Sara's Profile

443 ratings (3.52 avg)
78 reviews

http://www.thecelerymuseum.com

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Cloud Shelves | Stats | More…

Sara is Currently Reading

Sara is currently reading:

A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age

by Resl Brigitte

bookshelves: currently-reading, art-history, medieval-history

My rating:

Feb 03, 2012 01:44pm

Sara is currently reading:

A Journal of the Plague Year

by Daniel Defoe

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Dec 15, 2011 09:32am

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Sara's Recent Updates

Sara took the Never-Ending Book Quiz

questions answered:	1787
correct:	1142 (63.9%)
skipped:	19
best streak:	23
questions added:	0

Feb 06, 2012 06:51am · beat her score

Sara is currently reading:

A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age
by Resl Brigitte

My rating:

Feb 03, 2012 01:44pm

Sara gave

to:

The Good Thief
by Hannah Tinti (Goodreads Author)

read in January, 2012

My rating:

This book is exciting and frightening, touching and macabre. I sped through it wishing it were longer. Just a very good adventure story occurring in an exceedingly well-imagined nineteenth-century New England focusing on a compelling and resourceful ...more

Jan 30, 2012 09:44am · see review

Sara gave

to:

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth
by Chris Ware

read in January, 2012

My rating:

Jimmy Corrigan must have taken Chris Ware an astounding amount of time and energy to create. Jimmy's story takes place in an intricately imagined and illustrated Chicago, following two parallel narrative lines: one concerns Jimmy Corrigan, a 30+-year...moreJimmy Corrigan must have taken Chris Ware an astounding amount of time and energy to create. Jimmy's story takes place in an intricately imagined and illustrated Chicago, following two parallel narrative lines: one concerns Jimmy Corrigan, a 30+-year-old in present day Chicago and, the second occurs in the Chicago of 1893, when that city hosted a storied world's fair, and concerns a Jimmy-like child (8 or 9 years old, I'll call him Jim to differentiate) and Jim's father. These two narrative lines weave around each other interspersed with Jimmy's (and Jim's) dream ballets and bizarre nonsequiturs addressed directly to the reader.

This is, ultimately, a story about sons and fathers; about Jimmy trying to reconnect as an adult with a long absent, imperfect but well-intentioned father and about Jim, raised by an unloving malicious man who ultimately abandons him. I wanted to like this book more than I do because of the considerable amount of respect and admiration I have for the complexity of Ware's visual imagination. However, I could not make myself like Jimmy or find his woes compelling; sympathetic, sure, but not compelling. Jim's story gripped me more, primarily because he shows backbone that Jimmy completely lacks.

It is difficult to root for someone who will not help themselves and Jimmy seems almost completely paralyzed by his own timidity. His mother harangues and smothers him. His father reappears in his life after decades of silence, attempting lamely to manufacture a warmth between him and his son that he destroyed by vanishing in the first place. He is lonely and unable to connect with anyone. Jimmy has plenty to be dissatisfied with. His emotional turmoil is reasonable and understandable. Even as an adult, childhood issues can plague a person and limit them. But Jimmy's struggle to move out from underneath these issues never manifests with any force. He has no pluck and no spirit and possesses the sexual maturity of a 15-year-old. I feel unkind summing him up in this way, suspecting these characteristics should elicit more sympathy from me, not less. I characterize myself as having much empathy for the gentle and sensitive, for feeling protective of them rather than critical of them. For this reason, my reaction to Jimmy's character surprises and confuses me, but I found him annoying and uninteresting. But there it is. I didn't like Jimmy and didn't think he tried hard enough, which makes the emotional pain he suffers appear to some extent like his own fault.

Jim, on the other hand, seems faced with a nastier situation. He is a small boy. His mother is dead. His father alternates between distant and belligerent. But these circumstances do not crush Jim or intimidate him to the point of paralysis. They do, however, create a more jaded human being. When we learn how Jim and Jimmy's stories intersect (namely, who exactly is Jim to Jimmy), we do see how Jim's unhappy upbringing created an unhappy if resilient man who would pass down questionable fathering to his own son.

Perhaps it is Jim's chutzpah that gives me so much more patience for him than I feel for Jimmy. Perhaps I simply like the aesthetics of Jim's story better; the fact that his world is late nineteenth-century Chicago and his father, a glazier, works on the White City of the world's fair. Perhaps Ware, for all the pseudo-autobiographical hints in Jimmy Corrigan, actually found Jimmy mildly annoying as well. Perhaps *because* of the pseudo-autobiographical aspects of the book, Ware found Jimmy annoying; an unpleasant, helpless aspect of himself amplified in fiction.(less)

Jan 30, 2012 09:34am · see review

Sara gave

to:

Jealous Gods and Chosen People by David Leeming

Jealous Gods and Chosen People: The Mythology of the Middle East
by David Leeming

read in January, 2012

My rating:

Jealous Gods and Chosen People is an anthropological look at the religions spawned in the Middle East beginning thousands of years ago. Leeming traces the Bronze Age mythologies of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Hittites and Western Semites (whose des...more

Jan 17, 2012 08:47am · see review

Sara marked as to-read:

The Other Side (Dedalus European Classics)
by Alfred Kubin

My rating:

Jan 05, 2012 02:06pm

Sara marked as to-read:

The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts

The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
by Sven Birkerts

My rating:

Jan 05, 2012 02:06pm

Sara marked as to-read:

Reading Life: Books for the Ages
by Sven Birkerts

My rating:

Jan 05, 2012 02:05pm

Sara made a comment on her review of Ancient Evenings

"Thanks - that's a compliment. I thought about giving up close to the beginning of the book, but it kept being so strange, so unlike anything I'd ever ...more"

Jan 03, 2012 07:15am · see review

Sara marked as to-read: