My Lit Ladies

        Is it too dorky to admit that Tuesdays have quickly become my favorite day of the week? Part of that new-found Tuesday-love is probably due to the fact that it's my one day off from teaching... the one day I can dedicate to MY reading, MY projects, and MY LIFE!  But the other part of my preference for Tuesdays is definitely the Top Ten Tuesday meme run by The Broke and the Bookish. I love the opportunity to go digging back through my reading-memories to come up with answers to the weekly question, and I've really enjoyed checking out other people's answers. Every once in a while somebody will talk about a book I haven't read in YEARS and I'll float away on a tide of nostalgia... or run right over to the bookshelf to get reacquainted with the old favorite (last week's major re-find was The Giver... love love love that book)

Anyway! This week's episode is Top Ten Favorite Heroines! So, in no particular order... away we go!

1. Beatrice from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. She's snarky, sarcastic, a quick-thinker, and not willing to put up with any crap from any of the men in the play. Plus.. Emma Thompson plays her in the 1993 movie version.. and that gives her instant bonus points.

2. Lucy Snow from Charlotte Bronte's Villette. While I'm not huge on the whole 'repressed Victorian maiden' thing, I do love how self-reliant and resilient Lucy is. She's an intensely introverted character, but she also easily understands and reacts to the more emotive needs of others.

3. Precious in Sapphire's Push. It hurt to read this book-- the story was uncomfortable, disgusting, and horrifying. But no matter what happened, Precious managed to find a silver lining that was creative, hopeful and often hilariously funny. By the end of this book I was literally cheering out loud for her.

4. Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I love Elizabeth's spunk and her willingness to thumb her nose at convention. If I ignore the whole 'I won't really fall in love with Darcy until I see his fantabulous estate' business, she's pretty much perfect!

5. Jo March from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. In elementary school, my friends and I used to pretend that we were the characters from Little Women. It was a great way for girls with different interests to hang together- some of us could play house (the Megs and pre-death Beths), some of us could play dress-up and be lovely young ladies (the Amys) and some of us could be skallywag tomboys (the Jos). I always wanted to be Jo, but I usually got cast as Laurie because I couldn't seem to be lady-like enough to be a March daughter...

6. Thursday Next from Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. I'm still new to Fforde's series, but I have already decided that I want Thursday Next's life. She a literary detective (LiteraTec) who runs around INSIDE books trying to keep plots in place and characters happy. It's pretty much my dream job.

7. Ada from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. This is my all-time favorite book, and Ada (or Adah, depending on her mood) is a large part of the reason why I can't seem to go a month or two without rereading. She was born with a condition called hemiplegia (half of her body and brain is impaired) and she believes this condition changes the way she views and understands the world. Ada has an unusual way of looking at things (she often reads backwards and is obsessed with palindromes) but she has such heart and humor that you can't help but relate to her. 

8. Kambili from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. This is one of the books that really started the genre known as African Gothic, and Kambili, in her way, is just as determined to face her demons as any of the Victorian Gothic heroines who came before her (Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw). She's also more successful than many of them tend to be..

9. Hermione from the Harry Potter Series. Wicked smart, somewhat snarky, and perfectly willing to punch Draco Malfoy in the face when he deserves it. 

10. Petra in the Enders Game series. Petra has a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibralter, but (as you see in the later, Bean-focused books) she also has a huge heart and a willingness to do just about anything to help those she loves. 

Country of My Skull

Title: Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

Author: Anjie Krog

From the Inside Flap:

"Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country–one of spectacular beauty and promise–come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors?

To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha’s extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey."

I picked up this book about a year ago and let it languish on my TBR pile for far too long.  I've done quite a bit of work on South Africa and its democratization during the early 1990s, but I've never read such a poignant, painful, but ultimately beautiful account of the TRC process.  Anjie Krog's narration draws you right into the action and gives you a unique look at the powerful personalities who shaped the fate of the new South African nation. Her descriptions of amnesty hearings were unbelievably moving-- reading the stories of victims (black and white) and the justifications of perpetrators (black and white) really brought home the horror of the apartheid system. The most fascinating/horrifying section, for me, was when Krog documented the testimony of former S.A. president F.W. de Klerk. In this testimony de Klerk dismisses gross human rights violation as "the bad judgement, overzealousness or negligence of individual policemen".  It was fascinating to think of the lengths to which people will go to cling to power and privilege.

