Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989)

What a great novel!

The story focuses on four immigrant women & their four US-born daughters, & the differences & similarities among them. Though they come from a Chinese culture, I'm sure the story would resonate with anyone who is an immigrant or first generation citizen.

All of the women in the novel are strong in their own ways. At times, however, their strength gets in the way of the daughters being able to truly know who their mothers are, & visa versa.

At the end, I was streaming tears, thinking of my own mother. I have tried many times to get to know my mother, to understand who she was before she married my father (when she was 20 years old), to understand who she is now as an individual. But she resists. She doesn't like to talk about her feelings or her past. I think she must have suffered a lot in her life to keep everything so tightly guarded.

So I continue to think of her merely as half of the pair "Mom & Dad". I call my parents every few weeks to catch up, but our conversations are very superficial: the garden, the dog, their next big trip.

Perhaps I'll try again when I see my parents at my brother's house in December. It will be difficult to find a time for the two of us to be alone. My parents tend to plan every minute of their visits so there is no room for spontaneity. But this will be a longer than normal visit. We'll all be together for 10 days, so if I put my request in early, I might be able to tear her away for a cup of coffee alone. Then I'll have to tackle that wall that she has built in hopes of finding out who is behind it.

This book was passed on to Wendy Quast.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006)

I got about halfway through & then lost interest.

I may try to listen to it on CD. Obama reads it, so it might be better that way.

The part that I did read, though, makes this book seem to be an excuse for Obama's actions as a politician - why he has "sold out". He basically says that politics is all a game & you have to play by their rules if you want to play at all.

This book has been passed on to Linda Redman.

Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)

A collection of short stories.

I didn't like this as well as I liked "A Man Without a Country". These were some of his first published works, from the 1950's & 60's. They definitely carry the personality of the day, as I imagine it. Fear of space travel, fear of innovation & technology, fear that doing good will turn bad. In the wake of Hitler & the atom bomb, it's no wonder that people were skeptical of perfection & "progress".

But time has passed & we have not ruined everything - yet. So these stories for me were only mildly amusing, as a snapshot of the sentiment of the time rather than truly entertaining stories.

This book has been passed on to Wendy Quast.

Ilan Stavans, Spanglish (2003)

The introduction, which lasts for 54 pages, is a discussion of Spanglish: its origins, its relationship to languages like Ebonics & Yiddish, its social stigma, etc. The rest of the 258 pages is a dictionary of Spanglish terms.

Although I enjoyed browsing the dictionary section, I was more interested in the discussion of what Spanglish is, how it is developing, the impact it has on society & vice versa. With only 54 pages to work with, the author didn't go into much depth. So in the end, I felt kind of jipped.

The author's description states that Stavans teaches at Amherst College, but it doesn't say what he teaches. Latino studies? Latino literature? Spanish? Spanglish? What? Wikipedia has him as "the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture".

This book is in the library at The Spanish Place.

Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

A how-to guide on living on the road long-term, focusing more on travel in third-world countries. It has lots of resources for things from getting visas to getting jobs while on the road.

I'm sure this book will come in very handy for me!

This book is in my personal library.

J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China (2008)

An engaging travel memoir. Troost's accounts of his experiences in China, including eating live squid & pushing to get to the front of the line, are entertaining yet intelligent. I wonder if his comments on the excessive pollution in China are accurate. He claims that in the US, a reading of 50 in particulate matter in the air (I have no idea what that really means) is cause for alarm. But in China, they typically experience 140. That sounds bad.

I definitely want to read more of J. Maarten Troost.

This book has been passed on to Mengying Fu.