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.

Akiko's Control

Since being introduced to Akiko in My Year of Meats and learning that she has this problem of throwing up her dinner, I keep wondering whether or not it's intentional. As the story goes along, we see that she has a problem with keeping meat down, and we immediately feel sorry for her when her husband insists that she makes the same meat dishes that are being promoted on My American Wife!. We can imagine that meat just doesn't agree with her frail body, and therefore just rejects it, but I can't help but wonder if there isn't some form of control that she has over the situation. She is obviously depressed, and the thought of her having an eating disorder isn't very far fetched to me. She has a husband who controls more or less every aspect of her life, and she doesn't seem to have any friends. She doesn't have a very strong motivation to take control of her life or undermine her husband's assumed authority over her. Throwing up her food seems to be the only thing that brings her some form of comfort, even though it's causing her body to waste away and her menstrual cycles to dry up. She doesn't seem opposed to the idea of having a baby, but doesn't exactly long for one either, like Jane did. Maybe this is the only part of her marriage that she could possibly have some form of control over, and so she keeps on throwing up so she won’t gain enough weight to get her periods back. The doctor she visited even told her that her bad attitude was probably to blame. As much as I hate the fact that this would play right into "John's" views of his wife and his blaming her for all their strife, maybe this contains a grain of truth. Another thing that plays into this idea is that Akiko got her period back after she started keeping the meat down which only happened after her husband insisted that she never be in the bathroom with the door closed. She no longer had the privacy; her indulgence was no longer comforting once her secret was out.
Having said this, I certainly don't blame her for wanting to save something for herself, even if it's an unhealthy eating disorder. As the reader, I want her to do something more productive, like kick her husband in the junk and leave his alcoholic ass, but here is where I imagine cultural views and gender roles get in the way of Akiko seeing any way out. So she stays, holding onto this little secret, that unfortunately doesn't remain a secret for long.
This is all just speculation, and for all I know I could be way off base. However, I'm curious to know if anyone else wondered the same thing while they were reading?

Alternate Ending to HappinessTM

When Edwin went in search of the real Tupak Soiree, he would be led to Paradise Flats and find Jack’s trailer to be a hub for a handful of nerdy looking gentlemen surrounded by very expensive looking computers and technological equipment. Edwin would learn that Jack McGreary was actually a very wealthy man who owned the whole town of Paradise Flats, but became extremely reclusive after he was abducted by aliens right out of his La-Z-Boy. He was sent back to Earth once they coerced him into helping them take over the planet. McGreary secretly hired a team from NASA to come out and help him communicate with the aliens so he could send information and take orders from them. What I Learned On the Mountain turned out to be the work of aliens who decided it would be easier to mount a global takeover if Earth’s inhabitants were subdued into happiness, and the whole thing was relayed through Jack. Once Edwin found out what was going on, he would have to be sworn to secrecy, and join their ranks if he wanted to live through the end of humanity. Reluctantly, and without any real intent on keeping his word, Edwin would agree. In a last effort to try to get the world back to the state it was in before What I Learned On the Mountain, Edwin would write How to Be Miserable, According to Tupak Soiree, and use his old office to get it published. The book would be a best-seller, and the nation would begin to come down from its happiness high. In the meantime, the aliens would have found a far more inhabitable planet elsewhere in the universe (a place without pollution and global warming taking its toll), and abandon their plans for global domination of Earth. As souvenirs, they would decide to take a few thousand human slaves with them (Jenni, Nigel, Harry Lopez, Jack McGreary and Mr. Mead among those taken). The mass disappearance would cause a new wave of religious fanaticism, once Mr. Ethics wrote a book attributing it to the “second coming of Christ”. Edwin would take over Mr. Mead’s old job at Panderic and be Mr. Ethics’ editor, making himself a decent profit off of the new book.

During the whole happiness epidemic, May would become pregnant in her stint as “Cotton Candy”, and wouldn’t remember who the father was. Once she was miserable again, she would decide to keep the baby and start a new life as a single mom working for a new publishing house. She and Edwin would see each other occasionally for drinks or lunch, but nothing romantic would ever come of it.

What is your opinion of self-help books and why?

I’ll never forget the first time (and last) I read a self-help text. It was in the form of a pamphlet my grandmother comfortably slid in front of me as I was lunching at her house. Only after biting into my savory turkey and cheese sandwich (extra cheese, mayo to all the edges, yes-I’m-going-to-eat-it-all) did I realized what I was looking at. Dr. Phil’s 10 Necessary Steps to Losing Weight and Keeping It Off. Although my memory is a little fuzzy in regards to what happened next, I remember getting a phone call from my mom later wanting to know “why is grandma so upset?” I carefully (and by carefully, I mean I left out all the colorful words I may have used with grandma) explained why one might take offense to being fed such hinting material while eating. You see, each week grandma used different ammunition in order to get me to lose weight, based on what material she read most recently; “no white at night” or “smaller portions, smaller waste”, and my personal favorite “loving carbs is hating your body”. Although my grandma loves me very much (and I her) and has nothing but the best of intentions, all kinds of self-help have since become haunting reminders of what others think I should be doing. I won’t say that I am completely satisfied with my life and all things as they stand today, nor should people always refuse help that is offered them. In fact, I consider it my own personal goal to progress as an individual. Perhaps self-help books truly work for some people. But it’s those who have the courage to get out and live in order to learn valuable lessons, to make mistakes along the way and overcome their shortcomings through human experience that I respect the most. It’s not the people who have conquered the latest popular issues by reading a book or magazine. If everyone read books and followed someone else’s advice in order to better themselves, we’d become not individuals, but robots, programmed to behave just so, and never color outside the lines.