completion....

ok, so in addition to cleaning my kitchen and making a mockery of cleaning up my harddrive.......i also finished tom wolfe's tome my name is charlotte simmons.......a cuationary tale of a backwoodsy yet brilliant girl from appalachia who earns a fullride shcolarship to an up-east school that seemed all too familiar......one can guess the trials and tribulations before opening the book.....the culture clash, the gap between her modest bank account and that of her roommate.......the temptation to dumb herself down to gain acceptance....the loss of her academic focus with all the distractions that college has to offer......and all that before sex, drugs and rock and roll come into play......most interesting was the portrayal of college sports on an other wise competetive campus......charlotte finds herself in what she thought was a high level french literature class, only to discover that the book is being read and discussed in english because the tiny band of students are all athletes and need the credit to fulfill a foreign language requirement.......and the basketball player she meets in that single class (before she transfers out into a real fr lit class) is the crux of much of the plot line......i did laugh out loud when said basketball player finds keys to a new (leased by a rabid booster) suv in his pocket after the first practice ..i always wondered how that all worked out...every player at osu had a nice car........i must admit have several painful flashbacks as i read this book.......wolfe either talked to people i knew, or i wasn't the only person who had unpleasant collegiate experiences.......maybe what i found most difficult to read was wolfe's descriptions of the fictional dupont students and their parents (read this as mothers......).....it is one thing to suspect that (your?) children feel this way, and yet another to see it in print....in some respects i felt sorrier for the parents (mothers) of the characters than i did for the characters themselves.......this is not a book that i would recommend to anyone who has not the leisure time to devote to a book thicker than any of the harry potter installments......nor for anyone who has children in college.......