Recently Reading

(Two blog posts in one day, I know…. But I use the internet at my friendly neighborhood McDonalds so the options are either hoard prewritten posts for a couple days or start taking bets on how quickly I can gain back the fifteen pounds I recently lost…)

These last few weeks my reading selections have been eclectic, which is great as far as I’m concerned.  I’ve read Addicted by Zane, Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Alan Wolf, Who Does She Think She Is? by Benilde Little, and Scars and Stilettos by Harmony Dust.

As for Addicted, I was a little disappointed.  It is the first book I’ve read by Zane, and I had heard such good things about her.  She’s really popular and authors I like such as Noire, Karen E. Quinones Miller, and Eric Jerome Dickey have mentioned her.  But although I liked the theme of personal recovery, I thought the book started too slow and one plot element that bothered me was how easily Zoe seemed to accept the murder of her best friend (not to mention the handful of other people who died as an indirect result of knowing her.)

The book said she was sad but I didn’t feel her sadness.  I didn’t feel her guilt, her unrelenting questions of what would have happened if…

This is just a personal annoyance for me because recently a friend of mine was killed and my reaction was completely different from the ones I saw in Addicted, or for that matter, in Who Does She Think She Is? (in which a character learns that her high school sweetheart, the unknowing father of her daughter, died of a drug overdose after struggling with depression.)  I felt, and still feel, like if I had been a little different, a little smarter, if I had prayed for intuition like I should have, maybe I could have seen this coming and saved my friend.  Of course, I understand that this response is completely irrational and completely normal… in fact, I remember feeling like it was somehow my fault when I lost one of my grandmothers to a stroke, even though I realize that if doctors couldn’t save her, an eighth grader who was barely passing science probably would not have been much help.

Apart from that small detail, I really liked Who Does She Think She Is?... for the most part.  The plot is both thought-provoking and entertaining and the characterization is phenominal.  Whover copy-edited the book, though, might have been drunk and/or a second grader because I spotted so many typos and simple mistakes, it’s really a shame.

In between reading these two contemporary novels, I read Taking the Quantum Leap, something the eighth grade me could have never seen herself doing.  It took me a long time to get through that book, because although I do enjoy my fair share of nonfiction books (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was a fantastic one I read not too long ago) I’m used to stories about people, and that book contains so many complicated ideas (scientific as well as philosophical) I had to read sentences, paragraphhs, and whole pages two or three times before I could begin to understand.  But that’s part of what I liked about it…  this new interest in quantum theory is part of my whole finding God/ a higher meaning/ something ‘more’ agenda, and on my TBR list is The Vodou Quantum Leap by Reginald Crosley and I am so, so excited about it (I’ve been interested in Vodou, Santeria, etc. since high school) but I need to let my brain cool off for a while, let the ideas sink in, so I’ve decided to wait until I finish my other February reading goal, which is to get my hands on as many Black-authored novels as I can (currently reading and loving A Day Late and a Dollar Short by Terry McMillan) and at some point read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (because all I really know about him is he was Muslim, he copied the entire dictionary, and my ninth grade history teacher “really wished I was allowed to teach you guys about him.”)

Since I’m looking for God in more places than just physics (and shouldn’t I look everywhere, as He is supposed to be everywhere?) I was thrilled when I got the chance to read Harmony Dust’s autobiography Scars and Stilettos.  I read it in a day and a half, and not just because her story is so gripping.  Everything from the imagery to the descriptions of these real-life characters is beautifully written.  She explains her emotions and decisions with honesty and clarity, in such a way that I’m convinced I would relate to her even if I hadn’t ‘been there’ myself.  Even if I hadn’t been there, I still would have found hope in her story.  Maybe it’s a little hypocritical of me to be in love with a former stripper’s tale of redemption just as I’m preparing to get back into the life… maybe I’m a hypocrite.  Or maybe my universe is just complex.

Well that’s it for now.  Off to go burn some calories with a walk before I have to report for my shift in minimum wage purgatory because as they say, ‘closed mouths don’t get fed,’ and also ‘chubby would-be strippers who get fed too many McChickens are never gonna get what they want in life… like a nicely copy-edited manuscript… or an apartment with heat…’ =)