Oh my lord. She's at that cool stage where picture to picture you can see a transition from baby face to actual grown-up kid face. Amazing! And amazingly cute.
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Aw, what a cutie!
The most recent pictures
That is NOT Matilda! You swapped her for a CHILD.
No kidding! She is totally a little girl and not a baby anymore.
How did THAT happen?
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is breaking my heart. And I'm only on page 100. It just gets worse, doesn't it?
It just gets worse, doesn't it?
If I hadn't lobotomised myself shortly after reading the book, I could answer it for you. That book gutted me as a kid. I was exposed to lost of slavery/emancipation/Jim Crow/deep South literature as a kid, but that's the title that sticks with me the most to tie into all the grief I have attached.
And seeing this here just crystallised something for me -- I need to go ask a question in Boxed Set.
I had it in my post above, but then deleted it for fear of it being read as Aimee is a Shitheel.
I think that the reason I have avoided reading a lot of African-American literature is that there is so much of it that, well, hurts my heart. Cruelty, rape, racism, torture, etc. I know that avoiding reading about these things doesn't make them not have happened, because they did, and those sotries should be told, but ...
Reading Roll of Thunder gave me nightmares last night and I wasn't even to a part that was particularly cruel or mean. I think that by avoiding these books, I've been trying to save myself some grief and pain. A miserable excuse for not being better read in this genre.
I couldn't finish Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. I was 10 when I tried to read it; I couldn't believe that people could be like that to each other.
I still kind of can't. I think it's okay to be so overwhelmed by human cruelty that you can't go on reading about it. At least, I hope so. I mean, if I had to think about that stuff all the time, I would honestly, seriously, kill myself.
Aimée, black Americans are happy too. I'm not going to tell you that you have to sit through any particular horrific story, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even that sounds like a value judgment on the bathwater, which I don't mean to convey.