I’m giving my daughter a brand new copy of The Holy Bible for Christmas. It’s not her only gift. She’s going to get a pretty good haul this Christmas, but I like The Holy Bible as a Christmas gift. It seems to fit. It’s better as a Christmas gift than one for her birthday or Valentine’s Day or Halloween or the Fourth of July.
I’ve been reading an older copy of The Holy Bible that originally belonged to my wife’s grandmother. I’m not giving my daughter that copy yet (it’s probably not mine to give anyway). I don’t think my daughter’s ready for that copy yet.
I’m pretty sure my daughter won’t actually read her own copy of The Holy Bible for a while. She’s 18, and we’re not exactly church-going folk. She might never read it. She might glance at it and then put it aside when I’m not looking and then misplace it.
That’s why I didn’t buy her an expensive copy of The Holy Bible. This copy of The Holy Bible was relatively cheap for a book. It wasn’t much more expensive than an elaborate greeting card that plays corny music. I don’t think it’s a good idea if The Holy Bible plays corny music when you open it. That might take away the seriousness of some of the messages.
Reading the entire Holy Bible can be a slog. I don’t blame God for that. A bunch of humans have rewritten and retranslated it over a couple thousand years. I don’t even blame people for thinking that The Holy Bible is a slog, but it’s not as bad as some literary fiction. I figured that if I could get through three pages of Finnegans Wake, then I can read The Holy Bible. At least, I think I got through three pages of Finnegans Wake. It might have just been a long two.
I don’t think you have to read the entire Holy Bible for it to be useful. I think some Books are better than others. I’m not going to rank the books in a TOP TEN BOOKS in THE HOLY BIBLE as potential clickbait, though I’m sure somebody has done that. I don’t want to get spammed by somebody upset that I didn’t rank Malachi in my top five.
Malachi is awesome, alright?? It just didn’t quite make the cut!
If I had to choose a favorite book in The Holy Bible, I’d pick Matthew. Matthew has a bunch of good stuff about Jesus and his teachings, and you can’t go wrong reading about Jesus, unless you really don’t believe in God so much that you get angry at people for believing. If that’s the case, maybe Genesis or Revelations would be better.
I don’t even care if people believe in Jesus. I don’t care if people believe Jesus was the Son of God, or if Jesus was a prophet, or if Jesus never even existed. His teachings are pretty cool. If everybody followed his basic guidelines, people would get along a lot better and a lot of social problems wouldn’t exist.
I’m not saying that a brand new copy of The Holy Bible is a perfect gift for everybody. A hotel owner probably doesn’t need one (or maybe the hotel owner could use a bunch of them). But I think it’s a good gift for my daughter in our current situation. It might be a good stocking stuffer. And it’s a lot better than giving my daughter a copy of Finnegans Wake.
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Oh yeah, just so you know, my daughter doesn’t read this blog.
It’s tough to reminisce about famous authors after they die. With famous singers/musicians, you can listen to your favorite songs in a few minutes. You can watch a famous actor’s/actress’s best movies within a few hours. You can curse a famous politician’s worst policies in a few seconds.
But a famous author? It takes days to read a good book by a famous author; at least it does for me.
When I heard that famous author John LeCarre died, I thought, “He’s a pretty good author, but I’m not going to read any of his books just because he died.” Maybe that sounds crass on my part.
To be fair, last March (I think), I read John LeCarre’s most famous novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold because I was almost desperate. The lockdown had shutdown all the bookstores and libraries in my area, and I was stuck with my own personal library. An older relative had given me several LeCarre novels back when I was in high school in the 1980s, but I had never read them all the way.
Back then, the current bestselling spy novels were much faster paced and more exciting, so I had a tough time sticking with LeCarre. I kept the books, though, because gifts always remind me of the person who gave them to me. The older relative who gave me the books is a pretty good guy.
I liked The Spy Who Came in from the Cold when I read it a few months ago. I actually finished it. It was good. Since I haven’t read any outlandish spy novel in decades, I appreciated this slower paced espionage novel more than I had in high school.
