Currently Reading (Take 2) — Page 13

YES! She was a total BIOTCH! I couldn't believe some of the mentality of those women in that book.

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Stockard, it's not suprising but still gets under my skin.

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Well I am only 3 chapters in. But I think I will finish it. I want to finish it because they are having events surrounding the book here in Denver that I want to attend.

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Completly w you Plum. The Help just jangled all my nerves.
Finished The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Chabone. I found it a little picaresque but it got stronger as it progressed. The ending just gave me a bitter smile.
STILL working on the Seven Pillars but have to take frequent breaks due to the style. I'm also working on The Winter Vault by Anne Micheals.( also wrote Fugative Pieces) Her other job is as a poet and it shows in her writing. And I went to school with her. (it's not nepotisim but I don't know what to call it)

The most thing that bugged me the most overtly about the story was the way the black characters were written as speaking/thinking in dialect, while the white characters were not. WTF? Did Southern white women not have any accent or dialect in the 60s? It's an othering device that drove me nuts throughout.

And right now, sadly, I'm reading The Law of Patents, by Craig Allen Nard. Oh, school.

Recently read The Hunger Games trilogy, which I was actually fairly impressed with. Now reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, but I haven't really been compelled to pick it up often.

I didn't like The Corrections as much as everyone else did. But I'm interested in Freedom.

The best book I read all summer was The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Fantastic.

Just finished Alan Moore's breathtakingly brilliant Watchmen, the first graphic novel I've ever read.

In the middle of the fascinating God Is Not Great: How Religion Posions Everything by Christopher Hitchens, and about to start American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

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Plum, I am not having a problem with the dialect. The white people are talking kind of as I would expect and using words and terms I would expect them to. The author lived there so I am assuming she is pretty much on target with it. I actually cheated a bit and read a bit of her her acknowldgements at the end after your post to see if she says anything about the way she wrote it. No explanation but they were interesting. The book has really pulled me in and I am sure I will be reading well into the night.

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The white people are talking kind of as I would expect and using words and terms I would expect them to.

If the black characters' speech is going to be written quasi-phonetically, the white peoples' should be, too. And Southern ladies in the 60s didn't speak with a flat newscaster's accent. If you're writing the Southern white women speaking in "straight" English - the "neutral", "default" choice - and then you write the Southern black women in heavy dialect, you're saying that the black women speak something other than "default" speech. The white women are like you, the reader, and the black women are not. It's privileging the accent and dialect of the white women. Does that make any sense?

Not to mention that even if you accept the dialect itself (it doesn't seem so accurate to me) the very use of it by the author is inconsistent within the story. I can't give examples right now because I don't have the book, but try to see if she follows her own rules about dialect use - she really doesn't.

But that's more technical errors that an editor should have caught. In the end, I just didn't find the book to be nearly as compassionate about the experiences of black women as it thought it was. The plot reeked of privilege for me. But I can't deny that a lot of (admittedly white) people I know enjoyed it.

I skimmed the whole thing, so I have a rough idea of the whole plot. You can't spoil me, if that's what you're worried about. :)

Oh, and right now I'm reading my Employment Law casebook, but I'm pretty sure no one's interested in that.

Finished "The Help". Not he ending I expected but a very good read. The ending reminded me of a movie I saw that was based on a book and I don't know if the book and the movie had the same ending.

Plum, I was poking around reading about the book and on Wikipedia under criticisms it said:

"Critics have questioned Kathryn Stockett's use of the African American vernacular throughout the book, while not doing the same with Southern White characters."

Some critics don't see how a white woman can write about this. They don't mention that at the end of the book there is a section on the author's childhood in Mississippi and how she talks about her maid. But now the vernacular thing is in the back of my head and I am trying to find out her explanation for it. She says the novel is largely fiction but, at least I, couldn't help think that Skeeter was partially modeled after the author.

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Updated On: 9/14/10 at 11:41 AM

I just looked that up and read a review of it [tos]......it looks really good.

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