“Plague of Doves”=done

Last night I finished up “Plague of Doves” by Louise Erdrich.  I liked it a lot and always enjoy how her stories are not told in a linear order, but taken from different perspectives from all of the characters.  Of course since I spaced out my reading over a long period of time, sometimes I was confused about who was who, but it was pretty easy to clear it up within the context of each story.

What still puzzles me is what the significance of the plague of doves is.  I get the connection of the family murders with the lynchings and how the entire town is connected to both events.  This may be one of those books that I’ll have to read again to get it.

Yesterday I did start on “The Hours” by Michael Cunningham.  I’m only a few pages into it, but so far so good!

My favorite books & authors

While I’m in the midst of my books and not having much to blog about, I figured I’d write about what kind of literature I like and what in particular draws me to an author.  Having been a bookworm ever since I was very little, I’ve read a very wide variety of books.  For a long time I was a huge fan of “The Baby-Sitter’s Club” by Ann M. Martin and was determined to emulate their very lives.  After that I was obsessed with everything written by V.C. Andrews.  When I tired of her repetitive theme, I immersed myself in the fictional world of Alice Hoffman.  Quickly I was bored with the same old story and vowed to avoid authors who use the same formula obsessively.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered a few authors who surprised me with every book and keep me eagerly anticipating more.  While Haruki Murakami certainly has the same basic concept behind the novels that I’ve read, they’re presented in such ways that I can’t immediately tell what will come next.  Louise Erdrich is such an amazing storyteller.  I am wowed by how easily she can intertwine the lives of so many people without losing us in the midst of it all.   Equally impressed was I with Gregory Maguire and his genius thought of giving us his version of the classic fairy tales.  These are the authors I have come back to time and time again when I need a good book fix.  Otherwise you can find me with my nose in some kind of feminist literature or trying to muddle my way through an acclaimed classic or trying on a new author.

In Haruki Murakami’s works, he takes us on a psychological journey.  His characters take on dream-like qualities and sometimes have difficulty in discerning reality from their dreams.  By the book’s end the two usually blend together and leave us with a sense of resolve and yet still leaving a sense of wonder.  I like books that don’t fully resolve because then it can feel too clean cut.  In my mini library I own Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance, Dance, Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, After the Quake, and The Elephant Vanishes.  I have extensive notes on some of the interviews he’s done with various magazines but am feeling too lazy to dig them out at the moment.  My personal favorite out of the ones I’ve read are The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and the two books of short stories, After the Quake and The Elephant Vanishes.  I like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle because even though the main character is slipping in and out of reality quite fervently, he has a purpose throughout the entire story.  The entire time you are reading you want him to find out what is going on and to be reunited with his wife because everything else just seems so bizarre.  In Kafka on the Shore I was fascinated by how deeply lost the main character was in his fantasy.  Plus this was the first book I had ever read by Haruki Murakami and was hooked the entire way through the book.

We all know why I love Louise Erdrich’s writing, so I don’t think I need to say much more about that.

It wasn’t until after I saw an ad in the Minneapolis paper for the play “Wicked” that I picked the book up at a local Barnes & Noble.  I was utterly and completely engrossed in the book.  It was amazing and I immediately bought everything else I could get my hands on that he had written.  Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Mirror, Mirror  and Son of a Witch were the ones which I greedily read up.  I was impressed with everything I had read except for Son of a Witch.  It simply seemed to lack any of the power that Wicked did and it made me sad.  Although the question if he was Elphaba’s son or not never is answered, it can be powerfully assumed he was when his own child is born the same green as Elphaba.  In each of the books it was fun to read his take on what went on behind the fairy tale front.

Other than these three main authors, I don’t follow any one author or series of books religiously.  I’ve been dipping into the Buffy comics season 8 to satisfy my Buffy obsession and even that isn’t a constant because our little bookstore in town doesn’t get much for comics and the comic book store back home sells out fast too.  So I’m patiently waiting for the trade backs to come out.  I’ve come to appreciate autobiographies quite a bit but have found some, like fiction, to be quite boring and silly.  Some of my recommendations include Geisha, a Life (her story actually inspired the fictional work Memoirs of a Geisha), My Horizontal Life (a funny recounting of one’s sexual life), Bone Black (a memoir of bell hooks’ childhood) and of course Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which is every bit as insane as the movie).

A few other books I’ve fallen in love with on their own are: Sex Wars by Marge Piercy, A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom, Mozart’s Sister by Nancy Moser, and Diary by Chuck Palahniuk.  Some of the books I was not as big a fan of are: Lolita (I cannot for the life of me get into this book; I’ve tried 4 different times), White Oleander by Janet Fitch (loved the book thought the book was crap; of course, never did get very far in the book), and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (don’t understand what the big deal about this book is; good read just not sure what the WOW factor is).  There are a ton more books that I think are amazing, but perhaps I’ll wait for another time to go into details.  For now I’ll get back into my reading!

Louise Erdrich

When I was a senior in college, I wrote my senior capstone paper on Louise Erdrich. Exclusively about her tetraology Tracks, Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, and The Beet Queen. And, to narrow it down further, I concentrated my presentation and paper on the characters of Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyatt; old tradition .vs. new.

In my sophomore year of college, I took a women’s lit class and we read a short excerpt from Love Medicine and from there on out, I was in love with Louise Erdrich’s writing. And it’s simply amazing because usually I’ll tire myself out easily on a writer and rarely find myself picking up their books over and over again. That simply has not happened. I’ve easily read each book twice (except for The Beet Queen, I only recently finished that one) and go back over and over again.

My project for the summer is to re-read the entire tetraology and compare it to my notes and piece together each individual’s life. In addition to reading the four books, I would also re-read The Last Reports on the Miracles at Little No Horse because there is a ton of character development and background for Nanapush, Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyatt.

I started off my English paper by stating “The struggle between good and evil is as old as time itself. But the bodies, forms, shapes, and cultures it manifests itself in differ.” This is true in each story that she tells. Everyone takes on a ‘good role’ and an ‘evil role’ at some point in their lives and each for different reasons. Some are truly evil (Pauline Puyatt, the Morrissey clan) while others are simply victims of circumstance. Lulu views her mother as the ultimate evil because she sent her to the government school while she exacted revenge upon the man who bought up her land. Fr. Damien himself could be seen as evil for it is later revealed that Fr. Damien is indeed a woman who has taken on this charade because she feels that she is more than ever doing God’s work than as a previous nun or lover.

Also in my introduction, I come to the conclusion that Fleur Pillager is the epitome of what it means to be a traditional Native American Indian while Pauline Puyatt is the colonized Indian, converted into a fanatic believer of Catholicism. Fleur, Nanapush and Moses are some of the last survivors who still believe in the old ways and take part in the traditions of their ancestors. The Morrissey’s have sold out, Pauline is in her own right confused about her mixed heritage, and even Mary Adare is more of a colonized Indian.

In summary for the moment, it’ll be interesting to me to trace everyone’s histories throughout the books that I have read and to see if my theories hold true.