"Centered As If The Love That Boy Feels For Them Anchors Them Deep As A Tree's Roots, Holds Them Still As The Oaks, Which Don't Uproot In Hurricane Wind"

It's amazing how having a more modern and relatable book can make it that much easier to read. I had actually foregone most of my possible plans in order to stay home cuddled with the book this weekend. And while I did thoroughly enjoy Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, and it was a quick read, I don't know if I would necessarily say it was up there at the top of list of favorites.

The story is about a poor family in rural Mississippi in the days leading up to (and including) Hurricane Katrina. It is told through the eyes of Esch, a 15-year old girl with 3 brothers, Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, and a largely absent, hard-drinking father; their mother died in childbirth with Junior. Their father knows that a hurricane is coming - he can feel it in his bones - and is making preparations and while the kids somewhat help prepare, they are also dealing with their own issues. Skeetah is taking care of his pit bull and her new litter of puppies and Esch finds out early on in the book that she is pregnant.

The pacing of the book was very expertly executed. There are mini-climaxes or intense scenes in almost every chapter making it that much easier to want to continue on to the next chapter (side note: I feel as though this is a key strategy used in a lot of modern fiction that I've read recently. I could rattle off multiple books that do this...maybe it's a good thing to keep the reader that engaged, but when I read the same technique so often, maybe it feels a little formulaic?). And while the writing was clever and well-done, sometimes the text and descriptions felt a little simile/metaphor heavy (title quote of this post as one of MANY examples).

There are a lot of things about this book that made me uncomfortable reading. Foremost, Skeetah fights his pit bull and there is a fairly graphic scene describing multiple dog fights in explicit detail. So while Skeetah cares for his dog to an almost fanatical degree, in a very maternal, loving way, I found it hard to reconcile him then being ok with her being torn to shreds by other dogs. But the author does a good job of putting this in the context of his love for the dog being primarily so she can fight, so she can win, and so it can be an ego/pride thing amongst his peers and others who fight dogs. Similarly, 15-year old Esch talks about in detail, the many different boys she has sex with and how she knows that it's the one thing that she's good at, which is a bit hard to read from a 15-year old character.

I totally get that both of these elements of the story show the realities of these characters and their lives (and similarly, the realities of many poor, rural families in the South). And I completely appreciate the author's willingness to go there and include these things that will make the reader uncomfortable, and her honesty about these characters' lives doesn't need to be all non-offensive and vanilla. However, I found it a lot harder to sympathize with the characters, particularly Skeetah and Esch. There's one moment towards the end of the book when Esch is confronting her baby's father and he mentions that her brothers know she's a slut. He uses the word to intentionally hurt her and it does feel harsh in that moment of the book. But instead of feeling that it was inappropriate, I kind of found myself thinking, "Well, yeah, she kind of is." Same with how the book ends in regards to the dogs; I won't give this part away, but again, I had a hard time feeling all that bad for Skeetah. And maybe this is the author's intent. And maybe this is a result of my own life and upbringing being so vastly different than the characters affecting how I view their choices.

What I did love most about the book, however, was the dynamic between all of the family members. That even though each of them had difficult challenges going on, they all showed so much love for each other. In spite of their circumstances, they took care of each other, looked out for each other, and defended each other. In a multitude of little ways, the relationship between these 5 characters was very real and very loving.

I couldn't help remembering those days before Katrina hit too. I was visiting my parents in Florida at the time, and I remember that overnight, the hurricane just exploded into this monster in the gulf and then watching all the horrors that happened afterwards, hardly believing that this was happening in my own country. The book ends the day after the hurricane rather than telling the story of what happens in the days and weeks afterward. And while it doesn't necessarily end happily ever after, we're-all-gonna-get-through-this-just-fine, knowing what came in the weeks after makes me wonder how these characters and this community really would have fared. Oddly enough, 10 years ago today would have been one of the chapters in the book.

On I move to Sophie's Choice by William Styron. I have not ever seen the movie. I always get Sophie's Choice and Norma Rae mixed up (something about them being female names?), so all along, I've been thinking that this book was something about unions and envisioning Sally Field as the main character, when in fact it's about a Polish immigrant played by Meryl Streep. And I honestly don't know much about the story at all, but I have a feeling I'm not going to like what Sophie's choice actually ends up being. But here goes nothin'...let's just wrench my heart out.

Happy Sunday!

"Nobody Can Say, 'Forgive The Heavy Heart That Loves More Than The Tongue Can Say Or The Hands Can Do. Look Back At Me Every Time I Look At You And Never Feel Pity, For What My Heart Holds This Minute Is Better Than What You Offer The Least Bit Less.'"

Lesson learned: 600 page books of short stories might be the death of me. 1) Because it's 600 pages, and 2) because by the time I get halfway through the book, I can hardly remember the 20+ short stories that I already read. So I found myself going back through the stories and quizzing myself regarding what they were about. So maybe in the future, I'll have to read a book of short stories in conjunction with an full novel so I can break up the short stories and actually have a chance of remembering them a little better.

With that being said, I actually liked The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty very much. She is without a doubt a master of the form of the short story. The richness with which she describes her settings is like nothing I've ever read before. It's not as though she just pulls in a bunch of fancy adjectives or a few clever similes to describe something . It's a completely different approach to describing landscape, and nature, and interiors using concepts and structure that I've never seen before. And while I guess Eudora Welty is considered a Southern Gothic writer (although apparently she disagreed with that sentiment), and there definitely was a bit of a sinister edge to most of the stories, the stories definitely didn't seem as full-blown dark as Flannery O'Conner, whose stories I also recently read.

She also uses a technique that I like to call "writing around the event," where she tells of a critical moment in the story, but she doesn't just blurt it out and lay it out in such obvious terms. She presents it in vague descriptions, and then almost skips to the next part of the narrative without really telling you what happened. This is particularly true for intense moments (murder/death, sex) that are the pivotal moments in the stories (examples: "Sir Rabbit", "The Whole World Knows", "No Place for You, My Love", and "The Burning"). So much so that I often found myself having to stop mid-story and Google it to find out if what I thought happened (or what I could discern from how it was written) did indeed happen. And I really liked the idea of this. I liked the idea of not handing your reader the narrative on a silver platter, but to make them really re-read the words and conclude for themselves what was really going on in the context of the rest of the story (ok fine, so I cheated and concluded for myself after googling. So sue me). I would like to say that I will in the future try to incorporate approaches like this into my own writing, but I wouldn't even be presumptuous to assume that I could even remotely pull it off. My approach would probably end up seeming as though I wrote the story straight up and then just deleted a couple of critically important pages and just assumed that the reader could figure it out. Not a sound approach. 

So one more book in the books. I'm taking a quick sojourn from my lists to read Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. I've found lately that I really miss reading modern literature. My mom and sister are both in book clubs and when I was on vacation with them recently, I had a twinge of jealousy when they were talking about all the modern fiction they were reading and how much they enjoyed this book or that book. When I'm stuck in either 1940's Mississippi or 1600's England with Shakespeare. I'm looking forward to reading a book in less than 6 months because I'm slogging through the content.

Onward! 238 more books to go. Ugh, I feel like I've been at 238 forever.