Book Snails Book Group discussion

“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

What are you reading the month of September 2019?

Oh gosh, I don't even know at this point. I feel like I'm being drowned by my books! Well... there are worse ways to go.😂🤣😉

I finished Recursion yesterday

Currently reading: Where the Crawdads Sing and Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies about Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be

Up next: Their Eyes Were Watching God (Need to finish by 9/13 for my book club)

Not sure yet about the second half of the month...

Indeed there are Vickie! 😄😄😄
Still, I hope you’ll survive the piles of books and even enjoy them 😉

Thanks, I will try my best Pien!😏

The Man With No Borders - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4.... Am only a quarter of the way through but already I love and hate it: love how it's beautifully written but hate the casual animal cruelty (of fishing).

Erin wrote: "I finished Recursion yesterday

Currently reading: Where the Crawdads Sing and Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies about Who You Are So You Can Beco..." </i>

Erin, I'm curious what you thought about [book:Where the Crawdads Sing and Their Eyes Were Watching God. I loved both of those books. Did you enjoy them?

Keli wrote: "Erin wrote: "I finished Recursion yesterday

Currently reading: Where the Crawdads Sing"

Uhh... 🙄 Where the Crawdads Sing was ok. I didn’t think it lived up to all the hype it got and I really hated what they did in the last chapter.
And sadly, I hated Their Eyes Were Watching God so hard that I DNF’ed it. I didn’t like it when I was reading it so I tried listening to the audio while cross stitching and that just put me over the edge. I couldn’t take it.

Erin wrote: "Keli wrote: "Erin wrote: "I finished Recursion yesterday

Currently reading: Where the Crawdads Sing"

Uhh... 🙄 Where the Crawdads Sing was ok. I di..."

Oh, that's a shame.

I think the landscape as as character was so beautifully captured in Crawdads. The ending was a bit "we didn't really need to know," but I got a real sense of the coasts and marshes of that part of the country. The world around Kya was so richly told that I felt like I'd been there. Owens used the landscape to not just be a setting but to be Kya's friend or family, the only constant in her life, and also as the representation of her isolation and loneliness (which I also think she wrote exceptionally well). That's what I thought was spectacular about the book. The landscape and the sense of isolation.

Hurston's book is a love-story, which in and of itself isn't amazing but when in context, like Jane Austen (to me), is outstanding. It was written by a black woman in 1936 or thereabouts about a black woman in the south before that time. And though that doesn't sound like much, it's quite extraordinary. Hurston had a few obstacles (patriarchy & racism) to surmount to bring her, rather poignant, story to the world. She was writing about a subject that most of America sneered at, feminism and black love/romance. Hurston was a player in the Harlem Renaissance scene and no doubt that's how she got published. But she was competing against men, men who by and large were writing stories that reflected the struggle of African-Americans. She faced derision from her male compatriots for not writing something loftier, that either expressed the plight or aided in elevating the struggle. That's from her own community, fellow black writers. Like the character in her story, Hurston chose to go her own way.
There are better love-stories out there but there were not any or many back in 1937 that were about black people. Imagine being a black woman in the 1930s. Your choices of novel to read were stories written by men about men or by white women about white women whose lives were quite different to the average woman of color. Sure love is universal but there is something to be said about being able to identify and imagine with the MC. Janie Crawford is a black woman wishing to assert herself, stand on her own, within a male dominated world. It's set in 1928, eight years since white women were granted the right to vote. I bet many black women in 1937 wanted that and with this story they could take that journey.
I will finish by saying that when this was written blackface was only just waning, though racist buffoonery was still being kept alive in vaudeville. Within blackface or the minstrel show love was never a part of it. Black people falling in love was not something that white audiences wanted to see, much less read about. I was reading about black actors who acted in blackface trying to move outside that genre and have real plays. In 1906 the black production of In Abyssinia, which attempted to be less caricature and more realistic, including a hint towards romance, was reviewed by one critic who said audiences "do not care to see their own ways copied when they can have the real thing better done by white people." This book was published only thirty years after that play and not much had changed. Black love stories just didn't exist. So like Austen, it can be a slog if it doesn't appeal, but also like Austen, Hurston was a pioneer, so there will be a naivety to the writing that I think would have gotten better, more finesse, if she had carried on instead of fading into obscurity.