Book Meme (My First Meme!)
On other blogs I’ve seen these things called memes that people pass around, tagging each other as participants. I have only recently even gotten some idea of how to pronounce it (meem, pl. meemz) (though in my head, I always say MiMi). So I actually got tagged earlier today! I know! I’m trying to be all cool, “Oh, a meme, whatev.” but inside I’m feeling like the kid finally being asked to sit at the “cool table”. Even better is how fortuitous it was to be reading an interesting book today, and happen to have it in my stinkin’ hand when I read the rules. I was tagged by Nut Nut over at Nutty Tales. Here are the rules as copied from her site:
Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. Tag five other people to do the same. (BTW, when you do a meme, you should always mention and link to the person who tagged you, as well as linking to the people you tag.)
I was discussing books and book clubs with a friend last week and she said she had almost quit her book club over her suggested reading of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. (The other ladies there hated it.) I put it on hold at the library before I realized it was a graphic novel. Really? A comic book? Hardly. I had never read a graphic novel before and now I understand the difference between this and the comics of my youth. This is not something I would have every chosen for myself, but figured it’s good to try different things every once in a while. It was a quick read–clever, with raw detailing of this woman’s strange upbringing. Here is the passage: (actually from page 57 since page 56 is blank . . .and actually all of the text on the page since there were only five sentences)
My father’s death was a queer business–queer in every sense of that multi-talent word. It was strange, certainly, in its deviation from the normal course of things. It was suspicious. Perhaps even counterfeit. It put my family in a bad position, it thwarted and ruined each of us in particular ways. It left me feeling qualmish, faint, and, on occasion, drunk. But most compellingly at the time, his death was bound up for me with the definition conspicuously missing from our mammoth Webster’s.
I’m gonna have to check with my friends to see if they want to play, but I know these are up for it:
Vespagal at Vespagal’s Life on the Road
The Queen of Drama at Outhouse of Fun
Most of my friends apparently have lives in the real world and don’t blog much. Would it be rude to tag strangers who have blogs that I read and like? I’ll have to ruminate on that. Sort of like sending chain letters to people you don’t know?
UPDATE: I finished the book. It was clever and interesting. I had to include my favorite passage. When the author announced to her parents that she was gay, her mother informed her that her dad had had affairs with men. She wrote:
I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy. I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit.
My friend who suggested this book to her book club said she didn’t think they liked it because they thought it was all about THE GAY. While the author’s sexual preference (and her dad’s) is a major player in the book, that’s not what the book is about. It’s about family relationships and how we are all affected by them. Poignant and real.
