So, sometimes life gets the best of me, and I simply don't keep up with things as I'd like. With that said, I've read six books in the eight months since I posted last about my readings, and I'm just proud of myself for reading that much considering all the other things going on that's kept me from writing. Here's a rundown of what I've been up to literary-wise (and film-wise, since I've followed up my reading with a lot of movie watching).
Over the summer, I listened to The Help by Kathryn Stockett in audiobook form, and it was wonderful. I listened to it in the car, by the pool, in the waiting room at the auto-glass repair shop. As a learner, I take in information primarily through visual representation, so I sometimes struggle with audiobooks. It was good for me to stretch out of my comfort zone, though, since I so often tell my students that they have to practice other learning modalities to build them, and the novel itself was so completely engaging that I had no problem following the plot and characters. I loved the premise of the story, and I love the strength we see in the characters. I also enjoyed learning more about a time period that we didn't even get to in our history classes. I clearly knew all the major events of the Civil Rights Movement, but I really just understand history better when I think of how people lived it. As always, I also loved hearing the story from multiple vantage points. The audiobook actually had different readers/actors for each narrator, which helped me keep everything straight. The narrators also had Southern accents, which I felt gave a sense of authenticity (and caused me to speak in a Southern accent for weeks while I listened to the book). Even if you've already seen the movie (which was also pretty great), I highly recommend reading the book -- there's a whole lot more going on between and among characters that simply couldn't fit into the movie.
My next two books took me abroad -- first, I read Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, which is set in France. It follows two stories, one about an American-born French journalist who is researching an event in France during World War II and the other about a little girl who the journalist discovers may have, against all odds, survived the round-up. It is a tear-jerker, a story I couldn't put down for fear of not knowing if Sarah survives or how she and her family fare. I haven't had the opportunity to see the movie for this book yet, but I'm looking forward to it; I highly recommend it. Next I read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, which follows the story of two Chinese girls as they grow up together in nineteenth-century China. It took me a while to finish this book simply because it's extremely dense -- lots of detail that bogged me down a bit, that didn't really add to characterization or plot development even though it helped me better understand that era of Chinese history. I'll admit that my reading pace picked up quite a bit when I decided to travel to China this summer with a group of my students, which gave me more interest in the thought of the story. The end made me think of Scipio from last spring...when I read the last sentence, I thought, "Really? That's it? Huh?" I wasn't sure what more I wanted, but I certainly wanted something. The movie for this book took some liberties with the plot and even transformed the story into a frame narrative, complete with a pair of modern Chinese women to serve as comparison characters. Good book, but find your dedication to it early if you want to finish it any time soon.
Next I moved to the unknown -- nonfiction! Gasp! I rarely read nonfiction for the same reasons I've never learned much history; I care more about the content if I have a plot and characters with emotions pouring through, not just facts set down chronologically. Enter The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. My good friend Jen first recommended this book to me (and Jen has never led me astray), and out of the blue, I found out Rebecca Skloot was going to speak right here in town. There is nothing like listening to an author talk about her experiences while writing to jumpstart my interest in a piece. Once I started reading it, I found out that people all around me had already read it and loved it. This was the best of both worlds of fiction and non; the entire story was the not-so-simple truth, but people's real stories -- their hearts, their fears, their passions -- came through, not just the documentation of the events of their lives. Skloot tells her story of investigating the history of Henrietta Lacks, the woman who unknowingly "donated" her cells to cancer research and started a discovery and solution revolution in medicine. She tells us Henrietta's story and seamlessly moves into the story of Henrietta's family after her death, and how Skloot finds herself intertwined within their family structure. An excellent read, and I definitely recommend going to Skloot's presentations if you get the chance.
Now, back to what I thought was my normal reading format; next I read William Faulkner's Sanctuary. I picked it because I stand in awe of his Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, both of which have multiple narrators, disregard our common understanding of time, expose raw emotion and thoughts, and generally blow me away. I've never read any other novels by Faulkner, so I decided to begin chronologically. Sanctuary is the first book he wrote of the ones I own, and I wanted to follow the development of the community he created the way his original readers did. This story, though, is so very, very different than the other two I'd read. It's very traditional in its delivery -- third-person omniscient narrator, linear timeline -- and the plot and characters were downright unsettling. We walk through a horrific event (details of which are kept closely hidden throughout most of the novel) with Popeye and Temple, awful enough that I couldn't risk falling asleep while reading for fear of nightmares. I read somewhere that Popeye might be the most atrocious of all villains in American literature, and I think I agree. The blurb on the book jacket said that Faulker wrote it to sell books, and I can see why everyone pushed to buy it when it was published. Knowing that a sequel exists -- and that Temple, therefore, must make it out alive -- kept me reading. It's certainly not what I expected, but definitely a unique (and terrifying) piece in the American cannon.
Most recently, I finished reading The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. With the same setting as The Help, I liked comparing the characters' experiences under the same backdrop. Kidd did a wonderful job putting us inside Lily's head and helping us understand her pain and confusion. It certainly mirrored the feelings of the country at the time. Just last night I watched the movie version, and although I was befuddled by the relative ages of all the characters, the other vital components were all there. My only wish is that the movie had included more voice-overs of Lily's thoughts, since the book was made up of just that. (On a side note -- I thought the same thing about the The Hunger Games movie. As much as I loved it (both times I saw it), we needed more of Katniss's self-talk and internal conflicts.)
Today, I'm off to begin reading March by Geraldine Brooks (who also wrote People of the Book). Hopefully I'll post about it in less than eight months time.
And just an FYI -- when I return mid-June from a 10-day tour of China with a colleague and three students, my words-based blog will be temporarily transformed into a travel journal. More about that later!
