What I’m reading - 050911
How many times do we mean to read a particular book or seek out books by a particular author and fail to do so? I have made lists to keep me up to the mark without success. Best-selling author, Barbara Kingsolver, falls into this category for me.
Eventually I got to read The Poisonwood Bible after hearing so much about it. It is a tour-de-force novel told in the female voices of a mother and her daughter. It is a contrast of cultures as an American family goes as missionaries to Central Africa and it traverses the modern history of African self-determination and independence. I can’t remember reading a novel before which had a serious and extensive bibliography including US State Department documents. Kingsolver had included these because she knew how disbelieving her compatriots might be regarding US activity in Africa.
So - with no decent excuse at all - I have not read a Kingsolver novel since. Then this week, I went past an Opp Shop at the Burnt Bridge Shopping Centre on the Maroondah Highway and there was a Kingsolver novel sitting atop a stack of books outside the store. Open the cover to see the price - 50cents. Mmm…. and so The Bean Trees came home with me.
I am enjoying it. You will see a description of the book and some reviews here.
I loved and identified with this snippet on page 88. Taylor says:
So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.
I feel this in so many ways - no one person, no one church, no one political party and so on can use all of my parts. I am not so simple. I am complex, complicated, and multi-faceted. Traditional and conservative on one side: postmodern and radical on another. What do we do?
