Reading Caramelo was an odd experience. I used a library copy, but the only one my library had was the large print edition. The large type gave the odd impression of being shouted at. At first, I thought the larger print was the reason it was taking me a long time (several days) to read…
Month: August 2011
For Aztlán Reads: Gazing East: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?
[This text was written for the new blog, Aztlán Reads, to which I’m excited to have been asked to contribute. The blog post is here. Go ahead, leave a comment.] Just as there is a presumption that United States history begins in the east and moves to the west against a savage frontier, so is…
Building a Class: The Chicana/o Gothic
While I was at the MALCS Summer Institute I confided in another attendee that I was nervous about the process of creating course syllabi as I’d never done it before. She, an associate professor of Spanish and all around lovely person, enthused that creating a syllabus was fun, and then told me she sometimes writes…
Reading Today: Gods Go Begging By Alfredo Véa
For the past couple days, as I read Alfredo Véa’s San Francisco novel Gods Go Begging, I’ve been flashing back to my undergraduate days studying Vietnam in film and literature with Professor John Hellmann at Ohio State. My first impression of Véa’s book is that it’s a great Vietnam novel, a story of physical and…
The #aztlanreads Hashtag Is Everything
[Note, this blog title was shamelessly stolen from a tweet by @laura_luna who has her own blog, creativexicana. I only steal from the best.] Over on Twitter Chicano MA student @xicano007, who has a library anyone would envy, started posting images of his Chicana/o books along with titles and authors. Ever the busybody I suggested…
Reading Today: The Calligraphy of the Witch
Actually I read this book yesterday. Was so into it I didn’t start the review until after it was completed. Like The Hummingbird’s Daughter, I’m reading it with the thought of including it in my Chicana Gothic syllabus. Calligraphy of the Witch by Chicana scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an amazing American novel. It…
Demon in the Mirror – Twitter Reading Group
Since the MALCS Summer institute I’ve been more active in the Chicana/o community on Twitter. Today I found out about my first Twitter book group. Using the hashtag #DITM we’re going to be talking about poet S. Joaquin Rivera’s book Demon in the Mirror, a collection of edgy, dark poetry. The author is going to…
Reading Today: The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Today I’ve started the novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. I’m thinking of using it for a class I’m planning (planning in a sense of writing a syllabus, rather than actually having been engaged to teach) on the Chicana/o Gothic. At 499 pages, it seems a bit long, but is actually a fast…