for school
Centered around the 1918 influenza epidemic, Wickett’s Remedy features unconventional narration techniques and heaps of historical details. At times, the story feels fragmented in a way that makes me miss the warm depth of Goldberg’s first (published) novel Bee Season; yet the varying modes of unveiling the story does bestow a more epic scope which may have otherwise been too weak and narrow. It’s probably best to approach this book with a minimal amount of knowledge of what happens—and if I describe the parts I like, it will invariably reveal too much—but I can say that the way she illustrates the fallible nature of memory is especially brilliant. I’ve been imagining whispers all week.
pinball focused interview with Myla Goldberg (about Bee Season)
(Digital Prepress for Graphic Designers)
I wasn’t intending on reading this book all the way through, but I was waiting for a book to come in at the library and it was the only thing sitting around when I was leaving for work that morning. Though most of it is a fairly technical guide on designing for offset printing, with such fun topics as image calibration, dot gain, and trapping, the chapter on Understanding Color includes some clear and concise explanations of parts of color theory. The parts about things aren’t inherently any certain color and how we never can see a true black are well-stated.
Krik? Krak! has been on my mental book list for a while, so even though the blurb on the back of this book didn’t make it sound very exciting, I decided I fared a better chance with it than the other lackluster titles found in the stacks at the library. Luckily it is a much more dynamic book than that blurb lets on.
Sophie’s mother sends for her when she is twelve, having left Haiti for New York years before. After being raised by her aunt in her mother’s absence, the book begins with Sophie making a mother’s day card for her Tante Atie, which the woman refuses with tears, having just received the plane ticket that will reunite Sophie with her mother. Within a week, they are making their hurried goodbyes at the airport. This is one of those books I felt like I knew what was going to happen, only to discover how wrong my predictions were.
I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to.…
“There is a place where woman are buried in clothes the color of flames, where we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libéré?’ Are you free, my daughter?”
I must say I enjoy a murder mystery where the victim is a neighbor’s dog and the narrator is a 15-year-old boy who is autistic, keen on math, and more interested in numbering his chapters as increasing primes instead of the usual sequence. Of course, the book is not much of a murder mystery at all and instead more of a journal of this boy’s experiences during a difficult time in his family. From responses to this book that I’ve read (i.e., not having much personal experience), Haddon captures the nuances of autism with grace.