This is not an easy, or a pleasant read-- I cried several times. But its final message is one of hope. S.A. did progress to a democratic style of government and the TRC gave hundreds of people the opportunity to speak their stories, and, in many cases, to come face to face with their persecutors.  

I would absolutely recommend this book to anybody interested in African politics, in questions of morality and humanity, or in the remarkable triumph of forgiveness. 

Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme run by The Broke and the Bookish. This Week's Episode...Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I've Never Read.  I want to point out that this is a list of books that I, myself, am shocked to admit I've never read-- my professors have their own (lengthy) list of holes in my education...

1.   Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. I've had this in my TBR pile for years now but every time I go to the shelves to pick out a new read I seem to just waltz right past this one. 

2.  Actually... I've never read ANYTHING by Nick Hornby. I hear such good things, but we just never seem to be in the same place at the same time.

3.  The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. It seems like every third person on the street is reading a Suzanne Collins book this week. I've read blurbs and reviews and the series sounds like a good time. Maybe when I get a break from 'academic reading (of Doooooooooom!)...

4.  The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. This book sits on my TBR pile and taunts me from across the room. It's not necessarily something that I WANT to read, but in order to consider myself a good little English scholar.. I probably ought to have read something by both of these guys! They seem to be kinda important...

5.  Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I think I've started this book twice, but life interrupted.

6.  The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. 

7.  Atonement by Ian McEwan.

8.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers. I want to read this one just for the title. Dude's got some cajones to put that one out there...

9.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick. I got embroiled in a long conversation with a friend last week about whether or not Adam and Eve (or Frankenstein, or most of the Greek Gods for that matter) had belly buttons. If you're not born in the 'usual' way there doesn't seem to be any need for an umbilical cord and, therefore, no need for a belly button! At the end of the conversation I declared that if I ever wrote a novel about an android I would call it No-Navel Nanette. My friend then replied that Philip Dick had already written a book about this exact topic and that I should read it before wasting my time scribbling away.  

10.  Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.  

Saturday Review

It was rainy and unbearably humid out today... so I did what any good book-junkie does when situations like these arise- fill up the coffee pot, put the ipod on shuffle and curl up on the couch with the pooch and a stack of long-neglected TBRs. What with the start of the new semester and the arrival of hordes of screaming, high maintenance undergrads I haven't had much time lately to read for pleasure, so I decided that today, at least, I was going to read for ME!
Here are a couple of the friends who kept me company:

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I came across a review of this book on Bibliofreak's blog about a month ago and I was intrigued. From the back cover: "Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense." Our guide through this world is a LiteraTec (literary detective, I assume) named Thursday Next. Thursday is a sympathetic and wildly entertaining protagonist who gets into all sorts of scrapes and misadventures. Now normally I'm not a huge fan of YA fiction or science fiction in general but as a huge literature nerd I fell in love with the idea of a world where EVERYBODY obsessed/freaked-out-over books the way that I tend to on a daily basis. What book-lover hasn't dreamed of stepping into the pages of their favorite novel and living alongside so characters they've read so many times?
My major problem with the book, however, was that there was just way too much going on! There were side-plots and secondary characters coming out of the woodwork and the resulting chaos was a bit distracting. Cutting down on some of the less-essential adventures might have made the story easier to follow, though it would have cut down on the fast-pace Fford is obviously going for. If Fforde was going to magically take my suggestions and do some paring down of the plot I would also suggest that he cut out the incredibly necessary/boring love-triangle aspect of the story... I hear Thursday's love-life gets more interesting in the sequels so maybe Fforde felt he had to throw some drama in there to get things started, but I by the end of the book I was actively cheering for the relationship to fall apart.
I enjoyed this book- it played around with some of my favorite reader fantasies. I would give my eye teeth to jump into this book and become a LiteraTec myself, cause it sounds like my absolute dream job! That being said, however, I probably will not read this book again or recommend that people run right out to buy it. If you have a rainy day and feel the need for some seriously escapist book-loving, by all means look this one up. It's quick, dirty, and entertaining :)

