IKEA Furniture

The obsession that Edward Norton's character has with IKEA furniture is relevant to our current society in many ways. Especially around this holiday season, it is becoming more and more evident that we are slaves to advertisement. It may be an interesting peice of furniture, a new haircut, a clothing style, or anything really that grabs our attention and makes us think, "I have to have that." The consumers are being consumed by what is new and great, without thinking about why it's so special. Is it really that great of a coffee table? Or is it simply necessary becuase it's on the front cover of a catalogue, therefore making it the obvious thing to purchase? One way to look at it is, if you had never seen the coffee table in that catalogue, you never would have needed it. Nevertheless, because you did spot it, there was no longer a question; it was now a necessity, a need. As illuminated in Fight Club, this is absolutely ridiculous. The narrator explains that there is no inherent need for a cute yin-yang coffee table, but he still purchases it because he, like so many others, has been roped into a consumers nightmare.
The ironic part about obsessive consumerism in Fight Club is that the main character ends up incinerating all of these objects, without even knowing it. His subconcisous alter-ego (Tyler) was so tired of the excess material that he destroyed it. At first, the narrator is in complete disbelief, and is convinced that his whole life resided in that appartment and so now his life is over. Tyler, however, led him to believe that those unimportant mementos were hardly what life was about. While the narrator catalyzed the consumer spiral, Tyler strived to destroy it. It is these two competing forces in the characters head that made up the irony of the story. Neither one appears better than the other. One is groggy and blinded, while the other is violent and destructive.

Why Read Non-required Reading?

After reading the first part of The Best American Non-required Reading, the first question I asked myself was, why? What's the point of reading all of these random pieces of literature? Is it even literature? It wasn't until after I was completely finished reading it that I realized how much I had learned. It's amazing how much we don't know about our own culture. It made me realize that I've never stopped and realized just how absurd things have gotten. All of the little tid-bits in Part I were hilarious to read, simply because they were so strange. It threw me for a loop, therefore, when I realized that the things that they were talking about were present in my everyday life. The book is poking fun at our culture, the things that we experience everyday. We just don't see them until they are condensed into 27 pages of a book. In this way, I believe that it is literature, and it is definitely worth reading. It's informative, educational, entertaining, and it tells a great story.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The thing that is most interesting to me about this book is that I hated it... at first. It wasn't the "spanglish" or the slang, in fact it wasn't really anything that we talked about in class that bothered me so much. It was simply the fact that the syntax irritated me to no end. The story was set up with annoying little footnotes, huge gaping holes in the plot, and an unusual amount of seemingly unneccessary information. However, as the story progressed, things began to shift into focus. For instance, if the footnotes had not been there, I would not have been able to fully understand the harshness of the Trujillo reign, or the implications that it cast on the people. Though I didn't realize it initially, the gaping holes are what kept me reading in the first place; it was like I just had to know what happened. And what about all that "unneccessary information"? Turns out it wasn't so unneccessary after all. Everything fit together in the end with surprising ease. Once everything was said and done, it was like the story just made sense to me (which is odd considering I have never moved to a new country and can in no way relate to the characters for any other reasons, either). That in and of itself is a feat. Diaz allowed me to understand a family of characters that I have nothing in common with. This was different than other stories in that it didn't try to make the information easily accessable to you. Instead, Diaz made you work for it. To put it concisely, I really liked the book. It was a struggle, but in the end it was well worth it.