- Children of Men by P.D. James. Finished 1/2. Some thoughts. I picked this up because of the movie coming out with Clive Owens and Julianne Moore. The movie trailer looked very interesting and I always like to read the book before watching a book adaptation movie. While it seems, at least from the trailer, that the movie doesn’t stay close to the book, I enjoyed the book a great deal.
- Incantation by Alice Hoffman. Finished 1/6. Some thoughts. I found this book at the library and pretty much gulped it up on the power of it’s very first page. Beautifully and poetically written, it resonates with our horror at the depths humanity can sink to and our awe at the heights of hope humanity can inspire. "I thought I knew the world," Estrella writes in 1500 Spain, "I thought I knew myself. I thought I knew my dearest friend. But I knew nothing at all."
- The Assassin King by Elizabeth Haddon. 1/10. I was so excited to see the next book in this series had come out, but I have to say I was disappointed. This is a for pure fun series that I loved the first two books and they have slowly gotten less intriguing. I will keep reading them as I have to know what happens to the original three characters who were so wonderful, but, for me, the books have lost their original flair.
- Green Angel by Alice Hoffman. 1/14. I was disappointed at how small a book this was when it came in from Amazon, but size is certainly not always a indication of worth. This book evokes a lot of adjectives: haunting, aching, lonely, sad, painful–but in the end, it also says hope and rebirth and renewal. Quotes: "I understood wanting to forget. Things that made you remember cut like pieces of glass. A song, a memory, a blade of grass, a white dress, a dream, all of it as painful as the deepest wound" (50). "She was so busy forgetting, she couldn’t take a single step into the future" (97). "I saw then that the ink was green [not black]. It was the ink of a sister, a woman with long, dark hair, a man who was strong. It was the ink of a witness, of a girl of sixteen who had no idea what the future might bring. Green as the world we once knew" (115).
- Loose Canon’s by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Finished 1/17. I read this for my literature Senior Seminar class in order to open the discussion of multiculturalism and the question of the traditional canon and how to change it, modify it, throw it out in order to make it reflective of minorities (both ethnic and gender). I agreed with most of his points, though I’m not sure that sub dividing and specializing into groups such as Women’s Studies and African American Literature is the real answer–in some ways I think it simply draws everything further apart and says "this is classic literature, this is African American literature, this is literature by women" that seems to only accentuate the "otherness" that we are trying to dispel and keeps there from being a conversation between literary sub genres. I’m not sure, still chewing over it all.
- Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund. Finished 1/30. Some thoughts. Beautifully written, if a bit utopian, I think the short sum of the book is about hope. Quote: "He [Ahab] believed the moral powers–demonic and heaven-generated–are separate things, must be separate to be themselves; eternal. But I see them as all nested and layered together, sometimes with no clear seam between, but a gradation; transient" (18).
~ by kelly on Sunday, 14 January 2007.
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