The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker was one of the books from my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 that I was kind of dreading. I was not very familiar with the story, and I’d never seen the movie, but I’d obviously heard of it. I had a vague idea that it was violent, disturbing, and that horrible things happened to the protagonist. Also, for some reason I had the impression that it took place during slavery, and I just wasn’t […]
“Unbelief is a Terrible Thing, and So is the Hurt we Cause Others Unknowingly”
A couple of years ago I fell in love with the music and voices from the (at that time) currently running broadway revival of The Color Purple, and I realized that while I knew about this book and the subsequent movie adaptation, I had never read nor watched it. But here it fit perfectly into the bingo square for frequently challenged or banned books, so no time like the present. I can’t recall if anyone I knew had read it as a part of our high […]
“the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce”
I tagged this as both “fiction” and “biography/memoir”, because Alice Walker explains that many of the stories are loosely based on her own life. I don’t know enough about her to fully separate fact and fiction (although a little Googling gave me some clues), but either way it’s a wonderful collection of stories. “We’ve never seen weather like the weather there is today. We’ve never seen violence like the violence we see today. We’ve never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. […]
Theology 101
All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances. ~ Tielhard de Chardin Another step along my literary walk of shame. How am I only just now reading this Pulitzer and National Book Award winner that Spielberg made into a movie starring Whoopie and Oprah? While it deals with hard subject matter (rape, incest, racism, misogyny — just like the […]