I wonder, though, how much a high school kid today would understand the book. Even though I hadn’t read much of the book in high school, I’d understood what I’d read. I understood most of the Cold War references because the Cold War was still going on (though it was in a different phase).
The Cold War culture in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is different from the pandemic post-terrorism culture we have right now, but despite that, LeCarre’s books are probably more relevant than the spy novels that I was reading in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of that stuff relied on specific current events within a certain time period and feel dated today.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold didn’t feel dated, even though it was published in the early 1960s. Some of the twists might seem predictable today, but I don’t hold that against the book. It’s not a book’s fault if other books copy/follow a similar formula.
I’m glad I kept that old copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I might even read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. If I read it, though, it will be because I want to read it and not because John LeCarre just died.
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What do you think? Do you read books after an author dies? What is your favorite John LeCarre novel?
Out of the three most famous authors in the literary Brat Pack of the 1980s, Less Than Zero author Bret Easton Ellis seemed to me to be the strongest writer. He didn’t use an obvious gimmick like Tama Janowicz (starting off a book with a paragraph about dicks) or Jay McIerney (writing in the 2nd person present tense). He also focused on youthful Los Angelos debauchery instead of youthful New York debauchery.
I was a college student when Less Than Zero came out, and I had no interest in reading it because I was already a college student and wasn’t interested in the literary debauchery of other college students, especially students from elite colleges. I went to a state school and for the most part had to pay my way. I didn’t want to read about privileged students.
Now that I’m in my 50s, I’m really not interested in college debauchery, unless it’s funny.
Anyway, at the time, I wondered how young authors like those in the Literary Brat Pack managed to get published. Who in the literary world would have wanted to read their novels?
Ellis had an advantage over other writers my age because his writing instructor was famous writer Joe McGinnis who probably helped Ellis get a book deal. My writing instructor in college was a guy who once brought in a somewhat known literary author of the 1980s to speak, but I don’t think the author really knew my writing instructor.
Don’t get me wrong. If Joe McGinnis had been my writing instructor, I still never would have gotten a book deal, so I’m not complaining; I’m just pointing it out.
In this early scene from Less Than Zero, the narrator Clay has returned to Los Angelos on Christmas break from his first semester in college and is going to a high school friend’s Christmas party:
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There are two Christmas trees, one in the living room and one in the den and both have twinkling dark-red lights coloring them. There are people at the party from high school, most of whom I haven’t seen since graduation and they all stand next to the two huge trees. Trent, a male model I know, is there.
“Hey, Clay,” Trent says, a red-and-green-plaid scarf wrapped around his neck.
“Trent,” I say.
“How are you, babes?”
“Great. Trent, this is Daniel. Daniel, this is Trent.”
Trent offers his hand and Daniel smiles and adjusts his sunglasses and lightly shakes it.
“Hey, Daniel,” Trent says. “Where do you go to school?”
“With Clay,” Daniel says. “Where do you go?”
“UCLA or as the Orientals call it, UCRA.” Trent imitates an old Japanese man, eyes slit, front teeth stuck out in parody, and then laughs drunkenly.
“I go to the University of Spoiled Children,” Blair says, still grinning, running her fingers through her long blond hair.
“Where?” asks Daniel.
“USC,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s right.”
Blair and Trent laugh and she grabs his arm to balance herself for a moment. “Or Jew SC,” she says, almost gasping.
“Or Jew CLA,” Trent says, still laughing.
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From the parts I’ve read, I don’t see anything special about Less Than Zero.
I think it’s interesting that out of all the characters, only the narrator doesn’t participate in the bigoted comments. Maybe Clay is a decent guy. Maybe the narrator needs to be portrayed as sympathetic to the reader before engaging later in the debauchery that’s sure to take place. Maybe the author was afraid to let Clay participate in the conversation because he didn’t want readers thinking the author himself was the narrator and a bigot. What a wuss!
As a side note, I don’t know what they were teaching in elite writing classes back in the 1980s, but I noticed three missing commas and at least one misplaced modifier in that excerpt. I would point them out, but then I might be accused of being a Grammar Nazi. I don’t think literary authors from elite universities like being corrected by unpublished bloggers from state schools.
