Or I could just eat wasabi....

This is sort of related to Toochi-Toochi's post below and I could've posted it as a comment but I am feeling exhibitionist, which is rare, so I thought I'd seize the feeling and run with it.

I'm not going to blame MFA programs because I don't think they're the only, or even the main, cause of this phenomenon but so much recent stuff I read is oh-so-clever, such smooth talk, such lithe vocabularies, and so little else -- it's been so long, so very long, since I've read anything recent that made me cry. Is it just me? Am I just not finding the right books? This has been an obsession of mine for a while. I keep coming back to it; I may have already posted about it here but I am too lazy to scroll down and see if I did and anyway almost no one posts on here so it's not like I'm taking up space that someone else wanted and besides only 3 (three) people still read this thing so it's not like I'm taking up too much collective time either.

I like to cry when I read. At the ends of books, in the middle, even at the beginning if it feels earned (actually, if it doesn't feel earned, I *don't* cry, so I guess I don't need to qualify that). I cry while reading *children's* books, not just the obvious ones like Charlotte's Web and Watership Down (homeless bunnies! Who doesn't cry for them?), but even The Railway Children, The Wind in the Willows, certain bits of The House at Pooh Corner. So it's not like I'm a hard sell. But more and more it seems that sentiment has gone out of fashion, or that all sentiment is dismissed as melodrama, or that emotion can only be approached with irony. Maybe it's the South Asian in me -- maybe I'm hard-wired to love emotion writ large, on the Bollywood scale: loud, wet tears, sadness that kills, fury that makes people gasp. Oh, don't get me wrong, I think Bollywood simply transcribed makes for ATROCIOUS fiction, and there are a few writers who do write like that, all of whom I despise, yes, despise. But the other extreme seems like such a poor and dry place. I'm tired of tongue-in-cheekness and McSweeney's and stories from the point of view of quirky misfits doing strange and quirky things that don't change anyone's lives.

I'm feeling curmudgeonly, it's true. But on a less curmudgeonly note, I looked at P. Ho D.'s novel, just at the dust jacket, and it left me feeling hopeful. I haven't read it yet but I am hopeful that it might make me cry. Has anyone here read it? I am a total sucker for wartime romance. It almost always makes me cry, all that impetuousness and fatalism. I cried and cried and cried when I read _The Heat of the Day_ (Elizabeth Bowen, you must read it if you haven't) and I cried at _A Very Long Engagement_, which almost everyone else hated and the critics panned for being cheesy. So maybe PHD's book will make me cry, and then I will feel better about the state of contemporary literature.

If you've read anything lately that made you cry, let me know. I'm making a list.

A Salon Letter from an MFA student about her doubts about an MFA program has set off a ton of blogochatter, from the sincere to the angry to the snarky to the MFA-programs-produce-a-lot-of-third-rate-poo-poo. Original post here: http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/02/02/graduate_schools/index.html