Solar Storms. This book is the reason that I have not been updating, because I do not know what to say about it. For the first ninety pages or so I really loved the novel — it reminded me a bit of early Barbara Kingsolver, or maybe Housekeeping, but I thought it was better than either of those. But then it really fell apart in the second half, to the point where I am a little angry that it is on my exam list because I think it fails some basic quality test I must mentally impose on the books I read. The pacing was sort of terrible — you just can’t introduce new major characters at page 304 if the book if ends at page 340, for instance — and I did not feel like character development was consistent or deftly handled. A lot of what we knew about the characters just came from the narrator telling us that so-and-so was like X, when nothing we’d seen supported the statement.

Plus there were a couple of plot-related factual fuckups, which always irritates me — a character claims that her half-sister is not related to the extended family in the novel because they have different fathers, but the extended family is her maternal family. A small point but it irritated me.

And, at the risk of sounding like a Republican here, the book offended me in a way that novels rarely offend me. One of my study mates said that what Hogan does in her novels is to deconstruct the “white” perspective of nature and Native American myth, but I didn’t see a lot of deconstructing going on here. Instead, Hogan set up a very sharp and clear dichotomy: Native Americans get it, and white people do not. Angela (a Native American teenager who has been adopted into white culture and then found her way back to her blood relations) has virtually magical intuitive powers in regard to the natural world, not because of the environment in which she has placed herself but because of genetics. The two white people in the novel who are not actively evil are still totally dumb about nature, to the point where they don’t understand that damming rivers can have bad consequences for animals and plants and people.

And I’m sorry, but I object to that sort of oversimplification. I object a lot. That’s not just offensive, it’s really bad writing. Every one of the Native Americans here, with the exception of one mixed-blood Vietnam vet and two deeply damaged women who are presented as truly lost souls, is wise and brave and good, and all the white people are just dumb caricatures. I am not writing Hogan off entirely because I have heard such good things about her, but I think I hated this novel. All recommendations are hereby rescinded.

Nice Work. This novel also made me angry, albeit for a different reason. Everyone in my program has to take a class that is basically an intro to critical theory course. Many of us also take additional theory classes, and most graduate seminars have some theory assigned. But for our exam? This is what we got assigned in lieu of anything difficult. What utter bullshit.

I actually enjoyed the novel well enough as a novel. It reminded me of Jane Austen, only with sex and literary theory and a different sort of happy ending. I think Lodge may be a big fat sexist, but I liked the book fine. I am still pissed off that it is on my exam list.

I just looked at next year’s exam list and it is much more respectable. Pah. A pox on this list. (Now watch, I’ll fail.)

Selected Poems: “Digging,” “Act of Union,” “Personal Helicon,” “Bogland,” “The Tollund Man.” I have nothing to say about Heaney except that I hope that the line that goes something like, “As a child, they did not …” was constructed that badly on purpose. Jesus.

True West. I love Sam Shephard but I really never know what he is talking about. I read this in college and its importance completely escaped me. I like it better now but I find that I have nothing to say about it.

John Scalzi is clearly deserving of an honorary membership in the Books and Pie Club. Of which I am no longer actually a participant, but I can still spot a promising deconstruction of children’s literature when I see one.

Solar Storms. I know nothing about this novel. I am going to assume that it will not be difficult, though, because it has not escaped my notice that I have lucked into the easiest MA reading list in the history of such things. Even for my school it’s an easy one — I am a big geek and I have the old lists going about eight years on my computer, I think as far back as they’ve been doing general exams instead of specific ones designed by the student and a selected committee, and this one is a breeze compared to any of its predecessors. Jeremy said it looked like a high school AP English reading list, and I think that’s about right.

I am going to be so embarrassed if I fail.

Their Eyes Were Watching God. I continue to have trouble with this book. I’ve made a point of reading a lot of material about it, so I understand its importance, and at times when I’m reading it I do understand. The book has moments that are just amazing, and when you compare Janie to some of the simpering literary nitwits who seem to be her immediate predecessors — I am thinking Edna Pontellier specifically, but I think Lily Bart might fit here as well — this novel is just an amazing step forward, not so much in African-American fiction as in women’s fiction.

The problem is that I don’t really like it. I don’t like the pacing of the storytelling; I like a few of the metaphors but I feel like I am buried in an avalanche of capes and nets and arms spread to embrace the world. I don’t like the fact that I don’t know if Janie ever went to the doctor at the end. I like Janie and I want to like Hurston but I don’t quite like this novel.