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But enough about me! What do you think? Was there anything special about Less Than Zero that made it worthy of literary attention?
When you like a song, you want to sing it, no matter what genre it is. This has caused a problem with rap because a lot of rap artists put the N-word that almost rhymes with trigger in their lyrics.
These artists say that the N-word that almost rhymes with trigger puts authenticity into their lyrics. Unfortunately, that means certain people can’t sing/rap the lyrics.
After all, other certain people don’t like certain people saying the N-word that almost rhymes with trigger. Certain people who care what other certain people think will edit themselves while singing rap lyrics or not sing them at all (unless there are no other certain people around).
If the N-word that almost rhymes with trigger stops certain people from singing rap, I’m all for it. Most certain people sound stupid rapping. But I’m a problem solver, not a complainer. If my young adult daughter likes rap, and it seems to be marketed to every sub-demographic within her age group, then she should be able to say the lyrics without getting lectured/fired/cancelled.
A few weeks ago, I took a couple paragraphs from Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and replaced the N-words that actually rhyme with trigger with the term Nice Guys (read more at Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Replacing the N-Words with Another N-Word).
Nice Guys has a positive connotation. It starts with the letter N. It has two syllables. The second syllable begins with the G sound. It seemed like Nice Guys would be a great replacement for the N-word that actually rhymes with trigger.
When I thought about trying this experiment with a song, the first example I thought of was “Nice Guys in Paris” by JayZ and Kanye West. This seemed like a great choice because almost everybody knows who JayZ and Kanye West are. Plus, the song has Nice Guys in the title. A song that has Nice Guys in the title would surely have a ton of Nice Guy usages in the lyrics, right?
No. “Nice Guys in Paris” rarely uses the term Nice Guys. At least, it doesn’t use Nice Guys enough to conduct the experiment.
So I delved into the past and thought of “Damn, It Feels Good to be a Gangsta” by the Geto Boys. Every guy in a certain group of people likes “Damn, It Feels Good To be a Gangsta” because of the movie Office Space. Yeah, there’s a lot of profanity in the song, but it still evokes strong positive vibes in guys of a certain group of people.
So here’s how “Damn, It Feels Good To be a Gangsta” looks/sounds with Nice Guys instead of the N-word that almost rhymes with trigger.
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Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
A real gangsta-ass Nice Guy plays his cards right
A real gangsta-ass Nice Guy never runs his f***ing mouth
‘Cause real gangsta-ass Nice Guys don’t start fights
And Nice Guys always gotta high cap
Showing all his boys how he shot ’em
But real gangsta-ass Nice Guys don’t flex nuts
‘Cause real gangsta-ass Nice Guys know they got ’em
And everything’s cool in the mind of a gangsta
‘Cause gangsta-ass Nice Guys think deep
Up three-sixty-five ayo 24/7
‘Cause real gangsta-ass Nice Guys don’t sleep
If you don’t know the song, here’s an edited version from Office Space.
And if you prefer the original version…
*****
What do you think? Is the term Nice Guys a good replacement for the N-Word that almost rhymes with trigger. Should certain people feel comfortable singing “Damn, It Feels Good To Be a Gangsta” using the term Nice Guys?
Famous author Roald Dahl is known for books like The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But even though Dahl died decades ago, his family has recently apologized for some comments Dahl made in several interviews over the years.
Unfortunately, the apology was not accepted gracefully.
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The family of children’s book author Roald Dahl has issued a belated apology for his history of anti-Semitism.
“The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements,” read the comment on the official Dahl website.
The apology comes three decades after the British author’s death in 1990. Over his nearly 50-year career, Dahl wrote such classic children’s books as Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG.
He also made some anti-Semitic comments.
In one example, in 1983 Dahl reportedly told Britain’s New Statesman magazine that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. … Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Read more at Roald Dahl’s Family Apologizes For His Anti-Semitic Comments.
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What? THAT’s the quote that Dahl’s family is apologizing for? I was a kid growing up in 1973, and I heard stuff that was way worse than that back then. Back in 1973, there were people whose biggest complaint about Hitler was that he started a two-front war. At least Dahl called Hitler a stinker.
