I think I remember reading The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan when I was a kid. My mother must have bought it, and I picked it up because I would read anything and everything I could get my hands on–even when I was too young to really understand it. So when I saw it on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40, I wasn’t sure I needed to read it again. In the end, I figured it was worth the […]
Mother, mother
The Scapegoat – Mary Lee Settle This is the fourth book in the Beaulah Quinet, Mary Lee Settle’s history of West Virginia through the lens of conflicts ranging from the ousting of a Puritan partisan in the English Civil War (leading to immigration to America) to the settling and drawing of land parcels in the 18th century to a novel I haven’t read yet in the 1840s to this coal mining dispute in 1912 and finally to more or less contemporary times. Following one family, in […]
Amy Tan’s nonfiction
I read The Joy Luck Club in college for a women’s literature course, and while it wasn’t my favorite book, it was certainly interesting. I do think Amy Tan gets pigeonholed quite a bit as a “Chinese” American writer, and while she writes about a heritage from China, it’s not exactly fair to think of the experiences she writes about as exclusive to Chinese-Americans, or even more broadly, Asian-Americans. I won The Opposite of Fate, a nonfiction collection, at my undergrad’s English Department annual Book […]
North East South West
Obviously, this book makes me think of this clip from the Simpsons. I am left wondering why this book gets taught to high school students, at least in a compulsory sense. I think that this book makes a lot of sense for a self-motivated kind of student. Not to say that it’s a particularly complex or difficult book to read, but that it’s themes and issues kind of skip teenage years. For example, everyone in this book seems to be either a child or […]