August 2010 Archives

It has been a long time since I looked forward to bedtime because I wanted to read. Usually I begin to read because I know it is good for me and then I end up enjoying it. The Help, by first time novelist Kathryn Stockett proved to be one of those books. It wasn't the beautiful word pictures or the fascinating thoughts on human nature which usually appeal to me, but rather the realism of the voices that carry the narrative of the challenge of the social structure of house "help" in Mississippi in 1962.

It was also quite fun to find that several of my friends were also reading the book- a phenomenon that rarely happens for whatever reason due to my usual reading choices.

Discovered, like most things I now treasure, in high school Steinbeck never ceases to disappoint the desire to be drawn into the personalities of a world wholly unlike one's own. Although the strange charmed painting of brothel life in a small town in Sweet Thursdayheld my intrigue, it was the overarching truths of narrative that continue to compel my admiration of Steinbeck.

At one point he diverges from the main story to weave a sidebar narrative about a little town in which the competition fostered in a simple croquette-like game turns the town into two groups of warring factions that cannot imagine intermarrying or using the same drinking fountain. Throughout the description of each increased expression of animosity I found myself thinking that while the story seemed outrageous, there was something right about what he was suggesting. The chapter ends with the thought that things don't have to have happened to be true.

Spurred on by the thought of a classic author I'd read in high school, and reassured by a recent NPR endorsement, I began Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury this summer. Unfortunately, the narrative of a 12 year old boy's summer memories of sneakers, movies, and melodramatic imagination failed to draw me into another world. The most magical thought conjured up remained in the title- the thought that the summer could be bottled up in the nectar of pressed dandelions, preserved for the most painful moments winter's discontent.