***hi Dr. Scanlon this is just a creative title, I am not attacking your reading selection****
Okay, so I am wrapping up my second literary analysis essay on my FAVORITE book we read this semester, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. I really appreciate how le showed how the trauma the girl faces from Ba and from dislocation affects how she handles her adult life and her overall outlook. Comparatively, I didn’t really connect with Once the Shore or The Hungry Tide as personally as I did with le’s book.
This got me thinking as to what was everyone’s favorite (or least favorite) work we read this semester? Add your thoughts below!
HotOrNot? Syllabus edition
Mine was When the Emperor Was Divine…a truly beautiful book (also incredibly sad, but that’s most of the books in this course)
This is such a hard question, but I also think that When the Emperor Was Divine was my favorite of the novels we read, it hit me the hardest emotionally and the writing style was so eloquent and carefully crafted. My favorite book of poetry was Night Sky with Exit Wounds, I feel like I could read this book over and over and still find new lines to be fascinated by. There wasn’t a single book I hated though, I feel pretty strongly towards all of them.
I loved our poetry books this semester. Soft Science had so many interesting facets and symbols within the poems, as well as some great imagery and juxtaposition of language, as well as her poem, Afterlife which really called out to me on a personal level. Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit wounds was also absolutely amazing, It not only talks about the other identities we discussed with Asian culture, but he also talks about his own personal struggles with his upbringing as well as his identity as a member of the LGBTQ community.
I think my favorite had to be Once the Shore. The book just felt really different from everything else we read, since it was a collection of short stories placed in an imaginary world. Yet, they also dealt with a lot of the issues and themes we discussed in other books, which connected all the short stories together and connected all the books together over the semester. Also, I just really enjoyed reading some of the short stories and not knowing what was actually reality/the truth, like in “Faces to the Fire,” “And We Will Be Here,” and “Look For Me In The Camphor Tree”).
I really liked No-No boy, the Hungry Tide, and the Gangster We Are All Looking For. I definitely can’t choose between these three. Just because I think I learned a lot from these books and I also like the authors’ writing styles. My favorite poetry book we read this semester would be Night Sky with Exit Wound. I really liked these poems because I could personally connect with them. When first reading Franny Choi’s poems I didn’t really understand what was going on so it was harder to connect with the work.