Bookish Thoughts

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer. Her books don't have a lot of plot, and they tend to be a bit all over the place. But the longer you sit with them, the more depths you find. These books are dense, and they take a lot of digesting. I liked On Beauty more than White Teeth . This book is tighter, more focused. Both the beginning and ending make sense to me in the context of the entire story. I know why Smith started where she did, with Jerome's emails. And I liked the ending. It was a bit abrupt, very loose and ambiguous. But it makes sense for this story. This book follows a family living in a small liberal college town in Massachusetts as they interact with a much more conservative family, the patriarch of which is their patriarch's greatest rival. Smith pokes into politics, race, class. And while she didn't really change my mind about anything, I thought she did a decent job of presenting both sides of the arguments, skewering the ones that becam...

White Teeth  is the kind of book you write essays about. Essays about immigration and family and the differences between the first generation and the second. Essays about religion vs science and progress vs tradition. About learning from mistakes and repeating the same old mistakes on down the generations. Essays about colonialism, xenophobia, racism, and never knowing where you belong. Essays about teeth and all their possible symbolic meaning and whether or not Irie ever became a dentist. What I'm trying to say is that this is a very dense book with a lot going on. It's going to stick with me for a while. But I had some trouble with it. The plot jumps around a lot, and it takes a while for some of the threads to come together. It took longer than usual for me to get into this book. Not that I was uninterested, I just wasn't particularly hooked for the first few chapters. Then it ended really suddenly, and I was left wanting more. But it didn't take me too long to ma...