18.) The Lisbons

Book Title: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 1-60 since last week; 1070 since semester

Mary Lisbon commits suicide by taking sleeping pills, and the paramedics arrive at the Lisbon household for the fifth time because in the past year, all four of her sisters have committed suicide. The narrators are a group of boys who live in the neighborhood and who have watched the sisters from afar during their lives.

The neighborhood has slowly shut out the Lisbon house, and it seems like they're giving consent for the sisters to kill themselves. They've stopped intervening with the Lisbons, and it seems like since they did, they are at fault for the sisters' suicides. This makes me think of how people are brought up today. I really do believe people are only capable of what their actions are because of the way they've been brought up. It really depends on the environment they live in that helps them understand what is morally right and wrong, and what a person should live up to. It's like how in some households children are expected to live out perfect Ivy-League lives and go on to be successful and rich, and in others it's perfectly all right just to finish high school and make a modest living to get by. The difference between all different environments and families everywhere is so vast, I can't imagine what is actually considered the perfect union between all of them, except the goal of being happy.

17.) Sophomore Year

Book Title: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Pages: 180-224 since last week; 1010 since semester

Sam and Patrick are graduating from high school and Charlie is left by himself to enter his sophomore year of high school alone. As a goodbye note, Sam gives Charlie his first kiss telling him she wanted it to come from someone who loved him.

I thought it was really sweet when Sam kissed Charlie, even if it didn't mean she wanted to be with him. This novel is all about being around friends and family that love you, and being able to find yourself in the midst of that. Charlie entered high school as a quiet person, reluctant to involve himself in anything. And now Charlie is entering his second year of highschool completley uninhibited. His two best friends won't be there, but he's okay with that. It's kind of like how I felt when I was going into my second year of high school. You can do a lot of growing in just a year, and after I found friends and people I love to be around, I wasn't afraid of anything after that first year of high school.

16.) Holden Caulfield

Book Title: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Pages: 120-180 since last week; 966 since semester

Charlie's been madly in love with Sam for the whole novel, even if he's dating her friend Mary-Elizabeth, and during a game of truth or dare, when someone dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room, Charlie kissed Sam instead of Mary-Elizabeth.

I thought this part was pretty sad for Mary-Elizabeth. It was like watching a train wreck happen. But I can understand why Charlie did that because he seems like such a naive person. He just loves Sam and he doesn't care what anyone really thinks. Charlie really reminds me of Holden of Catcher in the Rye. Holden is a loner in a sense that he thinks he's better than everyone else, like everyone else is phony in real life. And Charlie just wants to do what he wants, no matter what anybody else thinks of him. But the difference is, Charlie is a boy trying to find himself, while Holden is a guy trying to find some humanity in the world.

15.) Little Gripes

Book Title: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Pages: 60-120 since last week; 906 since semester

As Charlie becomes closer with Sam and Patrick, they introduce him more into their world of doing drugs and partying, and Charlie helps take his sister to the clinic to get an abortion after her boyfriend gets her pregnant.

Even though Charlie's taking drugs and drinking is generally a bad thing to do, it all just seems like experimentation. Sam and Patrick are very careful of what to give to him, and it seems like really care about him. I think this novel is about everyone Charlie cares for, and how much they care for him. When Charlie gets a bad LSD trip, Sam and Patrick are extremely worried and comfort him until he's fine. And when Charlie's sister needs help going to the clinic, Charlie is with her 100% of the way, no matter how rocky their relationship is at the time. It just shows how much Charlie cares fo the people in his life, and how much they care for him. It reminds me of a time I had with my cousins when we were little. We were playing outside in the neighborhood and my brother and I got into an argument about the rules of some game and we were mad at each other for the rest of the day, but when my little cousin fell off of her bike and scraped her knee we were both there to comfort her, putting aside our little gripe. No matter what happens, you're always there for the people you care for, as cheesy as it sounds.

14.) Charlie

Book Title: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Pages: 1-60 since last week; 846 since semester

Charlie is the main character of this novel, and he comes off as an intelligent, sensitive, and observant high school freshman. He meets his older best friends Patrick and Sam at a football game, and after that they invite Charlie everywhere with them.

