Reading Big

So this weekend I found a reprieve from all of my other homework for a change and had some time to read. I read a lot but I will just put on here the ones that I enjoyed the most. I really enjoyed Jack London's story, "South of the Slot," it was an interesting read about a guy living two very distinct and seperate lives. Not in the sense that he has one family here and another over there but more that he splits his personality to take on a whole other persona, "acting" as he would call it, to fit in. However, I believe he is really the everyday guy with the gregarious personality more than he is the stiff and cold college professor, True to this feeling, that is the guy he ends up being in the end. I liked the way London showed the complexity of what this character was thinking and how he actually became what he thought he was only acting to be. It was an excellent story.



Sarah Winnemucca was also an interesting read and kind of encompassed all of the Native American reading I did this weekend. She was a very educated "Indian" woman and gave a heartbreaking narrative of her encounter with the whites as a child. She gives the reader a true sense of how terrifying it was to be a woman in those times, especially a Native woman. Her experience with the white man, she aptly contrasts to the experience of her grandfather with the white man. She shows how different everything is from the woman's perspective and how helpless they felt at that time.



I was also able to read a little Louisa May Alcott and though I have read "Little Women" a long time ago I wasn't sure what to expect of "My Contraband." I found it to be a moving story of a white woman on the side of the Yankees during the civil war and of the mullato soldier who finds himself in the same hospital with his white brother. There is no love lost there and needless to say she is able to keep him from killing his dying white brother and helps him in his pursuit of finding his lost wife. The conclusion is good, if a bit expected, but I found this story interesting because it was such a contrast to reading "Little Women" and it was very different from what I at first thought it would be. I guess I will have to try to find more of her work.


The last story I will comment on was something else that Dr. Hepworth mentioned in class as a personal reading assingment. I decided to get "Out of Africa" by Karen Blixen or Isak Dineson, which is the name she wrote under. It was kind of funny because I almost didn't get the book because I thought it was the wrong one since I was looking for Blixen not Dineson. I got the book anyway and started to read the pre-face and realized that it was indeed Blixen writing so I was glad I took the time to read into it anyway or I would have felt silly. Anyway, I just started it so I will have to comment on that a little later. Just wanted to keep everyone posted on where I'm at and what I'm up to...in case you had some burning desire to know.

Oh, and I also listened to the wax recordings of Whitman and a few others too. A little creepy in some ways because of the way their voices sounded. Whitman's was a little distorted too because of the scratchy sound on the recording. However, it was pretty cool to think that this was what their voices sounded like reading their poems. I was a little bummed that I couldn't get the Alan Ginsberg recording to work...maybe I will try it again later.