Listening to There There by Tommy Orange while starting in on quilting my Lone Round Robin. Yes it's a box of CD's, that's what was available first from my library. Good thing I kept my little boombox that has a CD player! This is the book that UCSC is doing for The Deep Read this year.
This book is amazing, like a modern day Canterbury Tales, about American Indians in Oakland. I'm so glad I'm listening to it, because each chapter is a different character's story and there is a different voice actor for each, men and women, and their voices really suit the stories perfectly.
So far, I've figured out the book has two reasons for its name. The out of context-ness of the famous Gertrude Stein descriptive quote about Oakland, "There's no there there". I never knew about the context of the quote and how it referred to noticing how "progress" had changed her childhood home so utterly that she didn't recognize it. There was no there there of what she'd remembered of the place. Which gives a completely a different meaning to that quote.
The second reason for the title comes from one of the younger characters referring to one of my favorite Radiohead songs, There There.
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4 comments:
What a great accompaniment to your quilting. I will have to check on getting this book.
I remember reading the Canterbury Tales and think a modern interpretation would be interesting. The info on the Gertrude Stein quote is insightful. It is amazing how the meaning has been changed!
It was a great book, i love the ambiguous ending. And the author is at work at a sort of sequel. I thought the idea of Oakland being gentrified *more than once* was super interesting. Because of course it has been, we only really know about the current iteration of it.
Because we Americans forget about the past....unless it suits us. :(
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