Bookish Thoughts

This was my second time reading The Bluest Eye , and I definitely got a lot more out of it this time through. It's a difficult book with a complicated structure. It's all about how envy and jealousy can turn into hatred and self-hatred. It's about generational trauma and how it propagates. It's about innocence and the loss of innocence and what happens when the people who are supposed to love you don't. Or when that love gets twisted. It's a really important book, and I'm glad that I read it with my book club because the conversation that followed gave me a lot of hope. When I started my neighborhood book club, we began with Tayari Jones' An American Marriage . It's about a black man who's been imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. But roughly half the club was sure that he'd committed the crime. There's this naive trust in our justice system that privileged white people grow up with, and it's hard to start to question that. Bl...

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye , is a classic for a reason. The language is lovely, straddling the line between poetry and prose. And the subject matter is heavy, with more layers revealed the longer you sit with it. Structurally, Morrison reminds me of Ray Bradbury, though that could just be because I read Dandelion Wine  so recently. This is less of a novel and more a series of vignettes, told from multiple points of view. But unlike Dandelion Wine , where the goal was to invoke a sense of nostalgia for small towns and childhood summers, Morrison uses the various stories to demonstrate how damaging institutional racism and abuse can be. The subject of the story, Pecola, is utterly destroyed by novel's end. It's not just the various hardships she faces, both overt and more subtle, that break her down. It's her complete lack of resilience, thanks to her crappy home life and lack of real friends. There is literally no one to love her, and it ruins her li...

Toni Morrison's Beloved  was a difficult book to read. Not only does it deal with the painful and uncomfortable subject of slavery (always interesting to find yourself cast as the ultimate evil), this is non-linear story-telling taken to an extreme. This book wanders. The narrative is slippery. It slides from person to person. From present to past to deeper past and back. Keeping track of whose point of view your in takes work. Piecing together the timeline takes more. It's the sort of book where you find yourself flipping back to make sure you didn't miss a page, re-reading a passage to check if that really just happened. The language flows and, like a poem, you get caught up in it, half-forgetting that there's a plot and characters driving this story because the prose is so beautiful. It tricks you into reading and then stabs you in the heart. Because I had to keep backtracking and pausing, this book took me a lot longer to read than the 275 pages wo...