview with several different participants or witnesses to the same event that aren’t put in order of chronology, just in whatever order the people happen to fall on the tape to tell what they saw or heard. I feel like each person is given their own voice this way, even if they don’t necessarily reveal exactly who it is speaking in each part. However, I realize that so far, there is one important character that doesn’t seem to be given a chance to tell his side of things, and that’s Oscar. Perhaps this exclusion is related to the insinuation in the title that he dies at some point in the story. If the narrators/interviewees are detailing events leading up to and following Oscar’s death after it has already happened, it makes sense that he wouldn’t have any say in how his story is told. While I’m on the point of his lack of narration thus far, it’s interesting to see that even though he doesn’t directly contribute in this regard, each person’s narration includes references that only Oscar would (or could) make. For example, on page 78, there’s the quote we discussed in class: “…a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it.” I’ll admit that what I’m about to say gives people the right to think I’m as a big a nerd as Oscar, but these little references to fantasy/sci-fi books are my favorite parts. It makes the whole reading experience feel like maybe he really is the one telling the story, through the memories of the people who witnessed his “brief wondrous life”.

Horseman

When I read the short story Horseman by Richard Russo for the first time, I felt a considerable amount of compassion for Janet. I have often wondered if I sympathize too easily with the main characters of stories. But this time, it felt like more than just sympathizing; I felt as though I might be glimpsing into my own future as an English student who will probably end up in grad school, and follow the natural course of events until I find myself teaching at some point. I couldn’t help but shudder at the words that Bellamy threw around so easily when he told her he had “serious misgivings” about her work. After the class discussion the next day, I was almost convinced that I was letting her off too easily, and that she was really just a whiny, self-centered woman who needed a good wake-up call like the one Bellamy served up so casually. However, after reading it a second time, I have to stick to my first impressions. Janet may not be the best mom or the most sincere wife, but I had to ask myself, how would I deal with having a child who had special needs, like Marcus? If I was the less preferred parent, if my very presence set up tension for my family interactions, wouldn’t the implications of that leak into other aspects of my life? And in regards to her work, if it seemed that no one (students, Bellamy, Newhouse) was taking me seriously, wouldn’t I try to regain my bearing by taking myself more seriously? I know the answers to those questions would vary from reader to reader, but as for me, I can’t say that I would behave much differently than she did. After feeling as though Russo had snuck into my own future and come back to write an accusatory piece about it, I was more hopeful when he gave Janet the possibility for warmer human connections when she decided to give James Cox a second chance, and invited Newhouse to come for Thanksgiving dinner. Janet may not be the type of person I’d head down to the pub with for a pint, but I still feel a profound connection to her.