Well Ceremony is a big old slog.
Not an unpleasant slog, or one I didn't appreciate, but boy howdy it is one dense piece of work. I was sent into a trance while trying to annotate it at three in the morning, and all that ever seemed to matter were colors and shapes.
(Whenever I see a circle now, I get traumatic flashbacks).
I do think there's a point, especially in more modern literature where repetition and fragmentation are both things that turn up a lot, where having a requisite amount of annotations gets a little absurd. Especially especially in a book like Ceremony, where it has a narrative structure that folds in on itself, and tells the same story with different names several dozen times. Trying to find new things to say is like finding a needle in a hay farm, and by about halfway through the book I felt that I had a strong enough handle on it to render any extra comments kind of unnecessary.
Still, there were things in Ceremony that I truly enjoyed, and I genuinely appreciate the message it tries to send about balance in life, between the races as well as within one's own self. I think the exercise we did comparing the different colonial writings from the textbook really plays into this, because there is a wide range of ideals in terms of racial interaction between the dominant and repressed cultures, and Silko's beliefs are the ones that I feel most comfortable agreeing with. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that as the dominant culture, I'm not entirely comfortable with retaliatory eradication, but I think I'm allowed to have that concern.
We may have just been pressed for time, but I feel like we were kind of uninspired, as far as our discussion of Ceremony went. It felt like Ms. Holmes was always trying to lead us to the idea that Silko wasn't saying 'all white people are awful and must die', but that was a point that I had picked up on my first read through, so the idea wasn't as revolutionary as I think it was supposed to be, at least to me. I can't vouch for anyone else.
Overall, Ceremony kind of just whelmed me.
(How morally reprehensible is it to go to the multiple choice practice just for the donuts? I do really well filling in bubbles, but I really can't resist)
