9 posts tagged “family”

What I learned from this sad to disturbing collection of Christmas tales is that Sedaris has major psychological issues with Christmas.

Six in all, the pieces are a mix of essays and short stories. The short stories include baby murder and intentional self-dismemberment.

The essays are not quite as disturbing, but still not what I would call funny. Even Santaland, which is one of the author's most famous pieces, was never one of my favorites. But most people find that one fall down funny. I don't get it.

Maybe I don't get it because I can't join the Christmas -is-the-most-depressing-time-of-year mentality. I mean, it's not like my favorite time of year, but I think we've all become a little too dramatic about how depressing we think the holidays are.

I'm starting to think I'm a freak just because I can accept the holidays as another day, and I don't spend the rest of the year either dreading them, plotting against them, or harassing people who say Happy Holidays as opposed to Merry Christmas. Times are weird.

I can't remember the last time I was so gripped by a novel. I loved the way this story was told. There are basically three sections and each section is one day in the storyline. The first part is told from various points-of-view. Sometimes we go forward in the day and sometimes we reverse a bit. The second and third sections are told from the viewpoint of a single, but different, character.

There is so much you could talk about with this book. I am not sure what the main theme is. Crime? Love? Time? One might think from the title that it would be atonement itself?

As a statement about life starting out at one point and ending up somewhere else completely unimagined, it's a wonderful analogy.  We never really know what another person might be thinking or his/her true motives. Even friends. Even family. And there is a certain amount of danger in that. And loneliness.

What a strange book. Since finishing it I have heard that Palahniuk always writes about the same angry man. I'll have to read more to judge that, but this book is great. Not because he is writing about an angry guy. Not because of all the shocking details.

I am impressed that he could use the shocking details and such an angry protagonist to make some pretty great points about who we are--and who we think we are.

Looking forward to reading another Palahniuk novel now.

I finally picked this book up after years of people either telling me to read it or assuming I already had.

Enjoyable read, a little too tongue-in-cheek maybe for such a topic, but well researched.

Nothing shocking, or even revealing, if you know much about intersexual issues. The side issue (of incest) was the topic I found much more interesting.

Desdemona was a great, great character. Maybe one of my all-time favorites. It was worth the read just for her.

As with the last few classic books I have read, I am surprised by the dissimilarity between this book and the ideas of the book in pop culture.

Neither Frankenstein nor his creature are anything  alike between film and novel. Frankenstein comes across as shallow and cowardly--at least until it is too late. The scientist reminded me of all those bad horror movies where the female lead is running without thought. Frankenstein needed a plan and he needed to protect his family. Instead, he ran around until he twisted his ankle and fell to the ground.

The "monster" is less like a monster than an exile and an outcast. He is erudite, articulate, and athletic. It took a while to adjust to this "new" image of the creature.

The pop culture images of the creature are actually just the image that the character fights against through the book. It seems Shelley failed to get the point across. Or, we really are more like the humanity Shelley represented in her novel than we would like to believe.

Housekeeping does not have much in the way of plot, but it certainly is haunting. It is rightly considered a modern classic for its beautiful, poetic language.

I love the title of this book too. We have so many underlying notions about that word--many of those preconceptions come up in this book.

I kept thinking of The Secret Life of Bees (a book I particularly loathe) while reading this. In that book the main characters are also females in a situation that is a bit out of the mainstream, but that's where the similarity ends. Housekeeping is powerful where the other book is cheesy. This book deals with loneliness, expectation, and waiting and results in with a life-usually-does-not-give-you-what-you-expect ending. The Secret Life of Bees has an everything-works-out-in-the-end-if-you-just-believe-hard-enough ending.

Generally, books about women with female characters and a domestic plot line are more like Secret Life of Bees. I am glad Marilynne Robinson was able to give us something else.

The Book Thief is by no means a feel-good book. It's hard to imagine a book about Nazi Germany could be anything but depressing. Throw in the fact that the book is narrated by Death, and you can understand why so many people say they cried their way through the last part of this book.

When I think about books and movies about the Holocaust I think of the stories being told from the point of view of the Jewish citizens mostly. It makes sense, as they were obviously the ones who suffered the most. But this book made me question that assumption a bit.

The family in this this story are not those in the concentration camps, not those hiding in an attic, not the Nazis themselves. They are just ordinary, average citizens living in Nazi Germany.

I have often wondered what it would have been like to see people being marched to death camps and others being whipped in the streets. How could those people have gone along with it all? Take a pinch of conformity, a dash of fear, and bake it really slowly. That's how it can happen.

Some have said Death as narrator is a bit hokey or pretentious, but really it's rather inspired. Who else could be an objective narrator of such a tale?

In college I was taking a philosophy class and happened to watch the movie Trigger Effect. It's not a memorable movie but it stunned me because I was absorbed in trying to understand Hobbes's State of Nature. Suddenly it all made sense. I wonder if some student out there is having the same experience with this book. (The Road is vastly superior to Trigger Effect in case you're wondering.)

But the fact that society is based on two things: people and trust--that's the same message in all three. Of course, that led to all kinds of thoughts about how I live in a place with three main rules: never admit you're wrong, take as much as you can from everyone in every situation, and patience is a vice. And I wondered just how close Connecticut is to full on cannibalism.

OK, my personal nightmares aside, I did find this book haunting. I have been thinking about things--birds and food and aspirin and the general point of life--for days now in a new light.

But the ending...I don't think this book could have an adequate end. There's no point if the characters die, right? And if everything works out in the end it's just a cheesy cliche. I think the author did the best he could in light of this horrible corner he painted himself into, but the ending just didn't quite work for me.

It seems most people read this book in high school. After I finished it, I could not decide if it would have been better to read it fifteen years ago or not.

Part of me would have gotten more out of it at the age of eighteen. Now, it's hard to believe that there is a place where children play outdoors, listen to their parents, and everyone is wise.

Except on the topics of race and class, that is--
which is one reason this book is so poignant.

Telling the story through the eyes of a child is a powerful tool. It reminds the reader that everyone was young once. Everyone saw the world without the contemptuous of adulthood at one time.

Living in a very jaded place for the last eight years, I can really relate to the message. I fight to keep the cynicism and animosity at bay. But I know some of it has crept in over the years. In some ways it seems like the South has made more progress in the last hundred years than many places in the North. Where I am living the class struggle might as well be given a name that holds the same weight as racist does. Because it's no less ugly and no less harmful.

In high school I would not have known any of this. I was living in the rural Midwest, perhaps one of the most sheltered places in the U.S. I would have just thought this was a nice story about how kindness will win out in the end and if you get to know people you'll find they're basically good. Now I know it's a lot more complicated than that.