From My Library: The Woman Warrior

New blog feature: sharing some books from my beloved library with the world. I don't want to write a big synopsis or review of these books--just talk a little bit about them.
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The Woman Warrior
-Maxine Hong Kingston

"Night after night my  mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began..."

A beautiful and complicated story. I've heard people say that they dislike the narrator, but I somehow find myself entranced by her, her story, how she tells her account of growing up in a strange place (amidst what it is to be American, Chinese, and Chinese-American) that can't be easily explained. It is a study of relationships, primarily between the narrator and her mother, but it contains so much more.

This is not an "easy" book, and I understand why some dislike it. For me, though, it pierced me, hitting some part of me that wouldn't stop bleeding once it had been touched. It made sense, although it was disturbing. Perhaps it is best described this way, from a New York Times reviewer: "it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword."

It is tough for me to name favorites, but I would say that this is probably my favorite book. I don't love it for a warm fuzzy feeling or satisfying resolution. I love it for its confusion, beauty, and layers of depth.

"Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true."

Pride and Joy

I have a confession to make: I collect books. I love owning books. I like getting new books almost more than I like to read them.

It's the English major in me that got me started, I suspect. Unlike many majors, English students tend to want to keep their books instead of selling them back at the end of each semester. Or, maybe it had more to do with the way I started to look at books. When you read a book for a college class, you can be sure that you will discuss the hell out of that book. And whether you loved the book or weren't so much a fan, you have still gone on a journey with that text and it will always be a part of you. It makes you come to treasure the books you've spent time with.

But since graduating, I've kept up a love for books and a desire to collect them with the hope of reading them. But, another confession: I am a slow reader. I know I don't read as often as I should, but this is partly because it takes me a fair amount of time to get through a book.

One of my favorite things in life is searching thrift store shelves for special books. There's a lot of what I would consider crap there (cheap romance novels, mass-produced best-seller thrillers, etc) but it can really be worth the time it takes to graze over all of those titles to get to the gems.

I guess there are worse things a person could spend time fretting over...but I tell you, browsing books is one of the best things in life.

Although I don't read as much as I really should, I'd like to share some of the best books I've encountered on this blog. Ones that have been important to me, or deeply influential in some way. This will require some consideration, though, so I can't commit to anything yet.

In the meantime...my library keeps growing and very soon I will need another shelf.