Back on Track | Reading Update

My reading has been in a slump recently, lingering and procrastinating over the overhype The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips. I like historical novel with a tinge of adventure and the premise of the novel sounds really appealing. It is the story of an Egyptologist who is obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king. Situated not too far from the western bank of Nile in 1922, Professor Trilipush at the expense of financial difficulty and risk of forfeiting his imminent wedding thrives to derive an immortal fame that will remain after he dies, the value of which surpasses any financial rewards. He feels that he's born for the role to unravel the secret - that he knows more about the king Atum-hadu, the impulses and purposes, than he does about anyone and anything else in life. The story is a maddening suspenseful one, pieced together through an epistolary structure which mainly contains two narratives. It might seem witty to begin with, with a story that is layered with death, suspense and self-absorption and tries to produce this confusing effect to beguile readers, but it becomes so tedious and dessicated that I just wish to finish it for the sake of of ensuring I do not miss anything. So meanwhile, I re-read To Kill A Mockingbird, a beloved American classics which I haven't visited for years. People have sent me e-mails and left comment on the blog about how Dill from the book is Capote. Indeed, in his childhood Capote made friends with Harper Lee, who might have portrayed him as Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. Vestige of Capote is found in this passage:

"Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead."

I just started Covering: The Hidden Assault of Our Civil Rights by Professor Kenji Yoshino. Perhaps its greatest contribution is its noble endeavor to show how covering affects all of us, whether we are white, black, yellow, red, or green, not just the marginalized or disenfranchised. Everybody covers, and everybody is harmed by it. Far from diluting his claim, this frank admission offers a way out from traditional civil rights discourse, which is increasingly viewed as provincial, dogmatic, and overly combative. Even people who are sympathetic to traditional (and more radical) civil rights efforts recognize this problem: the "race to the bottom" by which anybody who wants to comment on marginalization has to show how one personally has been suppressed by the system. But on the other hand, he clearly has faced his share of marginalization: Asian-American homosexuals are not exactly at the pinnacle of social acceptance. I'll post an update as I read along and follow up with a complete review.