At first Charlie is a very passive person, he only observes people and never participates. But as I read further into the novel, he becomes more outgoing and less afraid and he just does things to make him happy. This reminds me of one of the dailies quotes Ms. Voss left on the board for us last year. I completely forgot the quote, but it had to do with being an observer and a participant. Basically, the butterfly catcher is the one who only observes the butterfly's life and lives vicariously through the butterfly, never really going anywhere with their own, whereas the butterfly is the one who goes out and lives its life, doing anything it wants. I think this is what Charlie is going through.

13.) Calliope

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 478-529 since last week; 786 since semester

After Cal ran away, he picked up his life and visited his parents once when he was a man, but never much again. Years later Milton died in a car accident and Cal finally came back home. It was the first time he's seen his parents and brother in years and also his grandmother, Desdemona.

When meeting with Desdemona, Cal found out that she was extremely senile and could barely walk and often forgot things, but a few minutes after they met Desdemona realized that Cal was Calliope, her former granddaughter. Desdemona explained everything how she married her brother Lefty and Cal finally realized how he came to be this way. I thought this was a really neat ending because it just takes the story full-circle. The novel starts out as Desdemona and Lefty's emigration from Smyrna, and it ends with Cal's coming-of-age story, meeting back with Desdemona. At one point in the story, Cal talks about how language tends to oversimplify emotion, like "joy", "regret", or "sadness". Instead, he thinks language has no words to explain complex hybrid emotions, and I think this just shows Cal's character because he is exactly that. Everyone has their own story and everyone is complicated in their own way. This book was Cal's.

12.) Cal

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 423-478 since last week; 735 since semester

After the incident with The Object's brother, Callie gets into a small car accident where at the hospital it's actually revealed that she's a hermaphrodite. Her parents send her to a specialist and he misdiagnoses her as a female based on false data, and Callie ends up running away.

This is the start of Callie's new life as a boy, and she gets a haircut, wears her dad's clothes, and changes her name to Cal. This part of the book reminds me of the movie Boys Don't Cry. When Cal runs away, lives with a bunch of homeless teenagers in a park, but when they leave him alone, Cal is pinned down and gets all of his things stolen by older homeless people. The homeless people find out he's a hermaphrodite and they immediately begin beating him up. It's like when in Boys Don't Cry three guys find out that Hilary Swank is actually a girl and beat her up and rape her. It's pretty sad when situations like this are addressed with pure violence. It's like some people just don't want to deal with change or different things at all, and so the only solution they can think of is process of elimination. I don't think people as ignorant as that will ever come out of their ways of thinking, so I feel pretty sorry for them.

11.) The Object

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 360-423 since last week; 680 since semester

Callie and The Object go on vacation together with The Object's family in the woods, and Jerome brought The Object's crush, Rex. The four of them sneak out at night into a cabin and get drunk and do drugs as the boys' scheme to go all the way.

This is the night that Callie finally realizes that she's a hermaphrodite. She's had a major crush on her best friend the Object, and all this time she's been trying to dismiss it. When Rex and The Object are kissing across the room while her and Jerome are kissing as well, Callie gets an out of body experience and imagines that she's the one kissing the Object instead of Rex. Once her and Jerome actually have sex, she feels only excrutiating pain, and although Jerome notices nothing, Callie realizes that she is no normal girl. Callie goes to the doctor and her parents finally realize she's a hermaphrodite as well. I would consider this the climax of the book because now it's about her dealing with who she is, not just trying to discover it. This kind of reminds me of the hero's journey, because you always have to fall into the abyss before you can come out as a hero. Callie has experienced the worst possible thing, and out of it she's realized who she is.

10.) Enlightenment

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 307-360 since last week; 617 since semester

Callie is growing up into an awkward teenager and she meets her best friend who she calls "The Object". In middle school, they go to their first party and bump into two boys who seem interested in them.

Jerome is The Object's older brother and he and Callie get into a tiny argument about genius. Jerome claims he's a genius but Callie says real geniuses aren't geniuses never think they're geniuses, that maybe if he stopped thinking he was a genius he would become one by accident. Re-reading this passage made me think of none other than our favorite topic: enlightenment. This page made me think of Siddartha so much I could hardly believe it. Callie's thoughts on genius are the exact thoughts of Siddartha on enlightenment. You can't find enlightenment by looking for it, it just has to happen. I agree with both Siddartha and Callie on both subjects, it all just makes sense. If you think you're a genius then you'll think everything you do is genius, and you'll just end up slacking off and not really being a genius. If you're looking for enlightenment, you'll always be wanting something, when the whole point of enlightenment is to be at peace with your desires. This whole concept of genius and enlightenment seem to go hand in hand.

9.) Guerrilla Uprising

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 240-307 since last week; 564 since semester

At seven years old, Calliope sneaks out of the attic in which her and her mom and brother are hiding and she sets off on her bike to find her dad. She follows a tank there, and her dad is in front of the store watching it burn down, thinking about all of the insurance money he's going to rack up because of it.

I thought it was really cute that Callie went to go find her dad, because she saw her brother sleeping in the attic and saw how pathetic and feeble he looked, so she took on the duty of saving her father herself. It just goes to prove that not all heroes are manly men, and that even the scrawniest seven year olds can be heroes. This reminds me of Macbeth, because I think Macbeth is definitely a story about characters who aren't what they seem. Calliope is first seen as a little girl, a frail, feminine child, but she obviously isn't. She went and saved her father no matter how much she didn't fit a heroe's descpription, and she grows up to be a man instead of a woman. Macbeth is seen as brave and manly, but he constantly self-doubts himself and Lady Macbeth is even more powerful and ambitious than he is-- not exactly the characteristics of a housewife.

8.) Riots

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 180-240 since last week; 497 since semester

Calliope is finally born along with a brother and the setting is when she's a young child and her father Milton's store is being rioted along with everyone else's in the city by African Americans. Tessie takes Calliope and her brother up into the attic as shelter for three days while Milton is out in the city trying to defend his store in a bathrobe and a gun.

I thought this was a pretty sad part of the book because in those three days Tessie thought her husband had died, so while she was downstairs foraging for food she was also looking in Milton's desk for life insurance policies and the balance in their retirement account. Reading this made me feel like a part of history, and everyone in this story seemed to be so. They were in the midst of history in the making, and as I was reading this I couldn't help but think about Forrest Gump. I watched it for the first time in years the other week and I actually figured out all the historical jokes and references I couldn't understand when I was younger, where Forrest Gump fights in the Vietnam war and is there caught on camera when the first two African Americans are allowed to go to school with the whites. It was all pretty funny to me now.

7.) Milton & Tessie

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 120-180 since last week; 437 since semester

Fast forward a little, and Desmonda and Lefty give birth to their son Milton, the future hot-dog king of Michigan, Ohio and Florida, who seduces his cousin Tessie by playing his clarinet against her bare skin in lots of compromising positions. Milton and Tessie know that they're cousins, but they don't know that Milton's parents are brother and sister.

This story's web just gets even more tangled and tangled as we go further down into the generations. It's no wonder our main character Cal turned out the way they did, and learning about how she came to be has become pretty interesting. Calliope is the one narrating this whole story, and everytime he pops up I just want to skip all of this and get to his own story, but as I read more of this, I get more interested, and my urge to skip pages gets lost in my interest of what I'm currently reading. This was like how I had to read the first chapter of Harry Potter over 4 times to finally get past it, and once I did, it was toootally worth it. Everytime a novel seems to get boring, I try to just endure and read past it, and hopefully I'll get to something good, and that's what's happened so far.

6.) 2nd Generation

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 62-120 since last week; 377 since semester

Desdemona and Lefty settle in a distant cousin's house in Detroit and Lefty ends up working for the cousin's husband while Desdemona stays at home. Things get complicated after Lefty is set up with a factory job, and we find out that Desdemona is pregnant.

Sourmelina is Desdemona's cousin who moved to America years before them, and she married Jimmy Zizmo, a short, stocky man. Jimmy sets Lefty up with a factory job but later Lefty is fired because the boss finds out that Jimmy has a police record. I know that the baby Desdemona is pregnant with is not yet our main character, Calliope, but that it's probaby her father/mother. This means we're probably going to read about his life story too. This novel seems to be separated into three books, and I've just finished "Book 1", which was Desdemona and Lefty's past living in Europe. Now, we're in America and the stories are slowly getting more close to the present. I never thought I would enjoy a book like this--a book with a history that's set in old times. This book kind of reminds me of the books we would read in class, because of how it's written so elegantly and full of detail.

5.) Smyrna

Book Title: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 1-62 since last week; 319 since semester

Desdemona and Lefty are two 20-something aged siblings who are escaping their Greek homeland Smyrna to America because of Turkish invasion. While they're trying to escape, they fall in love with each other and end up marrying each other in America, never revealing that they're siblings.

When I started reading this book I had no idea what I was getting into, and I could barely get over the incest factor. But I guess it makes sense because I know that this book is a coming-of-age story about a hermaphrodite, and well, how else would the main character be a hermaphrodite if it weren't for recessive genes in the family? But it's so weird because as I keep reading the story, Jeffrey Eugenides makes the incest seem so natural, and it just makes me see the other side of things--not that I'm saying I support incest.

4.) Different Perceptions

Book Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Pages: 180-257 since last week; 257 since semester

David visits his younger sister Tiffany and at the end of the novel he's back at his home in France, wide awake in the middle of the night, when some tourists come through his neighborhood lost asking for directions. At that moment, David looks as if he is a creepy character, and he keeps finding things in his house that help add to this potential creepiness.

Tiffany is the most eccentric person we've met so far. Every person we meet along the way just gets more and more interesting. We first meet her when she's digging through other people's garbage, salvages a whole turkey, and takes it home and cooks it up and proceeds to eat it. Her floor is pulled apart because she sold the linoleum and it looks as if the elements outdoors were in her own home. I can picture exactly what her house looks like, because I've seen similar homes like this on Animal Cops! The same people who neglect their pets and have 50 cats running around also live in a completely filthy home, and it just opens my eyes to how many different people there are living like that in this world. At the very end of the novel, we're at David's home, and when tourists come up to him for help, he can't help but think about how creepy and serial killerish he seems to his guests. He finds a knife in the map drawer, some string lying around in the front yard, and he just keeps imagining himself looking like a crazy person. And I think this is his way of showing us that there is no one perception of a person. Even though he's written all of these stories about his family and the people he's met, that doens't mean that's just who they are. They are only his own perceptions of these people, and they'll always change to fit his mood.

3.) Quirks

Book Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Pages:120-180 since last week; 180 since semester

David visits his sister he barely talks to and later on attends his little brother's wedding, the one out of the four children David thought would least likely wed & have children first.

David's sister Lisa seems relatively normal throughout the story. The only weird quirk she has is that she believes absolutely anything that is told to her, and has a mild case of OCD. Since she's extremely gullible, she believed that the governemnt's been listening onto everyone's phone calls, and that people were able to sneak into her home. This reminds me of my friend--she has this strange paranoia that everyone is out to get her, and though I know it's nothing serious, I always wonder how people get to believing in weird things like that. I have another friend who cringes at the sight of pennies sitting in a puddle of water, and another who hates to see people rip the bark off of trees because she thinks it puts the trees in pain. I think everyone has a weird little quirk like that, and I don't think anyone can really explain it well enough for someone else to fully understand. So, we'll all just have those weird little quirks, even if no one else can understand. David's little brother Paul is the polar opposite of David himself. He's the athletic, manly, brute alpha-male, and he's so irresponsible in all his actions David would've never thought he would be the first to have children. I thought Paul was the most interesting character so far because he would talk to his baby in a soft cutesy baby voice but what he would be saying would be the curses and slurs he's normally accustomed to. I wonder how his kid turned out today.

2.) Like mother, like daughter

Book Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Pages:60-120 since last week; 120 since semester

Fast forward a few years in David's life: he is now 20-something, living with his parents, but soon enough his dad kicks him out because he's uncomfortable with David's homosexuality and David moves into a crummy apartment with some equally crummy neighbors.

