Latest Reads

All fiction is true.  I read that somewhere.  I wanted to attribute that to Chinua Achebe but when I did a quick internet search I couldn’t find it.  I really held my quick search to about 15 minutes.  I’ve tried “quick” searches before in an effort to find material to support my writing only to emerge a couple of hours later with absolutely nothing. Along the way I would find myself about to purchase shoes online, listening to music and then to facebook and somehow I find myself on a website about people that look like their pets.   

So forget Chinua Achebe and what he might have said.  Instead, I found this quote by Emerson which was on brainyquote.com: Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I thought about this as I finished my latest read The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah.  I had mentioned in a previous post that I discovered that I could get in a lot of reading while riding the metro to and from work.  I was able to get through this book in three weeks.  Sister Souljah really took me on a wild ride with this fictional tale although I believe that all of these characters are recreated from her experiences. These characters live in some form in everyone.  To see it, most would have to get past the obvious - a black, drug dealing family in Brooklyn.   You can go to work every day and encounter people who are schemers and do not hesitate to stomp out other people for their own advancement.  Let’s not forget all of the functional alcoholics and those with drug problems in the workplace.  Our experiences may just be more sanitized and politically correct.

I was very impressed with the book because of the development of the characters.  Souljah provided a lot of different angles to consider regarding these characters.  The characters were multidimensional and had depth which isn’t how black characters are often portrayed.  She handled them sympathetically. 

Prior to this, I had read Amy Tan’s book The Opposite of Faith which is about her writing life.   It was interesting reading a work of fiction following a book about a writer of fiction.  In Tan’s book I read about her writing process.  In Souljah’s book, I often thought about her writing process and the choices that she made in her storytelling.  I think this was also her first work of fiction so I gotta give the sistah a break and hey, it was a national best seller.  But I wonder about choices made in writing in almost everything that I read.  I think that most people are this way.

For my next read, instead of purchasing something new, I think that I will go to my bookshelf and pull out something that has been waiting to be read.  I’m contemplating picking up ‘Tis again by Frank McCourt. ‘Tis is a memoir about his life in the U.S.   I read some of it many years ago.  It did not grab me like Angela’s Ashes which was about McCourt’s life in Ireland.  That’s kinda unfair to expect the same thing again when it is a different book.   I’m sure that he was a different person when he was writing it.    I find McCourt fascinating because he didn’t write Angela’s Ashes until after he had retired from 30 years of teaching.  Anyone worried about their dreams deferred can look to McCourt for inspiration.