Greenridge: February 2011

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this for my book club and could never get the feeling it was real. The author has a story he wants to tell that points up problems of immigration (Little Bee) and shallow values (Sarah)and it fails for me in the same way that Poisonwood Bible did. Neither of the women or the places described seemed very real to me. There was some delicate and thoughtful writing here and there but all in all I would have been more moved by a straight journalistic piece on the whole subject.

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Welcome from Sylvia and Sal

Sylvia's
favorite books
Nabokov's "Speak Memory", poems, short stories and biographies.

I like to be involved in community activities -- am on the boards of local Castro Valley Library and the Alameda County Library. I do not like phone banking (will never do it again) or fundraising. I like gardening altho I kill most everything I plant with over-watering. I like reading, sleeping (a lot), eating (a lot), walking and talking to friends. I adore opera, classical music, theater, television -- I know a real soul-mate if they like Seinfeld - #1 soul-mate is Sal!

A Cat/A Future

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

--- Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA.
About her work, J. D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost."