Books & Book Reviews

This is where I talk about books I have read or would like to read. I may also talk a bit about authors and writing.

Fun Home at College – Literature or Pornography

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Incoming freshman to the College of Charleston, my alma mater, this fall are asked to Fun Home - A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdelread Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel as part of their freshman orientation. According to the College, “All faculty and incoming students are encouraged to read this selection as it will be included in the academic curriculum and in activities throughout the year.” Now even though my daughter is coming into the college as a higher level transfer student, the College still gave her a copy of the book so she would know what was going on.

I saw the book briefly when she got it, thought it was interesting because it was a graphic novel, and then thought nothing more about it. Until last week. It seems that a conservative action group and some parents are none too thrilled with the choice of Fun Home as freshman reading. In fact, Oran Smith, president and chief operating officer of Palmetto Family, went so far as to call the book pornographic. So with that kind of furor starting to brew in the papers and on TV, how could I resist reading the book to see what it was all about?

Do you want to know what I found? Well, what I found was a very well written story about a girl’s coming of age, how she dealt with finding her own identity, how she managed to love her father despite a difficult relationship with him that was only made more difficult by the discovery that he had a secret life, and then how all of this wraps around her father’s apparent suicide and the affect of that upon the entire family. Heavy, but pretty normal stuff for coming of age literature. The two things that set this work apart are that both the author / daughter and the father are gay, and that it is a graphic novel. Being a graphic novel means you get to actually see some of the situations that would just be verbally described in a regular literary work.

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Not Your Typical Childhood Book – Exercise #24

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When I was a kid, my mother would read to me for hours, I loved it.Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbettir?t=palmettobugdigit&l=as2&o=1&a=0195622553That simple act has had a great affect on me and is the key to my answer for today’s exercise. Exercise number twenty-four out of thirty-one is to detail my favorite childhood book. The answer to that may actually answer a lot of questions about my personality.

My mother saw no reason to stick to kids books when reading to me. Basically, if the subject was interesting and I could handle and understand it, then it was fare game. Game. Huh. The book I remember the most and will call my favorite was Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett. To quote Amazon,

Corbett was also an author of great renown. His books on the man-eating tigers he once tracked are not only established classics, but have by themselves created almost a separate literary genre. Man Eaters of Kumaon is the best known of Corbett’s books, one which offers ten fascinating and spine-tingling tales of pursuing and shooting tigers in the Indian Himalayas during the early years of this century. The stories also offer first-hand information about the exotic flora, fauna, and village life in this obscure and treacherous region of India, making it as interesting a travelogue as it is a compelling look at a bygone era of big-game hunting.

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The Collector – Exercise #19

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First off I would like to apologize to all who read my blog as soon as it comes out. I have discovered that the quickest and easiest way to proofread anything I have written is to just hit the “publish” button. Same probably works with email. As soon as you make the work public you will begin to notice all the small spelling errors, incorrect word choices, and mixtures of tense. I try to go back and correct these as quickly as possible, but those of you who get immediate notice of the posting or are Johnny-on-the-spot and read it as soon as I post it online will get to see all my gory and glorifying errors. Really quite shameful. Especially for an English major. We all know that spellcheckers and other such grammar tools cannot find all little errors. It takes time, it takes reflection on what you wrote, and  it takes rereading with a keen eye and ear. None of that seems to happen until I hit the publish button.

Catherine CollageWell, enough of that apologizing and self flagellation. Today’s exercise, number nineteen of thirty-one, is something that is near and dear to my heart, something that drives those who live with me nuts, for today I am asked to describe, “what do you collect?” That is both a dangerous and a broad subject.  We can start with the fact that I am a collector of all things involving around British cars. Not just the cars themselves you understand, but books about the cars, emblems from the cars, models of the cars, publicity posters, videos of the cars and car races, well I think you get the idea. Basically if I run across almost anything that has to do with old British cars I will collect it and try to find some spot for it in my home or office. The more esoteric the better.

If that’s not enough on the large side, I am also a train and trolley collector. Unfortunately I have no actual prototype real-size trains or trolleys (not that I haven’t tried), so I have to make up for that by collecting the same tonnage in model trains. Next week in fact I will be at the NMRA (National Model Railroad Association) convention in Atlanta for four days. My wife is going with me, and boy is she thrilled. And as is inevitable with a collection like this, not only do I collect the model trains and track and scenery and buildings that all go together to create a scene, I also collect the aforementioned books, movies, posters, belt buckles, and anything else you can think of that has to do railroading.

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