K's Books

I heard of this novel a couple times in college, but I didn't read it until working at a bookstore and encountering a physical copy for the first time 14 years ago. Although I had a difficult time understanding a lot of the written dialect, I adored the book. It's powerful and imperfect in a very human way. I wanted to own my own copy for a while, but I just bought mine at a used bookstore about a year ago. Zora Neale Hurston is at the top of the short list of people I'd love to bring back to see that all their hard work bore great fruits after they died.  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37415.Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God 

Although I first encountered this book in college, I bought my copy at a used bookstore in Viroqua, WI just 2 years ago. The first time I read this book was right around the time that I was first learning that marriage and children are optional. I heard of the novella through a lot of lesbian feminist tomes I was driving headfirst into at the time, and many of those writers had made the same discovery through Perkins Gilman's work.   The Yellow Wallpaper is very familiar to me now, this is the third time I've reread it since buying my copy, and I still appreciate it immensely.  I also greatly appreciate Crash Course's episode about this book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/286957.The_Yellow_Wall_Paper 

Like Uncle Tom's Cabin , this was another novel that I learned about in my middle school history class and decided to read. This was also very difficult for me, less because of written dialect and more because it's very slow and dense. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it then because I was fascinated by the Southwest and I' d been so misinformated about Native Americas. I reread the book, purchasing the copy that I own now, about 15 years ago and enjoyed it. At that time I had a 1.5 hour commute every day, so the slow pace of the novel worked well for me. Now though, I found it barely readable. I kept waiting for something to happen, and it's more of a tragic romance then literature. The characters are one-dimensional, and although Harriet Beecher Stowe and Helen Hunt Jackson have been compared to each other extensively for 150 years, the latter doesn't use her characters to illustrate complex ideas about theology and politics. I suspect that Ramona was so popular because o...