{"id":41351,"date":"2013-12-02T19:15:56","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T19:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/tom_speelman-oscar_hijuelos_rip\/"},"modified":"2013-12-02T19:15:56","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T19:15:56","slug":"tom_speelman-oscar_hijuelos_rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=41351","title":{"rendered":"Tom Speelman&#8211;Oscar Hijuelos RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of&#8230;[the party], though, after most of the guests had gone home, my sister had gone to sleep after marathoning all then-7 of the Harry Potter films the night before and my folks were busy chatting with my aunt and uncle, I headed to the stack of my new books and, almost at random, chose one of the titles from my American Literature survey course: Mr. Ives\u2019 Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos.<\/p>\n<p>I read the book in most of 2 days, instantly captivated by the story of a man, himself an orphan, trying to put his life back together after the murder of his aspiring priest son, and thinking back over the story of his own life as a honorary member of New York\u2019s Cuban community of the 40s and \u201950s, despite not really being Cuban himself; a simple story, Hijuelos captured it in poetic, delicate writing that painting broad, vibrant brushstrokes in your head.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tomtificate.wordpress.com\/2013\/10\/18\/rip-oscar-hijuelos\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of&#8230;[the party], though, after most of the guests had gone home, my sister had gone to sleep after marathoning all then-7 of the Harry Potter films the night before and my folks were busy chatting with my<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=41351\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,39,50,209,92,206,620,438,184,113,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-life-church-life","category-culture-watch","category-international-news-commentary","category-americau-s-a","category-books","category-caribbean","category-cuba","category-death-burial-funerals","category-parish-ministry","category-poetry-literature","category-religion-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}