I have heard of Claudia Rankine's renowned work for many years, but this book was my first taste of her fantastic writing abilities and fiercely passionate perspective on a wide variety of issues circulating racism in America. This book is defined as an "American Lyric," and I would certainly use the word "lyric" to describe the style of writing portraying the abstractness of microaggressions. I was not a huge fan of every single section - aka, most of the verbosity went over my head - but I deeply admire the apparent wordsmith Rankine is. I also admired her integration of various images throughout the work that she doesn't directly comment on but expertly connects to the content of the adjoining words. The book is made up of various "scenarios," all written in second-person, allowing the utilization of "you" to really draw her readers into the situations being described. I wholeheartedly believe this is the kind of book that everyone should read principally because it attempts to open the eyes of its readers regardless of race, ethnicity, or any other shallow definer to understand the implications of everyday situations African Americans repeatedly deal with in this country. Also included are scripts from situational videos Rankine has collaborated with her husband to write and produce. I've seen a handful of the videos, and watching them while following along with the script is a truly thought-provoking experience, allowing for deeper consideration beyond merely reading words on a page that don't correspond to visual images. All in all, this book is important and stands as a creative entity in its format as well as content.



Some of my favorite quotes from Citizen: 

​“because white men can't
police their imagination
black men are dying”

"Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context - randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out 'I swear to God!' is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship."

"Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present."

"The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you."

I will admit it took me until the last forty pages or so to really get into this book, to get to a place where I felt I was genuinely connected to and invested in the characters and could see how all of the seemingly meaningless dialogue that came before had been functioning to create a painfully beautiful picture of the relationship between a brother and sister with the same peculiar drive for greatness. My main takeaway from reading this lesser known work of Salinger's is that he really likes to utilize dialogue to flesh out and convey the inner desires and motives of his characters. Between what they say and how they move, consciously or unconsciously, reading this book felt like looking through a window at the characters, observing their movements and word choices in attempts to understand what they seem unable to directly say. Knowing that this book was originally published as two separate short stories, one titled "Franny" and the other "Zooey," made this read even more interesting for me. Upon first glance, these characters and stories didn't feel to me like they fit together. First you see Franny Glass operating within what looks like a terrible relationship she should get the hell out of, painfully trying to express how important a religious aspect called the "Jesus prayer" is to her before fainting. Then you see Zooey Glass in all his glory, calling his own mother names, painfully self-aware and possibly full of self-loathing for his overly righteous and arrogant attitude towards what seems to be every person and subject that portrays even the slightest of flaws. These two characters - brother and sister - come together in their childhood home, Franny in a physically low state, Zooey in a frenzy of neverending chatter revolving around the aforementioned Jesus prayer. It is this prayer, idolized by Franny and scorned upon by Zooey, who admits to having once participated in it himself, that makes this book much more religious and profound than I expected. I definitely have a lot of unanswered questions regarding all of the theological topics and opinions brought up in this novel, but I appreciate being able to ruminate on them nonetheless. For, overall, it brilliantly displays the struggle of two young adults who endured childhoods in the spotlight of a family radio show, living with the aftermath of the high expectations they seem to have set upon their own shoulders, constantly in a state of pushing away the very people trying to get closer. It's the book's ending, where Zooey pretends to be one of their elder, potentially wiser, brothers on the phone who wants to talk to Franny, that has contributed the most to the lasting impression this story has had on me. Maybe it's the fact that he was selfless enough to really think about what his younger sister needed after emotionally taxing her with his harsh words. Or maybe it was the imaginative quality of his devised plan to masquerade as someone else. But I think it was the fact that it took a conversation over the phone, in the aftermath of the chaos that ensued when they tried to engage in conversation whilst in the same room, that really impacted me with its subtle, almost symbolic, certainly bittersweet beauty. Perhaps it reveals how difficult communication actually is, especially when both members of a party are struggling to make sense of the complications of their own identities and complex ways of thinking. But it's these siblings' somewhat shaky yet powerful bond of family, matched loves for acting and the stage, and a mutual belief that they've been made into "freaks," that all stick with me as well. Discussing this thought-provoking text with the members of my beloved book club for the past three or so months has allowed me to think more deeply about this text than I ever could've on my own. Ruminating on exactly what the "Fat Lady" both Franny and Zooey pictured during their childhood acting days was an aspect of the plot I was confused about on my own. But talking with my group members about how she could symbolize a plethora of things, such as Christ himself and how artists produce their art for the least of these as well as the more desirable audience members, or even the abstract concept that Franny really can constantly be saying the Jesus Prayer if she views her life and her acting as a form of prayer.
​I think this is a very human as well as thought provoking book - I recommend it to everyone. :)


​
Some of my favorite quotes from Franny and Zooey:

"[h]e tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person."

"If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything."

"Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity."

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”

“I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.”

This is the second comic book I have ever read, and even though I don't see myself reading a whole lot more comic style fiction in the future, I really enjoyed this read. First and foremost, the title really has an irony that I feel helps to encapsulate how the author is trying to portray her family's dynamic as well as an unnatural familiarity with death as a result of spending most of her childhood days at the family's funeral home. Bechdel conveys a permeating sense of miscommunication amidst the concealing of identities - not only her own sexual identity, but also her father's. It was very interesting to me how she began by describing how her father passed away and then spent the rest of the book unpacking her simultaneously complicated and close relationship with him. I also felt like her description of as well as visual portrayal of her experience with OCD was accurate, liberating, and exciting for me to encounter since I feel like OCD is either misrepresented or avoided altogether in a good deal of literature. She narrates from a place of obviously deep introspection, the style of her comic art very intentional in coloring (blue is the only color used among black, grey, and white) and the facial expressions of her characters very telling of emotion that is carefully captured. The professor whose class I read this for pointed out something I don't think I would've noticed on my own: every depiction of the author's father shows an unsmiling, rather apathetic man. Only in scenes where the father is speaking to or with some of the other male characters who the reader later realizes he was having sexual relations with is he showing even a hint of a smile. I think this detail is especially interesting for the sole purpose of most of the book being hinged on the author's attempts to ruminate on and understand (to the best of her abilities) why her father took so long to finally come out to her (in a very indirect, illusive conversation) and details having to do with his inherent obsessions and favorite authors that might have pointed to some explanations for what looked like a freak accident resulting in his untimely death. All in all, I was very impressed with the relationship of text and images throughout this entire piece, despite my lack of comic book expertise. It is definitely the kind of book that keeps you thinking even after you've replaced the bookmark and set it aside. I also recently learned it was adapted into an award-winning Broadway musical, so I'm going to have to listen to the soundtrack!



Some of my favorite quotes from Fun Home:

"I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death."

"Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?"

"Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?"

"Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers."