Category Archives: American literature

August 30, 2016 · 1:19 pm

Infinite Jest: Why Reading this Book Makes You a Hero

I started reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest  at the cottage. I set myself an (overly) ambitious target of 100 pages a day. Ambitious because it took me an hour to read 15 pages. And I could only reasonably avoid my family and read on the dock for seven hours of the day. Because reading Infinite Jest is an exercise in focus, absorption and dedication. Like the ‘entertainment’ that so bewitches characters that they cannot look away (choosing death by starvation or dehydration rather than stopping the consumption of the entertainment) the novel asks for (demands?) complete attention if the reader is to make sense of the overlapping plot lines, constantly shifting points of view, temporal and geographic locations, narrative styles and relationships among characters. Continue reading →

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August 22, 2016 · 11:06 am

The Good Earth: How I Accidentally Stole from the Public Library 

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is so bad I have almost nothing to say about it (and so will tell you about my accidental thieving – but first…). Continue reading →

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July 25, 2016 · 12:27 am

Break In Case of Emergency: On Being 32 and Childless (and not on purpose)

Break In Case of Emergency is funny. You’ll read it and laugh at the satire of office life. You’ll laugh a little at the portrayal of income inequality in 30 something friend groups (that sudden realization that your friends make way more (or less) money than you do; or that your friend inherited a heap of money and so never has to think about whether to replace their air conditioner). You’ll chuckle at the representation of hipster politics: the effort to be *seen doing good. It’s the story of Jen – 30 something artist, who starts the novel unemployed and begins working at a (parody of) nonprofit dedicated to enhancing the lives of (all) women. The novel offers sharp observations on white, middle class feminism, on the changing dimensions of female friendship and a whole heap of a lot about fertility. Jen wants a baby. A lot. And she’s infertile. (and some stuff about New York, but who cares).
I guess if you’re an any-age someone you could stand to read this novel for how it demonstrates the extent to which (young-ish) women are bombarded All. The. Time. by messages about their (in)fertile bodies, the judgements heaped upon these bodies for reproducing (or not), the myriad of outrageous and hurtful things that get said out of assumptions about why you have (or more obviously haven’t) had a baby. Continue reading →

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July 23, 2016 · 2:46 pm

Catcher in the Rye: The book my bookclub actually talked about 

I re-read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye for bookclub. It was a good choice for bookclub because a) it was easy to get copies of the book (in fact I read a .pdf version the day-of) and b) it invited sustained discussion (I’ll be the first to admit our bookclub has the tendancy to wander off into talk of breastfeeding and the lastest Justin T. photo-op). S. gave the book high reviews, as did most others (though L. didn’t like it one bit), but in the discussion we circled around how much of liking the book was because we thought we *should* like the book given it’s canonical status (and adolescent attachment for those who had read it in their teen years). Continue reading →

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Filed under American literature, Bestseller, Book Club, Fiction, Prize Winner