On Monday, I finished T.C. Boyle's When the Killing's Done: don't think I'll read another by him. The story was fairly interesting for the first half, but it ended like a bad murder-mystery with an escaped rattlesnake (one of ten that had been in burlap bags on a boat that got crashed by a giant ship) peeking at humans celebrating their eradication of wild pigs from a California island. Yeah, irony.
Boyle's prose is excessively detailed, calling attention to his ability to notice details, like exactly how many ounces of vodka in drunken mother's glass. And most of his characters were women, imperfectly realized, who vacillated between the female stereotype (worried about make-up and hair) and the male stereotype (competitive to a fault).
Next, I began a series of short stories that Ricardo left for me (at least I think that's where I got the book): Say You're One of Them is set in awful Africa, and I couldn't stand the first story about a 12-year-old prostitute supporting her family, told from her little eight-year-old brother's point-of-view. I also tried the last story, again a child protagonist, who witnesses her Tutsi mother's murder by her Hutu father. The brutality is supposed to be humanized by the child protagonists, but for me the stories just reinforce the *lack* of humanity that people attribute to Africans. I think it supports racism, and I don't know why Oprah picked it for one of her book club offerings.
So after that, I began again the Mark Doty memoir Firebird. I've tried it before--I love his poetry--but again, the narrative point-of-view bothers me: the excessive detail that doesn't add up to anything but an awareness of the narrator's powers of cataloging observation. But I dipped around in it, reading beginnings and middles of chapters, finishing the ending because I wasn't sure I'd be able to read the chapters chronologically.
I've gotta find a novel, I guess, that'll pull me along. Faulkner awaits, as does Sinclair's The Jungle. I know Toni Morrison has a new novel, Home, and I don't think I've read her last one, A Mercy, on sabbatical when I was reading all of Morrison. So I guess I'll get started on one of them or go to the library.
It's summertime!
Boyle's prose is excessively detailed, calling attention to his ability to notice details, like exactly how many ounces of vodka in drunken mother's glass. And most of his characters were women, imperfectly realized, who vacillated between the female stereotype (worried about make-up and hair) and the male stereotype (competitive to a fault).
Next, I began a series of short stories that Ricardo left for me (at least I think that's where I got the book): Say You're One of Them is set in awful Africa, and I couldn't stand the first story about a 12-year-old prostitute supporting her family, told from her little eight-year-old brother's point-of-view. I also tried the last story, again a child protagonist, who witnesses her Tutsi mother's murder by her Hutu father. The brutality is supposed to be humanized by the child protagonists, but for me the stories just reinforce the *lack* of humanity that people attribute to Africans. I think it supports racism, and I don't know why Oprah picked it for one of her book club offerings.
So after that, I began again the Mark Doty memoir Firebird. I've tried it before--I love his poetry--but again, the narrative point-of-view bothers me: the excessive detail that doesn't add up to anything but an awareness of the narrator's powers of cataloging observation. But I dipped around in it, reading beginnings and middles of chapters, finishing the ending because I wasn't sure I'd be able to read the chapters chronologically.
I've gotta find a novel, I guess, that'll pull me along. Faulkner awaits, as does Sinclair's The Jungle. I know Toni Morrison has a new novel, Home, and I don't think I've read her last one, A Mercy, on sabbatical when I was reading all of Morrison. So I guess I'll get started on one of them or go to the library.
It's summertime!
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