I don’t believe in apologizing for somebody else’s behavior or words, even if I’m associated with that person. I might acknowledge the bad behavior and say that I don’t agree with it or condone it, but I won’t apologize for it.
I’m not a fan of people who apologize for the behavior of others, but even worse are people who can’t accept apologies.
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The group (Campaign Against Antisemitism) added that the apology was “encouraging,” but that it’s “a shame that the estate has seen fit mere to apologise for Dahl’s antisemitism rather than to use its substantial means to do anything about it.”
“This apology should have happened long ago — and it is of concern that it has happened so quietly now,” said Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Dahl’s “abhorrent antisemitic prejudices were no secret and have tarnished his legacy.”
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When it comes to apologies, my philosophy is that you either accept the apology or don’t. When somebody offers me a sincere apology, I accept it. I don’t complain about how long it took and then tell the offender to give me money.
If the apology isn’t sincere, I might ask a bunch of questions like “What exactly are you apologizing for?” I don’t accuse the apologizer of being insincere. I just ask specific questions and see how defensive the apologizer gets.
But enough about me! What do you think? Do you apologize for the behavior of other people? Do Dahl’s comments “tarnish his legacy,” or is that just how some people felt back then? What famous authors have said or done stuff that tarnish their legacies?
I know! I know I should have known better! Clicking on an internet list is like making eye contact with a kiosk salesperson at the mall; you just don’t do it.
But I did, so it’s too late. A weekly entertainment site posted a list of 20 of the Best Book Adaptations of All Time. I should have known not to read it. The title said “… OF ALL TIME.” Nothing good comes from a title like that.
According to that recent clickbait list, here are the best book-to-movie adaptations OF ALL TIME!!!!
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- Emma by Jane Austen
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Lincoln the movie)
- Room by Emma Donaghue
- The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- I, Tina by Tina Turner (What’s Love Got To Do with It? the movie)
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Little Women by Louise May Alcott (‘m not sure which movie version was the best)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (and Truman Capote)
- Le Transperencig… whatever (Snowpiercer the movie)
- The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John LeCarre
- Poldark by Winston Graham
- It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
- Outlander by Dians Gabaldon
- The Mazerunner by James Dashner
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
Read the list and the reasoning behind each choice (if you care) at 20 of the best book adaptations of all time.
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At first, I thought this list was devised to get people arguing. The list creator makes some obviously bad choices, such as over-representing recent books and movies, which causes readers (suckers like me) to react. Making a good list would be counter-productive because nobody would respond to a good list.
A better list (in my opinion) would include classics such as The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, or The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. But a good list probably doesn’t start much conversation.
Then again, maybe the list was to promote book sales for authors that the weekly entertainment site writer likes (or is tied to). The weekly entertainment site can’t make much/any money from increased sales of The Wizard of Oz. But it can maybe give The Princess Diaries a slight boost, and then the entertainment site can promote that author’s new novel, get a couple high profile interviews, and maybe even receive a little incentive (kickback) from the book publishers.
I’m not making any accusations. I’m just wondering. Maybe it’s a possibility. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe the creators of this list simply have limited historical perspective. Maybe….
AAAaaaarrrrgh! This is what I get for clicking on an internet list!
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is kind of an impressive book. It was a New York Times bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017. It even has an impressive array of positive reviews on the back cover.
I’m reluctant to buy books because I rarely finish reading them anymore, but when I found a cheap copy at a used bookstore, I bought it. After all, it won a Pulitzer. Even if I didn’t like the book (I don’t always enjoy Pulitzers), I could find somebody else who’d appreciate it.
I actually finished reading The Underground Railroad, so that’s something. On the other hand, it took me more than six weeks to read it. I’m not that slow of a reader. I just didn’t feel like reading The Underground Railroad sometimes. And my reaction to the book was much different from those whose positive reviews ended up on the back cover of the book. For example:
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Oprah Winfrey wrote: “Kept me up at night, had my heart in my throat, almost afraid to turn the next page.”
