The Non-Fiction Book of the Summer

For my summer reading assignment I decided to immerse myself in the "poetic writing" of Mary Karr. The book I selected is called The Liars Club. I wanted to make sure I could stay interested in the reading so the selection process was difficult. I believe we have all grown up thinking most non-fiction books are very factual and rather boring. I wanted to make sure that with the book I picked, this wasn't the case. The fact that The Liars Club was a memoir captured my interest. Reading about someones life experiences has always been interesting to me-- it gives you another point of view.

Even though I started the book with an open mind, it began at a snails pace. I didn't quite understand the points she was trying to make. Nothing exciting happened for such a long period of time that I didn't understand how this book got such raving reviews. It had to win the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for some reason.

Her style of writing surprised me. The vocab that was used was advanced-- so many sticky notes were stuck between the pages, marking words I needed to look up. Also, there was a lot of colorful language used. Sometimes it seemed as though Karr tried to get away with it by mashing phrases together to make it seem like one word. She had me stumped on a few! I had to read them over a couple times before I really understood what they signified.

Once I got on track with the pace this book was going, I began to enjoy reading it. At first I dreaded going back and seemingly skimming over words and glancing up at the page number multiple times to see I hadn't even made it three pages yet. But then, the story line picked up. Things began to happen that peaked my interest and made me want to immerse myself in the storyline.

I noticed something interesting that I would like to just make note of. Throughout the entire book there is a slight fixation on the idea of death, which began after her grandmother passed. Karr stated many times that the idea of death did not scare her. She saw death all around even at a young age, and realized how natural it was. Admittedly, this was not something an eight-year-old should be thinking, yet she was strangely comfortable with the idea. As I kept reading, the focus on this concept faded until the very end. The last paragraph in The Liars Club is her description of what death must be like-- as though it is something to look forward to.

I also found myself beginning to really appreciate Mary Karr's writing style. She truly makes it her own. It's as if she is reading the book aloud. She takes on a first person perspective, but makes it as though she is frozen in a young age. She may have wrote The Liars Club when she was older, but there is no way of telling. The book is written in the perspective of a young, tragedy-stricken girl.

In my opinion, the first section of the book started off on a sour note compared to the rest(and that is a lot to say for this particular memoir). Once part 2 came along, (Colorado 1963) things began to have a more positive light. Nothing became completely happy, just happier. It gave me an uplifting feeling to see that positive things began to happen in her life. She deserved every single one of them. This is one of the effects a great book has. It makes the reader want to dig deeper into the story. For me, I wanted to know if something good actually became of her life. That is the hook in her story.

From being raped to witnessing her grandmother's death, Mary Karr's world was not a great one to live in. The list of terrible events in her life go on and on-- just one of them would send my whole world in a tailspin. But she went about her experiences in a laughable way. For this, I applaud her. I found a part in her book that really captures how strong she was: "The theory behind it held that not mentioning a painful episode in the meanest terms was a way of pretending that the misery of it didn't exist. Ignoring such misery, then, was equal to lying about it. Such a lie was viewed as more cruel, even, than the sad truth, because it somehow shunned or excluded the person in pain from everybody else." This was the reality of her world. Most of us really don't realize how lucky we are. Mary Karr-- I pity you for your experiences, but commend you for your strength.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Okay, first of all this reading took me a couple days to finish. If I put my mind to it, definitely, I could finish it in one day. This passage was just too painful to focus on for more than five pages at a time. Another aspect of it that created issues for me was the way it was written. I understand people talked differently during other eras, but this was ridiculous. I read a passage to my mother out loud -- stumbling over some of the words I might add-- and she just gave me a blank stare.

While reading I had an idea in my head of what point she was trying to get across. I believed I could understand everything she wrote, but then again there were so many words and phrases I was not familiar with, I could have been completely wrong.

I am not the type who enjoys being negative and harping on the works of others. I do admit I enjoyed reading parts of Mary Wollestonecraft's passage, particularly the middle. The reason for this is I noticed a pattern. In the first couple of pages she really focuses on how people look at women in a negative light-- "..docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man..." Towards the middle she began to describe how the world should REALLY view women. They should be seen as powerful and independent. They should not be objectified and viewed as submissive. This section made me perk up just a bit. I began to find myself feeling very powerful and confident as I kept reading.
But towards the end, Wollstonecraft once again brings up the negative and begins to concentrate on how women are mistreated. It brought the whole piece back to a sullen frame of mind. In my opinion that is not a memorable way to end a 20 page paper.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I found this article particularly interesting because it discusses how people cannot focus on a long reading, by fault of the Internet. It was not necessarily interesting to me because of the subject matter, it is the fact that what was being mentioned was happening to me at that moment. I had a hard time staying interested and not skimming through. I was being very cautious to make sure I did not just 'scan' the words on the page. Nicholas Carr was attempting to decode why this was happening to him. I came to one conclusion: that this sensation he was feeling is not familiar to people my age. We have grown up with the Internet at our fingertips. People his age had to adapt to the online phenomenon, and that is why he feels its effects.

I also found it interesting how Carr mentioned that "we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s..." "But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking..." A way of thinking where the creative aspect is done for us. Words are defined automatically and not by our own processing. He says we have become "mere decoders of information," which actually, I agree with. People have become lazy and rely too much on the Internet to think for them. The reason I feel this way is because I have felt these effects myself. I may have grown up with the Internet always in reach, but that doesn't mean I want to use it all of the time. If I can't come up with an answer in my own way and I have to rely on a computer, I feel helpless-- but maybe that's just me.

The connections Carr made in this article were great. The first one I liked in particular was the comparison of the Internet to a method of how our brain decodes information. We decode information in several different ways: deep decoding-- thinking of all the details, shallow decoding-- letting the basic details become apparent to us, and automatic decoding-- the Internet. It is as if the Internet is taking over a part of our brain. The other main part of his article I enjoyed reading involved him using examples in human history when we try to be the most efficient. For example: using the steam engine as a faster mode of transportation. He makes this seem like a inevitable change. It is just how people work. We try to make everything faster and more efficient.

My favorite quote in this reading was "The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people-- or smarter." I immediately thought of how kids act in school. We all look to the smart kids to do the most work. It is assumed they will figure it out and help the rest out. The Internet seems to be the smartest kid in school.