June 2009

Due to me going a bit crazy, I didn't read as much in June as I did in May. It's okay, because I'm working on making up for it this month!

The list:

1. Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Writings - Francesco Petrarch - various mediums, 14C Italian
2. The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri - novel, 21C American
3. When You Are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris - non-fiction essays, 21C American
4. Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance - Poetry, 15/16C Italian
5. Towelhead - Alicia Erian - Fiction, 21C American

I also read a few essays from David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. Everything he writes is interesting and I came away from his essays feeling like I'd really gotten something out of them. However, reading his work IS work. The footnotes often play as big a role as the text itself, so I paced myself and just read an essay here or there. I plan on finishing it when I have a chunk of free time.

Selections from the Canzoniere and Women Poets were both for my Renaissance Lit class which ended at the end of June. I decided to read both in their entirety because, let's face it, I have a lot of time on my hands. I really loved both. It's amazing how accessible this poetry still is, despite being centuries old.

I absolutely adored The Namesake. I saw the movie first, then picked up the book at Borders sale earlier in the year. I'm not much of an elitist when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations, I actually enjoy seeing what directors and actors make out of the words and characters that I love in books. So it was interesting so see the movie first and then get SO MUCH more detail out of the book. I love books (obviously), so a story about the huge significance that one book had on an entire family really affected me. Shortly after finishing this book, I saw that it's on the reading list for my 20/21C Women Writers class this fall. I'm excited to discuss it academically as well.

As for Towelhead by Alicia Erian, I was a little disappointed. It was a quick read and something of a page-turner, but it was definitely not the funny book that the blurb quotes suggested it. A lot of the sexual material was flat-out disturbing. I also got sick of Jasira's "I'm a little girl" narration after just a few pages. I felt bad for the girl, I really did, but it was hard to sympathize with a thirteen-year-old girl with no personality to speak of. I understand that this novel is showing her coming of age time, trying to discover herself, but it's just not interesting to hear her say, "I don't know," as the answer to every question. I think Erian did well developing her characters and their relationships, I just found myself annoyed by the protagonist more often than not. But I still finished the book. It was a page-turner because of its intensity, it really left the reader wanting to know how the story ended and (without spoilers) I think it ended on a good leaf.

That concludes my pathetic month of reading in June, here's to a more productive July.