Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
One reader's thoughts as she steps from book to book.
Books I've Finished
- "A Christmas Memory"
- by Truman Capote 12/8/12
- "Child's Christmas in Wales"
- by Dylan Thomas 12/7/12
- "One Christmas"
- by Truman Capote 11/29/12
- "The Thanksgiving Visitor"
- by Truman Capote 11/29/12
- Inside Mrs. B's Classroom
- by Leslie Baldacci 11/28/12
- The Bee Eater
- by Richard Whitmire 11/15/12
- There Are No Shortcuts
- by Rafe Esquith 10/28/12
- I'd Like to Apologize to
- Every Teacher I Ever Had
- by Tony Danza 10/21/12
- Corked
- by Kathryn Borel 10/15/12
- Year of Learning Dangerously
- by Quinn Cummings 9/30/12
- A Hologram for the King
- by Dave Eggers 8/23/12
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- by Harper Lee 7/18/12
About Me
- Christine
- I often have a few books with bookmarks in them at once. I enjoy classics more than contemporary works of fiction, often read historical fiction, and love to get glimpses into other people's lives by reading memoirs and biographies.
10 comments:
I'm at the written-like-a-play part of Moby Dick. Very amusing. NYT magazine featured Rockford as a city to highlight unemployment...read about that...
I finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and after a quick detour to read books 3 and 4 of a series of graphic novels I like, Jack of Fables, I'm back into my David Copperfield.
I finished An Object of Beauty, which was ok, but some of the characters (ok, a lot of them) left me a bit cold. I'm now on to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Although I disagree with a lot of her tactics, I do think hard work is somewhat undervalued (while entertainment and commercialism are overvalued) here in the U.S., as highlighted by the e-mail I got from a student which contained the words, verbatim, "I would like 100% on my homework (completed or not by the deadline) for the hours and hours I spent trying to chip away at it." That clearly came from a student who thinks that hard work is the exception rather than the rule, and that anytime she has to work that hard (which I would imagine is not that often), she must be immediately rewarded regardless of her level of performance. This is worrying. She's not my student, but I would imagine she hasn't taken advantage of her instructor's office hours yet to get help on the concepts, which might reduce the number of hours she has to spend chipping away at it.
~Lisa
Lisa, I definitely believe in hard work and high expectations. But I keep coming back to the fact that Amy Chua seems to have created an anxious, unhappy household with her inflexibility. And over and over again she gives her girls the message that what you produce is more important than who you are. I cannot agree with her methods.
I really want to read that book. I've read a few articles from her public appearances, and also a newspaper article that her daughter Sophia wrote. It seems like Amy Chua might be making it sound (at least slightly) like she's more outlandish than she really is. There wasn't NO fun in the household, but accomplishment WAS stressed to be the first goal. Like, once you do your homework (and done WELL) and practiced your instrument, THEN you can have fun.
(Then again, this is just from articles and appearances, not from reading the book.)
Oh, and I'm still reading the Stephen King book. :)
In the book, she gives at least two instances where she forced the girls to write sincere, heartfelt eulogies or speeches. She extracted these from the girls just like she extracted any other product from them. I would not be surprised if she pushed Sophia to write that public letter of thanks to her mother to help alleviate some of the anger that her book has caused.
I have not watched the Colbert clip yet, Martha--maybe later today!
Sorry Christine--I didn't mean for my little rant about that one student to sound like an endorsement of Chua's book! I definitely think she was over the top. I agree with her in theory but not necessarily in practice. There needs to be some happy medium. I'm probably about 2/3 through the book now and I'll hopefully finish it before tonight. I'm trying to decide what to read next.
I think you and I are in agreement, Lisa!
Since so many people have been sick lately, I picked up Ah-Choo: Uncommon Life of Your Uncommon Cold (Ackerman). The author wrote about what you'd expect--what exactly is a cold (virus), how serious is it (ranges from no symptoms at all to death), how transmissible is it (surprisingly, not very), what over-the-counter remedies actually work (none). The book was chocked full of scientific studies to back up every claim.
The best part of Ah-Coo was the ending: the advice gleaned from these endless studies. Here's the scoop (and I can hardly wait until I have a cold to try them!):
1. Chicken soup (two recipes included)
2. Fluids (recipes for hot toddy & sit-on-the-sofa old-fashioned included)
3. Kind words & sympathy, preferably from Mom or doctor. I have neither, so this might be a tough one.
4. Bed rest & reading. List of recommended books--a long one--are divided into classics, escapism, and humor.
Also, I just finished reading Admission (Korelitz), which Lisa had read a few posts back. I agree that it was an enjoyable fiction, but I would like to add two things I noticed:
First, the author has a rather inflated sense of the importance of an admission officer. Her character talked about her job incessantly & defensively throughout the book (even at a dinner party, on a hot date, and actually during sex).
Second, the author really does not like blondes. She never missed an opportunity to use "blonde" in a derogatory manner.
Mary, that's so funny about the cold book--at B&N, one recent question on the DAS was, "How do you treat a cold/flu?" My answer was that I rarely get them (knock on wood), but when I do, I try to just drink plenty of fluids and get more rest than usual, and I might occasionally take NyQuil (to help me sleep). And no antibiotics or anything crazy like that, because they're caused by viruses. Seems to do the trick!
I agree about Admission, and I think the reason she had an inflated sense of importance about her job is because of the hole in her life (from her past) that she never allowed herself to face and that she kept from everyone, including her own mother. Also, I think it's because she found herself unwillingly having to defend her job whenever people asked her what she did for a living.
About the "blondes" thing, I think it only came up because her character felt like an outsider at the WASPy college she attended, where many of the girls were petite blondes, including the girls that Tom dated when he wasn't dating Jewish girls like her for the sole purpose of pissing off his parents. I don't think the author dislikes blondes per se, but rather what the blondes in the novel represented--privilege and exclusion.
Post a Comment