Song of Solomon reading reflection

What has been most challenging for me while reading “Song of Solomon”, by Toni Morrison, is all of the characters, their relationships to one another, and the time that passes between each passage. When we first began reading, it was hard to tell who the book was primarily focusing on and in the first couple of chapters had a lot of minor characters who did some pretty strange actions that dont really come back up again(example: Porter—crazy man on roof threatening to kill himself) and it was hard to tell where the storyline was going. Also, I often got Pilate, Reba, and Hagar mixed up as they are often all grouped together and I often got their relationships to one another as well as their relationships to Milkman and Macon mixed up. The last thing that was challenging for me was when there would be a paragraph break, indicating a large jump in time. This jump in time could be a few days, weeks, or years, so the author throws you into the middle of a situation with little to no background and you have to figure out how much time has passed.

To address these challenges, I read the book very carefully and slowly as there are a lot of small details to pick up on. Specifically, whenever there is a new character I always annotate that in my book and write what relation they have to which character if it comes up. Also, to tell apart Reba, Pilate, and Hagar, I annotated who each was for the first couple of chapters until I picked up on it and could differentiate them. If there is a strange occurrence, or a character acts in a strange way, I go back and re-read the section carefully until I have fully understood what’s taking place. For when there were changes in time, I would mark it in between paragraphs and annotate anything that has changed between characters over the time jump. Specifically in the photo below I think I did a good job of marking time period indications and new characters. On this page, I was a bit confused on what “Hospital Tommy” was saying to Milkman, so I re-read it a few times and wrote in the margin my interpretation of what he was saying. I also wrote any questions or confusions I had of the passage in the margins. These tactics have all really helped me while reading the book, and although it is challenging I definitely think this makes it a lot more doable.