Explaining the Hardest Thing
Oct. 5th, 2006 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI just finished reading Anne Tyler's Digging to America. I liked it, but I didn't love it; I won't be buying it. However, I reserve the right to change my mind about that because this might be the sort of book that grows on me.
One thing I like about it is that it takes the character that might be the most difficult one to understand in real life, and then teaches you to understand that character.
Just like my favorite physics professor. He'd have you read from a text book, but then instead of just summarizing the whole reading assignment in class, he would somehow find the one part that didn't make much sense or was frustrating or was boring and do a whole lecture on that thing. By the end, that was understandable and interesting, too.
In the book, Tyler does her usual thing where she puts you into the heads of some people who are having some psychological difficulties in their lives. In this book, she keeps changing point of view. You never really know until the end who the main character is. And for a while it looks like the climax of the book might be a party that seems to be set up for failure. But it doesn't go where I expect. She shocks me in one scene by not going to the obvious place--it threw me so off guard I had trouble understanding parts of the book after that! I had to keep reminding myself of what had really happened instead of what I had thought would happen. Very interesting.
One thing I like about it is that it takes the character that might be the most difficult one to understand in real life, and then teaches you to understand that character.
Just like my favorite physics professor. He'd have you read from a text book, but then instead of just summarizing the whole reading assignment in class, he would somehow find the one part that didn't make much sense or was frustrating or was boring and do a whole lecture on that thing. By the end, that was understandable and interesting, too.
In the book, Tyler does her usual thing where she puts you into the heads of some people who are having some psychological difficulties in their lives. In this book, she keeps changing point of view. You never really know until the end who the main character is. And for a while it looks like the climax of the book might be a party that seems to be set up for failure. But it doesn't go where I expect. She shocks me in one scene by not going to the obvious place--it threw me so off guard I had trouble understanding parts of the book after that! I had to keep reminding myself of what had really happened instead of what I had thought would happen. Very interesting.