It has now become an addiction

It's official. My interest in BookMooch has now become an addiction. My parents dropped off three boxes of books that they didn't want anymore and said that I could sell them at the used bookstore, which I did. Theused bookstore only took six books so I have decided to mooch the rest. It is becoming like a small business. I am wrapping and sending books, emailing moochers, and checking my status several times a day. It is such fun. I just wish I was earning some money for all this fun. I always thought I should run a bookstore, and maybe I should but not a brick and mortar bookstore, but an online store.

In the meantime, I get to read a bunch of interesting books. I finished a book titled Names on a Map and found it underwhelming. It is very fractured with too many voices narrating the story. I didn't feel like I got to know any of the narrators well enough to care about the story. I also found Saenz's use of language very pedestrian and uninteresting. He is extremely fond of series of threes, three metaphors, always three metaphors. But the most disturbing thing about this particular book is the way he introduces early on in the book the fact that one of the main characters, Xochil, is raped at the age of 12 or 13 in an alley. This causes her to have a fear of alleys which she doesn't get over until the end of the book. Although the book is 432 pages long (give or take a page of two), the issue of Xochil's rape doesn't come up again until the end of the book. It is used to justify her having sex with a boy that she doesn't love. But at least SHE got to choose who she had sex with.

I was appalled at the fact that the rape was not dealt with more deeply. There was no discussion of how the rape helped to form the person that she became. And since she never told anyone about the rape, it is very difficult to believe that she never had any consequent psychological problems. Xochil never dealt with the rape, but also, according to the book, never NEEDED to deal with the rape. She just filed it in the back of her brain and there it remained, causing her no concern whatsoever.

We all know that this is not in the least realistic. It shows me how little the author is concerned about the subject of rape and how it affects those who are raped. Xochil's character and her rape were just used as vehicles to move the story forward.

Although I didn't like the story and found it very difficult to finish, there were some interesting tidbits, like the description of southern New Mexico in the 1960's, a positive and emotional description of living in the desert, and the description of the uniqueness that residents love about living in the southwestern United States.