David Sedaris' neighbors is a single mom with a 7 year old daughter, but this mother is the steretypical negligent, drinking & smoking white trash who barely cares about raising her daughter. As a result, her daughter is often at David's apartment doing absolutely nothing and David becomes annoyed with her because no matter how nice he is to her she always steals his things and runs a general muck in the house. All of these characters introduced in this book so far seem like caricatures. Like they can't be real people, but I guess all fiction is based on something. There has to be some kind of model to create an example out of. This family reminds me of the show Animal Cops on Animal Planet, a show about the loca ASPCA pursuing animal neglect cases. I totally watch this show every chance I get, and it always makes me sad. Pets are neglected in ways I would never even think of and it's all because of their careless owners. People really need to think things through before they start to make decisions that not only affect their lives, but another living being's life as well. People just need to really think things through in general, about everything.

1.) Aunt Monie

Book Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Pages:1-60 since last week; 60 since semester

This is the introduction of David Sedaris' life. David grows up in a middle-class family and realizes he's gay, and visits his dying aunt's rich home and wishes he had all of her wealth.

So far this book has been pretty tame to me. Nothing exciting has really happened. But I like the idea of David recalling past events of each of his family members and telling an individual story about each of them. The further I get into this book the more I understand its title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. This is David Sedaris' own account of each of his family members. Each of them have a unique personality and not all of them always particularly like David. Aunt Mildred is described as someone who is grossly wealthy, and although she has all of these riches she lives in loneliness and is stingy around everyone she meets. She just reminds me of so many people I've encountered who are just like her, since this book is based on Sedaris' life.

ch 6

Book Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Pages:118-148 since last week; 148 since semester

In the middle of the book, Billy Pilgrim time travels to the end of his life -- he's murdered by an old crazed Lazzaro who's kept his promise since the war, but shortly after he experiences death, he time travels back into his past where he is finally arriving in the city of Dresden.

So far, I think this book is pretty cool because it's unlike anything I've ever read before. The whole book has no concrete timeline, it began with just a random moment in Billy's life and it gave away the end of it in the middle of the book. Everything I've ever read has had an introduction, an arising problem, a foreshadowing, a climax, and then an end. This doesn't seem to be the case for Slaughter-House Five. The fact that this book has tried to go out of the norm reminds me of everything anyone stands for today. Everyone wants to be unique and smart and step out of the box to create their own identity, and so I'm kind of wondering if Kurt Vonnegut's uncommon writing style is just comforming to anti-conformity, or if he's a pioneer of change in a world where books are all written the same. Or maybe I just haven't read enough books yet. Personally, I'm liking Vonnegut's style, and I like how things are turning out.

Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

Book Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Pages: 66-118 since last week; 118 since semester

Billy travels back and forth in time from defining moments of his career of optometry to when he is captured in the war by Germans to when he is abducted by aliens. When Billy is captured by these Tralfamadorian aliens, he asks, "why me?", and the aliens respond by saying that there is no why, because the moment simply is, and that everyone is trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

Tralfmadorians accept the fact that things just happen they way they do just because, and that "only on Earth is there any talk of free will." This encounter with the aliens reminds me of nothing less than the myth of Sisyphus and our class discussions about fate. The Tralfamadorians seem to think the complete opposite of what Camus thought about creating your own fate, that you cannot change time. I think Vonnegut's manipulation of time has something to do with the way he interprets fate, I'm just not quite sure about it all yet.

So it goes.

Book Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Pages: 1-65 since last week; 65 since semester

Billy Pilgrim has mentally "time-traveled" throughout points in his life, revisiting times when he is middle-aged and an optometrist to when he is young and in the middle of serving in World War II. Currently, Billy's crossed over into enemy lines with two scouts and another soldier Roland Weary, and he doesn't really care what's happening, he is just going along with them, disconneted from everything.

Billy Pilgrim is a person I've never really thought would be the protagonist of a novel. He's not strong or brave or philosophically inclined. He is just a guy blundering through every moment that has happened in his life, trying to make some kind of sense of it all. Billy kind of reminds me of Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, only with a less angst and more clumsiness. They both don't want to conform to the way they should live their lives by what everyone expects of them. They're just out there, lost, and they don't really care what happens.