I give this book: 3 Stars

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. I've been meaning to work my way through Coetzee's work for some time now- I have a 4 or 5 of his books stacked up in my office gathering dust and/or doing duty as paperweights and door stops. I'm not sure why I have such a hard time getting into Coetzee's novel. I've read and enjoyed several of his collections of essays and postmodern/political theorizing but his fiction leaves me absolutely cold. I read his Foe a week or so ago and found the experience a bit like having my teeth pulled. Once I finished the book I could think about it and acknowledge the fact that I gained something from the experience and that it was probably a necessary/beneficial thing to have undergone, but at no point was it pleasurable. In Foe, however, the dentist was unusual and occasionally had interesting and thought-provoking things to say as she poked and prodded away at me; the Disgrace dentist, however, was old and tottering and seemed to be telling stories that I'd already heard hundreds of times. The story is about an English professor who has an affair with a student, is caught, and is dismissed from his position and who seeks refuge on his daughter's rural homestead. Here the protagonist runs into issues of class, race and sexuality. In a normal novel these interactions with Others might force a selfish, sexist, racist, out-of-touch Ivory Tower type to face his own weaknesses and evolve as a human being. Not in this book! There is relatively no character development from start to finish, the protagonist remains as unpleasantly self-serving and offensive as ever. Coetzee even seems to go out of his way to underline the fact that his main character learns practically nothing over the course of the narrative. Perhaps there's a deeper meaning here that I'm just not getting... it did win the Booker Prize (a second for Coetzee) and received rave reviews. Perhaps my issue is that the book's perspective is sooo male. The female characters are well-rendered, diverse and interesting but we are pointedly forbidden from getting to know them at a deeper level. The story is about one man's understanding of himself and of his relationship to the world- the main character can't hear or understand the perspective of his daughter, his middle-aged neighbor, or his teen-aged student mistress, and as a result we as the audience don't get those insights either.
I found this book frustrating- it had an interesting plot, tight and vivid language and a couple interesting characters. I just think Coetzee picked the least interesting and the least dynamic of the characters to focus the narrative on!

I give this book 2 Stars 

Somebody's Got a Case of the Mondays!

Last week flew by like you would not believe! Maybe it was because last week was my last week of summer "vacation" or maybe it was because I was woefully under-prepared for the classes I had to teach this morning.. but time definitely sped up!

Anyway- I now have the first day of classes under my belt. I'm cautiously optimistic about my students- even though when I asked them to write down their concerns about the semester almost ALL of them said some version of "I'm not a writer. I'm not creative or a deep thinker." I'm prepared for the rest of my teaching responsibilities for the week and ready to focus on MY reading!

So... I'm participating in this weeks "It's Monday: What are you Reading" event hosted by bookjourney. I actually found this useful because it made me acknowledge the number of books I'm reading at once... maybe I'll try NOT to start a new one until I finish a couple of the current projects.. maybe...

1. Sigmund Freud's The Uncanny- I'm not a huge fan of Freud's but this collection of essays deals with fun things like the undead and DaVinci's neuroticisms... so it's actually been an enjoyable read so far

2. Ben Okri's The Famished Road- I'm working my way through contemporary West African fiction for my comps and Okri's been one of my favorite finds. Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991 but somehow or another I've missed it until now!

3. Steve Stern's The Frozen Rabbi- ehh, it's gotten a lot of hype and I suppose some of it is deserved, but I'm struggling to really get into it!

4. Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues- I love him. He could write just about anything and I'd sing praises

5. James Clavell's Tai-Pan- I really enjoyed Shogun but am finding this a less engaging read :(

6. Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah- Very different from Achebe's earlier work.. I'll let you know more when I get deeper into the book

7. Langston Hughes's The Big Sea Book One of Hughes's autobiography- his prose is just as much fun/moving to read as his poetry. Really enjoying this!

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the 8 am Comp Class

So I've spent the last couple of days plugging away at my syllabi trying to come up with a fun (and not toooo dorky) way to keep first year college students interested in Composition Studies at 8am. Now I was a college student not all too long ago and I remember how absolutely painful early morning classes are- especially on Mondays and Fridays... and I know that a class has to be incredibly engaging/challenging/bizarre to keep people from passing out left, right and center. I've been having a difficult time, however, coming up with a hook that will both intrigue my students, and fulfill all the requirements of the strict First-Year Composition Program at my University. The funky thing about our Program is that the first semester's course has to focus on non-fiction. We can look at essays, articles, and criticism but absolutely no creative fiction, poetry, or film. That cramps my style a bit.. It's tough to be creative, inventive and slightly off-the-wall if you have to base everything in the real world! Where's the fun in a class without whimsy? Ehhhh?

