Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God III

"A dog with rabies comes out of nowhere, floats up to the guy, bites him, and then floats away into the night.

I still laugh thinking about it."


"Janie (main character) seems to be a tramp who is looking for any guy to please her desires. She hops from one man to another just by their appearance."


"I wouldn't recommend this book to most people because most people I know are part of my race and culture (most but not all), and I feel like it is hard for us to relate and/or identify with Janie."


"I'm not IN liberal arts college anymore; I shouldn't have to READ these sorts of things now ... It's a modern literary classic, and so I feel a rather poor English major for not enjoying it more than I did."


"Janie Crawford is a very obnoxious, outspoken woman"


"It was terrible. The biggest reason, the dialog. The terrible terrible dialog. Hurston was probably never educated as to the good and bad of dialog, but if all your conversation is in that southern dialect,and words are spelled based on their phonetic sound and not because of their actual spelling, well after a few hundred pages reading the book was like nails on a chalk board. This was one of the first things taught to me as a CRW 3013 student ... I believe I took an oath then, back in high school, to never right like that. To never force that punishment on a reader."


"I've never cared for southern accents, anyway. Most of them are irritating."


"One thing I really get annoyed by African-American fiction books from that period of time is that it was common to abuse the English language. My head started hurting from reading all the purposely misspelled words and pronunciations. I know black people of that time and region may not have had the best vocabulary and enunciation but this was ridiculous. I usually like dialogue but this time around, I was begging for the narrator to talk so I didn't have to read the abusive ways to spell words."


"Here's an example that stirred my hormones: 'The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye...' (pg 2).
Unfortunately the story line didn't follow in the same tradition."


"She marries with little or no consideration, walks out on marriages, and seems unimpeded by either long-distance train fare, Jack Crow laws, or, for that matter, the conventions of standard English."


"After reading this book, I felt as if my intellectual freedom had been ground under by the iron boot of PC liberal thuggery. It's a sad, sad day for literature when a book like this can actually be required reading in schools. It lacked form, character development, and grammatical elegance. Most of all, it attempted to beat the reader to death with the 'plight' of the author."


"This book makes one root fot the Klan"