1. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

[carenejeans]

Note: This book figures large in my bookish past, and I started writing this essay for an (unfinished) post for IBARW. Not all of my posts will be this personal.

I first read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye more than thirty years ago. I haven't read it very often since (about three times, once for a class in college) but it has stayed with me,

Comments

[nzraya]

This is a really great idea. (The community I mean.) Hopefully it will prod me to read some stuff by non-dead-white-males....

I read The Bluest Eye in college, as the final book in a year-long "Great Books of Western Civ" class, but I'm ashamed to say I can't remember anything about it except that it introduced me to the concept of Dick and Jane books (we didn't have them in New Zealand, or I didn't, when I was a kid) and contained lots of violence. I should give it a reread one of these days.

[decarnin]

Really interesting description of how and why the book affected you so strongly. I read it much later in life but *also* about 30 years ago, and my memory is very hazy, "not a happy book" is where it's categorized somewhere in my brain cellars, and only the names of the characters you mention ring bells (The Maginot Line!) It makes me wonder what books did similar things for me, though of course none would be exactly the same -- I grew up in that clean, pretty, safe house, so from books I could only get "insights" and some amount of identification in the literary sense with characters living in poverty, not the kind of Recognition you feel when something resonates truthfully with your own past. But some identification does happen, and from those books come a lot of our later political leanings. I'll have to think about this, try to remember. I mean, there are those I loved and deeply deeply respected, like Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", but I know that wasn't early enough to be the big Aha for me. Hm