I wouldn’t go that far. The Underground Railroad didn’t keep me up at night. I thought the author Whitehead didn’t write tension very well. Scenes that should have been riveting weren’t. Even though the book moved at a pretty good pace, I rarely felt suspense while I was reading. Maybe there was some suspense at the end of the chapter in North Carolina and toward the end when the reader finds out what happened to Mabel. Even worse, the Tulsa-like slaughter felt like it was written by a tired author going through the motions.
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People (magazine) wrote: “A great adventure tale teeming with memorable characters…“
I disagree. It was a decent adventure with a couple memorable characters, but most of them had very little personality. They were very courageous, or very smart, or very evil. Even the protagonist Cora didn’t have much personality, except maybe she was stubborn and very determined, but those aren’t memorable character traits for a major character in a major novel. Homer was probably the most memorable character; at least he was the only character who wasn’t predictable.
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Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote: “He (Colson Whitehead) has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.”
That’s a bit overstated, especially if the reader believes that the Underground Railroad was literally an underground railroad. A reader should have a lot of background knowledge before reading The Underground Railroad; if not, the reader could get really confused about what happened when in United States history, especially during the South Carolina section of the novel.
The literal underground railroad itself wasn’t used as much as I thought/hoped it would be. The concept of a literal underground railroad was cool. The idea of it carried me through what I thought was a lackluster opening. Once it was introduced, the underground railroad was underused, especially at the abrupt end.
The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so maybe there’s something that I’m missing in this book. I’m not saying it should NOT have won a Pulitzer Prize because I haven’t read the other nominees, and I’m not the type of blogger who’ll read other nominees just to see if the winner deserved it. However, I think it was at the very least overrated.
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What do you think? If you’ve read The Underground Railroad, what am I missing? Was Cora meant to be uninteresting? Was she interesting and I was just expecting too much? What other highly regarded books do you think are overrated?
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Here’s my own book! It can’t be overrated because it’s barely even been rated.
It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!
Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon !
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary claims that the word pandemic is the 2020 Word of the Year. It probably doesn’t matter much. The word pandemic doesn’t receive anything for being Word of the Year, except for a little bit of extra attention, which is unnecessary because pandemic has already received a lot of attention this year.
When it comes to Word of the Year, nobody actually receives an award or anything. And unlike a lot of awards, the standards for Word of the Year seem to be objective. Dictionaries (or the people who run them) judge Word of the Year, not by how much they like a word, but by how often a word is researched online.
At least it isn’t a bunch of dictionary word geeks sitting around and debating which words qualify and which don’t.
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Sometimes a single word defines an era, and it’s fitting that in this exceptional—and exceptionally difficult—year, a single word came immediately to the fore as we examined the data that determines what our Word of the Year will be.
Based upon a statistical analysis of words that are looked up in extremely high numbers in our online dictionary while also showing a significant year-over-year increase in traffic, Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2020 is pandemic.
The first big spike in dictionary lookups for pandemic took place on February 3rd, the same day that the first COVID-19 patient in the U.S. was released from a Seattle hospital. That day, pandemic was looked up 1,621% more than it had been a year previous, but close inspection of the dictionary data shows that searches for the word had begun to tick up consistently starting on January 20th, the date of the first positive case in the U.S.
Read more at Word of the Year 2020 | Pandemic.
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I prefer to choose my words of the year by how often I hear words used in casual conversation (so I guess I’m a word geek after all). From my own anecdotal, nonscientific evidence, I think the Word of the Year for 2020 is…
SUCKS.
I probably heard the word sucks and said the word sucks more frequently than any other word in 2020.
Here are some common examples:
“2020 sucks.”
“COVID-19 sucks.”
You get the idea. I know the word sucks has been used more frequently than any word on Merriam-Webster’s list. The problem with sucks is that it’s always been used a lot, even before 2020, but it seems that sucks usage has been way up this year.
To be fair, I liked a lot of 2020, but some people aren’t ready to hear about positive stuff right now. So in keeping with what I think should be the 2020 Word of the Year…
The word pandemic sucks!
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What do you think? What do you think the criteria should be in judging the Word of the Year? What do you think the 2020 Word of the Year should be?
A famous political figure author made news last week by donating 105,000 digital copies of his book to high school students and teachers in his home city.
