Reading

As I said recently I'm deciding to read more. I've just picked up this book. Its about, as far as I can tell, how we live with different ethnic groups and how we see and define ourselves by our ethnicity or not. I love the topic, I love her insights. I don't love the main character, who is a self-absorbed art professor, who neglects his wife, and enjoys looking at other women. There are actually two families that are profiled in this book, one, the family of the main character. They are loud, disorganized, combative with their words and disjointed. The other of the rival art professor, whose family is Christian, relaxed, welcoming, and enjoy each other. (Unfortunately most of the novel so far is given to the first.) The first has a white father and black mother and the second family is wholly black. Anyways, the main character's wife, whom is black, has a lot of ideas about how people look at her and how is is expected to act in return. Sometimes she is right and other times she is wrong. Their youngest son was decided, that although the family lives in a small college town outside Boston, he speaks ghetto, and dresses ghetto, and believes everyone is looking at him negatively. Anyways, all that is very intreaging to me and I want to see if especially and mother and son are freed from their some times self imposed stereo-types. I have one other problem with the book though. The characters swear a lot. In movies this doesn't bother me so much, but when you are reading a book, you have to say the words and I'm not really comfortable with that....so I don't know whether to put it down or not. All this reminds me why I love to read literature from the 1800's - they can introduce revolutionary ideas in elegant under the radar kind of ways. I have a Jane Austen novel waiting for me to read...so should I put this one down for Jane or not. I don't know...I really want to see where she is going with the racial thing.

Okay I've probably bored you all to death...