Books
It’s not Monday but I was at Matze’s till yesterday and he has no internet and I was super exhausted yesterday and I read so much last week that I really wanted to post about it, so here we go.
I loved The Handmaid’s Tale so much more than when I read it in August 2011. I think I’ve figured out that I adore Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction (this, Oryx and Crake) but am not too much a fan of the novels I’ve started reading that are set in the present (Surfacing). I am extremely disappointed that my Atwood seminar got canceled the day after I finished The Handmaid’s Tale because Prof. Nischik suddenly decided to do an Alice Munro class instead. Yes, I get that it’s pretty great that an author you’ve written articles and book chapters about has won a Nobel Prize but there’s no need to get up and change the topic of your class A WEEK before it’s about to start and I’ve already started reading the novels. But yes, I so hope Atwood comes to Konstanz next summer (before I leave) because I might roll my eyes at some people at this university worshipping her but she is an amazing author even if I forget about it sometimes. And I need to read The Year of the Flood.
I know I said in the last post that I was going to read Robert Arthur Alexie but I ended up reading the far more amusing Sherman Alexie instead. I think Sherman might be the author I read most books by this year and Flight is probably not by favorite. At times it felt simplistic although I understood what he was getting at. It felt like a poor man’s Abeng, tracing the Native Americans’ history but Abeng and Flight did it in very different ways. The Bow Boy and the second to last chapters were great but there were some that just felt over the top and didn’t do it for me.
Between Barack and a Hard Place by Tim Wise felt like a rehash of Colorblind (or rather vice versa since Colorblind is more recent) but the latter felt more fleshed out whereas Hard Place was just all over the place wanting to cover lots of issues and not getting into any of them very deeply.
And finally, because I went to the theater with Matze and my dad last week, I read The Merchant of Venice as preparation. It was a fun exercise to pick out the original dialogue from the theatrical adaptation and I read way too little Shakespeare as it is but I’m trying very hard to forget about the performance itself because why would you perform the first part of the play as a comedy, the second as a tragedy and then make it more anti-Semitic than it already is? We’re never going to that theater again because the end was just so horrible and disrespectful and racist.
I’ve started reading Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls and should finish it later today (that is, if I do all the other stuff I have to do before I’m allowed to read) and I really want to be done with it because that’s not a fun book. After that, I’m reading Oroonoko by Aphra Behn.
I loved The Handmaid’s Tale so much more than when I read it in August 2011. I think I’ve figured out that I adore Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction (this, Oryx and Crake) but am not too much a fan of the novels I’ve started reading that are set in the present (Surfacing). I am extremely disappointed that my Atwood seminar got canceled the day after I finished The Handmaid’s Tale because Prof. Nischik suddenly decided to do an Alice Munro class instead. Yes, I get that it’s pretty great that an author you’ve written articles and book chapters about has won a Nobel Prize but there’s no need to get up and change the topic of your class A WEEK before it’s about to start and I’ve already started reading the novels. But yes, I so hope Atwood comes to Konstanz next summer (before I leave) because I might roll my eyes at some people at this university worshipping her but she is an amazing author even if I forget about it sometimes. And I need to read The Year of the Flood.
I know I said in the last post that I was going to read Robert Arthur Alexie but I ended up reading the far more amusing Sherman Alexie instead. I think Sherman might be the author I read most books by this year and Flight is probably not by favorite. At times it felt simplistic although I understood what he was getting at. It felt like a poor man’s Abeng, tracing the Native Americans’ history but Abeng and Flight did it in very different ways. The Bow Boy and the second to last chapters were great but there were some that just felt over the top and didn’t do it for me.
Between Barack and a Hard Place by Tim Wise felt like a rehash of Colorblind (or rather vice versa since Colorblind is more recent) but the latter felt more fleshed out whereas Hard Place was just all over the place wanting to cover lots of issues and not getting into any of them very deeply.
And finally, because I went to the theater with Matze and my dad last week, I read The Merchant of Venice as preparation. It was a fun exercise to pick out the original dialogue from the theatrical adaptation and I read way too little Shakespeare as it is but I’m trying very hard to forget about the performance itself because why would you perform the first part of the play as a comedy, the second as a tragedy and then make it more anti-Semitic than it already is? We’re never going to that theater again because the end was just so horrible and disrespectful and racist.
I’ve started reading Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls and should finish it later today (that is, if I do all the other stuff I have to do before I’m allowed to read) and I really want to be done with it because that’s not a fun book. After that, I’m reading Oroonoko by Aphra Behn.