Only I Can Talk About Media Studies That Way!

       He was glad, he supposed, that she had earned a degree. Yet he wondered whether the abundance of the information provided by a $200K Dartmouth BA in "media studies" might have been available through a free trial subscription to The Atlantic Monthly and a basic cable package including Turner Classics for fifty dollars a month. His daughter's dubious degree had alone decimated the savings he'd accrued previous to the sale of Knack.

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, Page 117 of the Hardcover First Edition

 

You know how its okay if you make fun of your family, but when you hear other people do it, you feel completely and totally incensed? Actually, there are a lot of things like that. And its totally okay. And generally, people accept that as the way life is, unless of course your name is Dr. Laura. Its only okay when I make fun of my major (and the other people in it).

And I also know that the opinions of the characters do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author, but does media studies need to go into quotation marks? Seriously? This is generally why when people ask what my degree is in, I just say "I got a degree in Communications," and leave it at that...at least I didn't go to Dartmouth to get the degree.

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Manipulation: My Sister's Keeper

Jodi Picoult, I'm convinced, is evil. One of the most evil people in the world. She has written a plethora of books that will cause you to cry on the metro, both from depression and the sadness that you can tell this woman is manipulating you.

Take the above trailer, a movie based on the book My Sister's Keeper. A girl is conceived to be a genetic match for her sister, who needs some cells from the umbilical cord upon birth. And then later she needs blood. And bone marrow. The list goes on.

Sad, right? If this girl stops at any time, her sister dies. But it hurts her; the only reason she was put on this earth was to save her sister, and the only way to do that is to constantly have needles shoved into her skin.

So she sues for medical emancipation, despite the fact that her sister will die without a new kidney. Get ready to cry. Picoult manipulates every situation into a major tear jerker.

And its not just this book. 19 Minutes, the story of a school shooting. The Pact, the story of two teenagers in love that make a suicide pact. Change of Heart, where the murderer of a man and his daughter wants to donate his heart to the murdered girl's sister after he is executed.

You are manipulated. So much so that it no longer seems real. At the end of My Sister's Keeper, a twist occurs that made me want to throw the book across the room. "Come on!" I shouted.

Compared to the book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, which is about a school shooting from the eyes of the mother, in the aftermath, in her letters to her absent husband. I cried, but didn't feel like the author had created these situations to cause me to cry. Rather, they happened to the characters.

With Jodi Picoult, you get the feeling that she dreams up terrible situations and twists them around to get the most heartache.

(With the new job, I commute 40 minutes both ways. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, I get to read a lot. But I don't really write as much as I'd like to. That includes here.)