Xox read and liked Kim's review of Everything Is Illuminated:

"Sometimes reading makes me so angry

Dammit.

I’m a freaking mess. I realize this and I accept it.

Ugh.

Why, Jonathan Safran Foer? Why? Why do you do this to me? And why the hell are you so young? I kno...more Sometimes reading makes me so angry

Dammit.

I’m a freaking mess. I realize this and I accept it.

Ugh.

Why, Jonathan Safran Foer? Why? Why do you do this to me? And why the hell are you so young? I know that some call you gimmicky and think that you are just a phosphoresce in the pannikin (yes, I, too, have access to Thesaurus.com) but I just…just…spleen them. They can read their Anderson and their Coetzee and leave us dreamers alone. I am ‘Team Foer’; others be damned. (I still wish you weren’t so freaking young, though)

The story is fragmented, told through letters and hodgepodges of writings that might or might not be parts of a novel. There is the story about the people of Trachimbrod, which might be Trochenbrod, a city in western Ukraine that was decimated during WWII by a Nazi Invasion. There is the story of Alex and Jonathan and their journey to find out Who is Augustine? And to thank her for saving Jonathan’s lineage. There is the story of Grandfather and Herschel (copious amounts of tears during that one).

And then there are the stories within the stories. The story of Brod, Jonathan’s great great great great great grandmother and her struggle with loving the idea of love and her 613 sadnesses ( “Mirror Sadness”, “Sadness of not knowing if your body is normal”, “Beauty Sadness”, “Sadness of Hands”, “Sadness of knowing that your body is normal”, “Kissing Sadness”, “Sadness of wanting sadness”, “Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things”, What if? Sadness”, “Sadness”, “Secret Sadness.”)

The story of the would-be ‘Augustine’ and her house with its many labeled boxes ( ‘Silver/Perfume/Pinwheels’, ‘Watches/Winter’, ‘Darkness’, ‘Pillowcases’, ‘Poetry/Nails/Pisces’, ‘Dust’, 'Menorahs/Inks/Keys', 'Death of a Firstborn', 'In Case')

I loved them all. I love the awakenings and the not-truths. I love the humor and the tragedies and the friendships. I am giddy and heavy hearted. I am in love with the idea.

What I loved most, what I clung to after I finished the book, was this:

Jews have Six Senses
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing….memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and see memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain---that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.
When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks “What does it remember like?”

The idea of memory as a sense. Okay, I’ve admitted it before and will again and again. I’m a shiksa—a French-Canadian/German/NH bred—Shiksa. I can’t fathom the horrors of having the Holocaust in my past, I won’t even begin to pretend to imagine the ramifications. But I can appreciate this idea: “What does it remember like?” Aren’t we all tied to the past? Aren’t all of our future actions predetermined by a memory? “Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.”

So much for Free Will.

At one point, Alex begs Jonathan when writing their story: “I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good.”

We have that power in writing. To take away the bad and to recreate. We usually choose not to. It has to be gritty…fairytales are for the young…we need to set the story straight… we need to exorcise our demons….and so on. Make us good. God, that just about killed me.

And this is why I will always defend Foer. His ability to bring me to this awareness and to break my heart in 300 pages or less.


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Xox read and liked Sally's review of Does God Hate Women?:

"The authors present religion as the last socially acceptable voice for prejudices no longer countenanced from secular sources, and particularly a stronghold of domination of and discrimination against women. Many examples are given of the pernicious,...more The authors present religion as the last socially acceptable voice for prejudices no longer countenanced from secular sources, and particularly a stronghold of domination of and discrimination against women. Many examples are given of the pernicious, sometimes horrifying impact of religious authority today on the lives of women. Arguing persuasively that religions in practice have not been about love or compassion but about authorizing and justifying those in power staying in power, the authors dispute the claim by cultural relativists and representatives of the religious and cultural status quo that all religions and traditions should be respected equally and on their own terms. For them, this is dooming most of the world's women to lives of subservience to male authority, limitation on their possibilities due to the accident of being born female, and continued violation of even their most basic human rights.(less) "

Xox added a quote:
"However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice." — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Xox added a quote:
"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth." — Mark Twain

Xox read and liked Paul's review of New Moon (Twilight, #2):

"When she was 12 me and my daughter Georgia went to see Twilight. After the movie I asked her what she thought.

"THAT WAS THE BEST MOVIE EVER" she said. And she went to see it three more times, with people other than me.

...more When she was 12 me and my daughter Georgia went to see Twilight. After the movie I asked her what she thought.

"THAT WAS THE BEST MOVIE EVER" she said. And she went to see it three more times, with people other than me.

So she bought the book and read it in about four hours. I asked her what she thought.

"THAT WAS THE BEST BOOK EVER" she said.

Then we got the dvd of the movie and she watched it again.

"THAT WAS THE WORST MOVIE EVER" she said. I was surprised but she explained; "Bella is stupid, Edward is stupid, nothing looks right, they miss out all the important stuff, it's so bad, it's so so so bad"

Then she read all the other Twilight books in like four hours.

"NEW MOON IS THE WORST BOOK EVER FOR 200 PAGES AND THEN IT'S THE BEST BOOK EVER" she said. By now she was 13.

A week ago she said

"NEW MOON IS COMING OUT SOON, I'M SO EXCITED, I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE IT, CAN WE GO ON THE VERY FIRST DAY PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE"

and I said "But you think Twilight The Movie is stupid".

"Yes, it is stupid" she said "and I can't WAIT to see how bad New Moon is!"

Critics.


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