spoko’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2021)

spoko’s comments from the EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club group.

I second The Vanishing Half.

I second Double Indemnity and Our Man in Havana.

I second Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I nominate A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (489 p.).

Just finished this yesterday, and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I honestly think the person who suffers most might be Baba. I can’t imagine living like that—unable to show (or really even fully feel) my love for one of my own sons, while at the same time forced to raise him next to another son that I do acknowledge. The immense guilt he must have felt, and the grief at having Hassan ripped away from him. And unlike Amir, he never gets a chance to find any redemption.

I nominate Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977, 337p).

So, The Woman in White has been nominated a couple of times in a row now, and not quite won the poll. (I suspect the length is off-putting for some.) Is anyone interested in doing a Buddy Read of it? I’d like to start some time in July, if anyone’s interested. And this might need to span some time, since it is a pretty long book.

Shelley wrote: “Not sure if I was distracted, or just too unfamiliar with the time and place in which it was written, but I felt confused and kept having to listen to tracks over and over and still wondered if I understood what was going on.”

It’s a pretty surreal narrative, so I think a bit of that reaction is to be expected. My approach was just to kind of hold it loosely and be comfortable with the idea that I wouldn’t get it all on the first pass. I read it about 6 years ago, and haven’t returned to it, but a lot of individual bits and pieces do still stick in my mind.

I'll second The Song of Achilles.

I second The Vanishing Half.

I nominate A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (112 p.).

I second The Woman in White.

I second Pachinko.

I nominate Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (345 p.)

I second The Henna Artist.

I second Of Mice and Men.

I second Hound of the Baskervilles.

I second The Kite Runner.

I nominate Beloved by Toni Morrison (324 pages), last read January 2020.

I second Pachinko.

I nominate Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (496 pages).

I second Homegoing.

Sahara wrote: “I’ve always wondered why Hurston chose death for Tea Cake by rabid dog though.”

That stood out for me as well, when there were a lot more typical ways he might have died—in a fight over gambling, e.g., or at work, etc. I really think the dog is meant to be symbolic. From the description, and the later description of Tea Cake’s struggle with rabies, it seems to me that Hurston is symbolizing a system that keeps him and Janie down, and that his life-and-death struggle with it finally sets Janie free.

So at first it seemed like it might be the overall system of white supremacy that keeps so many of these characters trapped in certain lives. But as I think about it more—and especially as I read a quote like:

things were fixed so that Tea Cake couldn’t come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him and he couldn’t get rid of the dog and live. He had to die to get rid of the dog.... A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it.

I wonder if it’s toxic masculinity. That is, really, what Janie is free from in the end. I’m not sure it was Tea Cake that freed her from it, but I think a person could make that argument. Maybe Janie was never really going to be independent of men until she had felt true love, but she also wasn’t going to be truly independent until she had separated from Tea Cake himself. And when you think about the things @Kim mentioned above—him spending her money, him beating her—it’s pretty clear that he might never be rid of it himself.