I've decided to skirt around the rules a little bit by looking at non-fiction through the lens (through a magnifying glass perhaps?...) of a fiction. I want to focus the course around critical reading and analysis by using the character of Sherlock Holmes as a central, unifying trope.  We'll use quotes and scenes from the books to shape the way we discuss attention to detail, pattern recognition, audience awareness, and argument presentation. I think it could be a fun way to bring some silliness into what could otherwise be a pretty dull subject. Also.. it gives me the opportunity to periodically wear a tweed hat and a monocle and to pretend to smoke a pipe in class.

This is the quote that first got me thinking about Holmes as a Freshman Comp teacher...

"It seemed to me that a careful examination of the room and the lawn might possibly reveal some traces of this mysterious individual. You know my methods, Watson. There was not one of them which I did not apply to the inquiry. And it ended by my discovering traces, but very different ones from those which I had expected."
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)

I'm still working on coming up with ideas for class projects and paper topics that would deal primarily with current or historical events but that could also work with the detective theme we've got going on. If anybody has any suggestions for readings or project topics you think might work I'd LOVE to hear about them!

Tuesday Top-Ten

I'm jumping on the book-blogger bandwagon and adding my two cents to the Weekly Top Ten List run by The Broke and the Bookish. This Week's Episode...Top Ten Most Dislikeable Characters

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In no particular order...

1. Little Father Time from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Normally I'm all for brooding, precocious children- they usually have the darndest things to say, but LFT manages to be creepy without being interesting. He's an uncomfortably bland presence for 99% his time in the book and a flat out bizarre and morbid force for the final 1%. Not a FAN!

2. Jane Porter from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes. This book is full of monkeys (and their less adorable but more complex cousins the Apes) and therefor I am contractually obligated to love it. And I do, really! Tarzan himself is a wonderful character, as are Le Rou and (I hate to admit it..) Clayton, Lord Greystoke. And Jane does improve throughout the course of the Tarzan series so I can't hate her as a fully developed literary character... but in the first book of the series she is a spoiled, snobby, damsel in distress who totally does not deserve either of her hunky suitors.

3. Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. I'm an academic. I'm a huge nerd who spends ages in musty libraries reading up on world mythologies and comparative studies. I probably hate Casaubon because he makes people like me look like insecure, pedantic, stuffy, out of touch, Ivory Tower snobs. Which.. okay... sometimes we are. But I don't like to see it!

4. Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen's Emma. I actually think she's a great, well-developed, (relatively) complex character with some fun psychological knots worked in... but she's just so dratted ANNOYING.

5. Achilles in Homer's The Iliad. I feel bad about this one. But why is it that nothing is evvvvver his fault? Pretty sure a whole lot of bloodshed (Hector!!!) could have been avoided if pretty-boy had just gotten over himself a couple hundred pages earlier.

6. Ashley from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Whine whine whine, fuss fuss fuss, make up your mind and stick with it!

7. Susan Barton from J.M. Coetzee's Foe. Loved the book, enjoyed reading the character, but she's not likeable in the sense that I'd enjoy sitting down and taking tea with her. She's manipulative, invasive and incredibly self-centered. If we met in a dark alley in London... we'd have words.

8. Amy March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Little brat single-handedly tore apart my favorite literary relationship of all time, 'nuff said. Jo and Laurie 4ever!

9.Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Pretty sure she's what's rotten in the state of Denmark

10. Shiva of the Knees from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. This is a love-to-hate situation not a this-is-terribly-written!!! situation. I adore this book- I read it at least once a year. Shiva is an evil little snot (ha! Sinai reference!) every single time.

Kindle: Covering a Multitude of Sins

First- a disclaimer. I have a Kindle. I use my Kindle. As a matter of fact I LOVE my Kindle. As a student I've learned first hand how convenient it can be to load tons and tons of books into one tiny, light-weight device. I'm in the process of studying for the GRE Literature Subject Test and my Kindle has saved me hundreds of dollars in both book fees AND in avoided visits to the chiropractor for post-book-lugging spine readjustments! That being said...

Read the Article Here

In his article yesterday's Slate Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer makes a hugely valid point about the social ramifications of private reading devices. When you think about it, the only books that used to be 'hidden' when you were out in public were those smutty romance novels with bare chested hairy men and half-dressed fainting maidens groping one another all over the covers. Now THOSE books are perfectly reasonable to smuggle away behind brown paper wrappers (or, if you're creative, the book jackets of high-brow literary works). The anonymity of the Kindle really does serve the same purposes... who KNOWS what the guy next to you on the train might be reading...