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That is NOT Matilda! You swapped her for a CHILD.
'Day' is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. It's not applicable. I didn't get you anything.
River ,'Out Of Gas'
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."
Aims - Mar 18, 2008 7:37:11 am PDT #5282 of 28344
Shit's all sorts of different now.
sumi - Mar 18, 2008 7:53:40 am PDT #5283 of 28344
Art Crawl!!!
No kidding! She is totally a little girl and not a baby anymore.
How did THAT happen?
Aims - Mar 18, 2008 11:15:54 am PDT #5284 of 28344
Shit's all sorts of different now.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is breaking my heart. And I'm only on page 100. It just gets worse, doesn't it?
§ ita § - Mar 18, 2008 11:41:43 am PDT #5285 of 28344
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
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.
Aims - Mar 18, 2008 11:51:21 am PDT #5286 of 28344
Shit's all sorts of different now.
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.
flea - Mar 18, 2008 12:56:34 pm PDT #5287 of 28344
information libertarian
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.
§ ita § - Mar 18, 2008 1:18:03 pm PDT #5288 of 28344
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
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.
Shari_H - Mar 18, 2008 1:38:05 pm PDT #5289 of 28344
Keep breathing!
dcp - Mar 18, 2008 2:41:21 pm PDT #5290 of 28344
The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.
RIP Arthur C. Clarke
Awwwww....
sarameg - Mar 18, 2008 3:40:03 pm PDT #5291 of 28344
I'm going to have to re-acquire Roll of Thunder when I'm next home. I probably haven't read it in 20 years, but it was on repeat for quite a while. I can vividly recall the images of the land, structures and books (oh, the books) it drew in my mind. I wonder if they'd change. I have a clear impression of red dirt.
I don't know if it is just that I read them all at the same time and they are all oh the humanity, but Sadako, Return to Manzanar, a non-Anne Frank authored Anne Frank-book, a YA about someone named Liese during WW2, a YA about deportation to the Steppes during Stalinism and The Great Gilly Hopkins all share a common area in my head.
With few exceptions, I can't put anything down, no matter how upsetting or unsettling the story.
Probably took me a box of kleenex and liters of water to get through Four Spirits. (Fictional novel wrapped around the 16th Street Church bombing in B'ham .)