Bibliography
May. 9th, 2009 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyYou will notice a new tag on this entry, PoC. This is because I am taking up the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc challenge. I'm not planning to read fifty books by people of colour in a year; however, I am planning to keep track of the books I do read which are by people of colour. This is my response to RaceFail, however small that might be. This is what I can do - so I'm doing it.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz
So, to start the50books_poc challenge, I went with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (not technically my first PoC book of the year, as there was work in Mondo Barbie that counted, but still). This is the story of Oscar, a Dominican growing up in New Jersey, and the history of his family. I learnt far more about the history of the Dominican Republic than I was expecting to - Díaz, an Dominican-American, actually plays with the idea of the 'minority as educator', addressing his very first footnote "for those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history". You need the history. The plot is driven by the atrocities of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, better known as El Jefe. The kinds of things perpetrated by him and his henchmen aren't particularly unusual in the range of the kind of thing that dictators do, and some of it feels similar to the sort of thing encountered in the pages of novels by Louis de Bernières that don't involve mandolins, but Díaz differs from de Bernières in actually having cultural investment in that history. The narration runs deep, and it runs colloquial, and it runs strong.
Díaz also balances his language well - there's a fair amount of Spanish, most of which I didn't understand, but in contexts where the overall gist was fairly clear. The Spanish does not, however, turn up in Oscar's voice. Oscar is formed by his identity as geek - being fond of sci-fi, Tolkein, Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, where half the footnotes are taken up by historical orientation, the other half are taken up by geek references. There are lots of them in the text, even when Oscar himself isn't speaking. It's as if Oscar's geek-ness is so fundamental that it infects and shapes the voice of the narrator describing him; it cannot be separated out. It's a very odd juxtaposition - but it works.
Oscar's trial in life, you see, is that he does not live up to the standards expected of young Dominican men - he is not a ladykiller, and seems to have no luck with attempting to become one. When he does find love, finally, it ends up being a doomed romance of the sort he has been working up to all through the novel, although you don't realise this until the end of the book. He claims his masculinity, but in ways that repeat the cycle of his ancestors.
This is such a rich book - the ways it engages with personal history, with questions of modernity, with issues of race identity (did you know Dominicans and Haitians don't get on? I had no idea) is complex and detailed, and demands far more of you than a reader than you'd expect. Plus - it has footnotes. All good novels have footnotes.
Read this book. The end.
The Women in the Gospel of John: The Divine Feminine - Judith Kaye Jones
This was actually my Lenten reading - it just took me a loooong time to get around to the last chapter. I planned to read it on Easter day, but this did not happen for a variety of not terribly good reasons. I have, however, finally got through it today.
It is a slim volume, with a simple premise - to explore the backbone of stories about women that the author contends form the overall structure of the Gospel of John. Each chapter focuses on a particular story from scripture, and is split into two halves - the first, an accounting of the scholarly background and theological considerations raised by the passage; the second, a more reflective sermon/meditation on those themes and questions.
I have always had trouble with the Gospel of John, and in some ways this didn't address some of the questions I was hoping it was going to. However, it gave me a sense of the overall structure of the Gospel and some of the questions to look for when reading it. I liked her approach to feminist theology, which felt solid without being totally insane. I think this would be a very good book to do a Bible study around, just to see where it took people and what responses it provoked.
50books_poc challenge. I'm not planning to read fifty books by people of colour in a year; however, I am planning to keep track of the books I do read which are by people of colour. This is my response to RaceFail, however small that might be. This is what I can do - so I'm doing it.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz
So, to start the
50books_poc challenge, I went with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (not technically my first PoC book of the year, as there was work in Mondo Barbie that counted, but still). This is the story of Oscar, a Dominican growing up in New Jersey, and the history of his family. I learnt far more about the history of the Dominican Republic than I was expecting to - Díaz, an Dominican-American, actually plays with the idea of the 'minority as educator', addressing his very first footnote "for those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history". You need the history. The plot is driven by the atrocities of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, better known as El Jefe. The kinds of things perpetrated by him and his henchmen aren't particularly unusual in the range of the kind of thing that dictators do, and some of it feels similar to the sort of thing encountered in the pages of novels by Louis de Bernières that don't involve mandolins, but Díaz differs from de Bernières in actually having cultural investment in that history. The narration runs deep, and it runs colloquial, and it runs strong.Díaz also balances his language well - there's a fair amount of Spanish, most of which I didn't understand, but in contexts where the overall gist was fairly clear. The Spanish does not, however, turn up in Oscar's voice. Oscar is formed by his identity as geek - being fond of sci-fi, Tolkein, Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, where half the footnotes are taken up by historical orientation, the other half are taken up by geek references. There are lots of them in the text, even when Oscar himself isn't speaking. It's as if Oscar's geek-ness is so fundamental that it infects and shapes the voice of the narrator describing him; it cannot be separated out. It's a very odd juxtaposition - but it works.
Oscar's trial in life, you see, is that he does not live up to the standards expected of young Dominican men - he is not a ladykiller, and seems to have no luck with attempting to become one. When he does find love, finally, it ends up being a doomed romance of the sort he has been working up to all through the novel, although you don't realise this until the end of the book. He claims his masculinity, but in ways that repeat the cycle of his ancestors.
This is such a rich book - the ways it engages with personal history, with questions of modernity, with issues of race identity (did you know Dominicans and Haitians don't get on? I had no idea) is complex and detailed, and demands far more of you than a reader than you'd expect. Plus - it has footnotes. All good novels have footnotes.
Read this book. The end.
The Women in the Gospel of John: The Divine Feminine - Judith Kaye Jones
This was actually my Lenten reading - it just took me a loooong time to get around to the last chapter. I planned to read it on Easter day, but this did not happen for a variety of not terribly good reasons. I have, however, finally got through it today.
It is a slim volume, with a simple premise - to explore the backbone of stories about women that the author contends form the overall structure of the Gospel of John. Each chapter focuses on a particular story from scripture, and is split into two halves - the first, an accounting of the scholarly background and theological considerations raised by the passage; the second, a more reflective sermon/meditation on those themes and questions.
I have always had trouble with the Gospel of John, and in some ways this didn't address some of the questions I was hoping it was going to. However, it gave me a sense of the overall structure of the Gospel and some of the questions to look for when reading it. I liked her approach to feminist theology, which felt solid without being totally insane. I think this would be a very good book to do a Bible study around, just to see where it took people and what responses it provoked.
