Mumbo Jumbo is absolutely the craziest, most confusing book I have ever read in my entire life. If you thought reading Beloved was hard, just wait until you read Mumbo Jumbo. I felt like there was just too many characters and details to keep track off. Plus, the author doesn’t actually use correct grammar or anything which only adds to the confusion. The only thing I really actually liked about this book was how the author was able to tie everything together in the end.
The hardest part about reading this book is the grammar. There is hardly any commas and absolutely no quotation marks around the dialogue. This is not a book that you can just sit down, relax, and enjoy. Reading this book takes a lot of focus and a lot of work. For the most part, I was able to get the general idea of the chapters, but I don’t think I could really summarize them for anyone. I definitely do not recommend reading this book on your own. Without our daily class discussions, I would have been completely lost and would have missed a lot of important details. I also hated that the author purposely spells things wrong, or uses the number one to replace the worked “one”. Part of me felt like I was reading somebody’s text messages.
Had this book been a little easier to comprehend, I might have a favorite character or two. The plot itself was so hard to understand that I didn’t really have time to think about characters I liked. I could barely keep all their names straight. The worst part was the ending of the book, when Reed decided to wrap everything up. There were so many new names and plot that I didn’t really follow it all that well. I got the broad idea of it but again, I couldn’t really explain it to anyone that asked me to.
If I were to recommend reading this book, I would highly recommend that you be prepared to read it more than once before you truly understand what is happening. I think that if I were to reread Mumbo Jumbo, I would be able to catch more details and understand it’s meaning better. Overall, it is a very cool, interesting book, but you must be willing to do some critical thinking before reading it.
Mumbo Jumbo was a really confusing book to read, and it was a lot harder than Beloved. I also think the class discussions helped me understand what we read. I do think the way Reed writes is pretty cool even if it's hard to understand. It really adds to the meaning of the book.
ReplyDeleteMumbo Jumbo was super hard to understand but totally worth the read. It is super amazing to me that an author can write in such a confusing way and come out with such an amazing novel. I don’t think I would ever be able to think of something this cool.
DeleteI also found Mumbo Jumbo to be quite confusing to read due to the unconventional formatting deployed by Reed. The good thing about class discussion is that we can kind of piece together all the different parts since we all understand different things about the reading. I feel like by the end of the book, although I didn't completely understand all of the story, I could see how the formatting helped to match the story and mood of the book. But it took until the end for me to see that, so I was distracted for the entire book because of the formatting. Oh well. Maybe if I ever reread it I can do so understanding the format a bit more.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that rereading this book would help understand the meaning a lot better. I didn’t really understand the book until the very end, and I still feel like I only got the broad strokes of it. The formatting was a lot to get used to, and definitely made it a lot harder to read, but still worth it!
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