This might be a cool idea, giving digital copies of his book away. It saves paper. It means students wouldn’t have to spend money on his book.
Then again, maybe high school students don’t give a flip about his book. Maybe the school district could have used copies of other books that are in high demand or in the curriculum.
May be the author thinks too highly of himself if he thinks high school students really want to read his book. They might like an autographed copy, but digital?
Since the author involved is a major political figure, most people will form their opinions based on their personal politics rather than the author’s actions.
I’m wondering, when a famous (or even struggling) author gives away copies of his/her books, is it a form of genuine giving or is it an act of narcissism? I actually don’t know, so in the excerpt below, I’ve removed the names. If you had no political bias, what would you think?
And if you have no political bias, what do you think?
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High school students and teachers at City Public Schools received an email Monday morning that didn’t tell them exactly who would be at their virtual assembly that afternoon but gave some strong hints: The speaker had “strong ties to city,” “millions of Twitter followers” and “made history multiple times throughout their career.”
Hours later, those who tuned in to the live-streamed assembly were greeted by famous author, who surprised districts’ 105,000 high schoolers and thousands of teachers with free digital copies of his new book, “Title.”
Read the unedited version and more at Obama, in surprise appearance, gives 105,000 CPS students free digital copies of ‘A Promised Land’ .
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What do you think? Is giving away digital copies of your book really an act of giving? Or is it narcissism? Would you give away 105,000 copies of your book (if you could afford it)? How many free copies of your books could you afford to give away?
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu has just won the 2020 Nation Book Award for Fiction. I appreciate literary awards because without them I would miss out on a bunch of award-winning books that I’ve never heard of.
Even though I read (or skim through) a lot of books, the beginning of Interior Chinatown threw me off because it’s written in 2nd person.
*****
Int Golden Palace
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being kung Fu Guy./ You are not kung Fu Guy/You are currently Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face, but you’ve been practicing./Maybe tomorrow will be the day.
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The risk of opening in 2nd person is that the reader can deny the opening statement and stop reading:
Author: Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
Reader: No, I haven’t. (Gets annoyed, slams book shut, returns book to shelf)
Sigh! As a reader, I probably should go further to see what this narrator guy is talking about. A few pages later, the author/narrator explains how difficult it is for him to get a decent role in movies/television.
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Roles
First you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom it goes:
- Background Oriental Male
- Dead Asian Man
- Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy
- Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter
- Generic Asian Man Number One
and then if you make it that far (hardly anyone does) you get stuck at Generic Asian Man Number One for a while and hope and pray for the light to find you and when it does you’ll have something to say and when you say that something it will come out just right and have everyone in Black and White turning their heads saying wow who is that, that is not just some Generic Asian Man, that is a star, maybe not a real, regular star, let’s not get crazy, we’re talking about Chinatown here, but perhaps a Very Special Guest Star, which for your people is the ceiling, is the terminal, ultimate, exalted position for any Asian working in this world, the thing every Oriental Male dreams of when he’s in the Background, trying to blend in.
Kung-Fu guy.
Kung Fu guy is not like the other slots in the hierarchy-…
*****
And then the narrator talks some more about Kung Fu guy. The author/narrator’s obsession with kung fu threw me off a little bit because I thought nobody cares about kung fu anymore. Maybe 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago, but not now. When was the last time a kung-fu movie hit it big in the United States? Is it even a stereotype anymore?
If the author is making a point about Hollywood’s stereotyping, then part of me is… so what? All demographic groups complain about how they’re portrayed in Hollywood.
They’re not wrong. It’s just that everybody already knows that media relies on stereotypes, and I don’t need a novel (a form of media) pointing it out in the first few pages. From my point-of-view (a guy who doesn’t give a flip about actor problems), knowing the character first might have gotten me more interested in the book. But who am I to judge? The book just won an award.
Good job, Kung Fu Guy wannabe. Winning a National Book Award beats being Kung Fu Guy any day.
What do you think? Would you rather be Kung Fu Guy or win a major book award? How much of a book written in 2nd person can you read before you start denying the stuff the narrator is saying about you?
Dysfunctional Literacy 