Ryan Payton- Ragtime

Choosing to read Ragtime was a pretty simple decision for me. For about a year, I have been listening to the soundtrack from the musical. Usually, I would want to read something that was completely new to me, but I wanted to figure out the entire story. I could never really connect all of the different story lines that seemed to exist within the show, and this was my way to find out. Now that I have read the book I understand all of that. From Ragtime, you see how immigrants lived and were treated, how racism was handled throughout the country, and how people in the public eye acted. Besides the story itself, the biggest thing I enjoyed about this book was the way that Doctorow had written some characters to be anonymous (Father, Mother, the Little Boy, etc.). Tateh's full story was given, he was a specific person, but 'Mother' could have been any housewife at that time. It added a different aspect to the book that I, personally, have never seen before; that mystery of a character.