« The Good n' Bad | Main | Friday Shuffle - The Sort of Tired, Sort of Sick, and Totally Sick & Tired Edition »
April 26, 2007
The Classics
Before I jump into the subject at hand, I'd like to note that the irony of the recent BlogHer ads to your right has not escaped me. A book about the raw food movement advertised next to the "Go Meat!" people? Stuff like that cracks me up and I hope those ads stay up forever and ever. At least, until they decide to rumble. Not that it would be a good fight. The Go Meat! people will be all sluggish, what with having colons filled with five pounds of Meat!, and the raw foods fighters will be too weak by a lack of will to live brought on by the abscence of flavor and textural variety in their diets. Still, I'd watch it.
Anyway ...
For several days I've mentioned that I want to write about the books I'm reading. My procrastinationon this topic just emphasizes my point that much more.
A few weeks ago I joined the annual adult reading club at my library. No, it's not that kind of reading club. Do people who read "adult" books form clubs? Nevermind. I don't want to know. No, this is like the reading clubs you might remember from the children's library. Read so many books during a set period of time (in this case, 10 books or 50 hours of reading in three months) and win fabulous prizes and glory forever.
I think joining the club, much like majoring in English not once, but twice, might have been a mistake for the exact same reason. Let me see if I can put my overachieving nutcaseness into words:
I joined the club in mid-March. Before then, I was knocking out a book a week. Of course, I counted the two books I'd read prior to joining: Candy Girl by Diablo Cody and Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. Both were good reads. Not exactly fluff, but not exactly hard literature, either. Pretty typical of what I normally read, though.
Do you know what I've read since joining the club?
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Breakfast at Tiffany's: a Short Novel and Three Stories by Truman Capote
So, this is how it works with me: in my regular day-to-day doings, I stick with stuff I like with no regard to difficulty or impressability. But put me in a show-off position, and I'm destined to bite off way more than I can chew.
Books are hard to chew, so you know. But I do this with everything. For myself, I'll knit simple stuff, on the rare occasion that I actually knit something for myself. But when it's a gift involved? Oh boy. If the project doesn't give my panic attacks and hypertension, it obviously means I don't love the recipient nearly enough.
Food? Same thing, although I'm getting better about that. My mom called me the night before my first catering job - an art exhibit opening with fancy-schmancy passed hors d'ouerves for 100. She asked what I was making: smoked chicken with cayenne aioli on crostini, kalamata and Greek olive tapanade stuffed into mushroom caps, fresh pickled spring veggies, crab salad on cucumber rounds, and gorgonzola dolce spread with strawberries. "I don't know what most of that is," my mom said. Then she asked me what I'd made for dinner.
Hamburger Helper and bagged salad. Go Meat!
I did this in school all the time. If the choice was between doing a paper on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is beaten into the skull of every single child born in the state of Missouri starting about five minutes after birth, and The Sound and the Fury, better known as The Most Difficult to Read Novel Ever Written, you can bet I'll pick the latter, and even though I love to read I'll wait until two days before the paper's due before I attempt to read the four-part tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
I didn't do that business with The Sound and the Fury once. I didn't do it twice. I did it three fucking times: once in high school, once the first time I was in college, and once the last time I was in college.
I swore that I'd never touch that damn book again, but now that I have a little over a month to complete the last half of my book club reading requirement, my God! I think I need to revisit the world of Benjy and Quinten and Dilsey and please, somebody smack the shit out of me right now, as I am this close to logging into the library's website and putting it on reserve so I can pick it up tomorrow.
Next on the list: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
I don't know why I won't let myself read ... not fluff, but the stuff I'd normally read. At the beginning of the year I toyed with reading nothing but American 20th century classics this year. That's always been my genre of choice, but there were a lot of books I never got around to reading (like the last three books I've completed) and ones I read many, many years ago that I want to revisit with an adult perspective, like the one I'm about to start.
But why start such a huge undertaking after joining this reading club?
You know, instead of keeping track of number of books, they allow people to keep track of hours reading, which includes newspapers, magazines and internet crap. But you know what? I'm only logging the hours I spend reading Hard Books.
For some reason I've always had it in my head that, unless I set myself up to fail, I'm not trying hard enough.
Who knows? Maybe I'll force myself to not be like this for the last month. Maybe I'll read nothing but Harlequin romances. Do they still publish those?
I will say this: I don't regret the time and effort it's taken to read "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", "Go Tell it on the Mountain" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's". I was long overdue for reading them. Everyone should read them. If you haven't, go join a reading club right now, read them, and freak out like I did. It's worth it. The situation I'm in is teaching me a bit about patience, priorities, and quality over quantity.
Posted by Robin at April 26, 2007 09:23 PM
Comments
I LOVE "Breakfast at Tiffany's", the book... ah. Capote was so amazing!
Posted by: majal at April 26, 2007 10:58 PM
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is a great read. It should be required reading for everyone!
Posted by: Mrs. Chicken at April 27, 2007 09:07 AM
yeah, they still publish Harlequins... and I am almost ashamed to admit that occasionally, I have been known to actually purchase and read them. Sometimes, I need to not think about stuff too much when I'm reading. And do I ever LOVE to read. Mostly crap, but sometimes a good one comes across my pile of books I intend to read.
TKAM? one of my all-time favorites, both as a kid and an adult. I can totally understand why Angie at FP named her younger daughter Harper.
Anyway, good luck with your book club deadline.
Posted by: Mommythis! at April 27, 2007 09:24 AM
In the books you mentioned are two of my favorties: "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" - and one of my least favorites "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". I just don't get Carson McCullers, "Member of the Wedding" was IMO, even worse!
Both the Carson McCullers books I read in high school and college - but the other two I read within the last 10 years - and now I try to read "To Kill a Mockingbird" once a year, or at least watch the movie - one of the few times the movie stands up well to the book.
If you enjoyed "Breakfast at Tiffany's" I definitely recommned you read "A Christmas Memory" - absolutely beautiful! I've incorporated it into my Christmas traditions, sometime during the holidays I'll snuggle up with a cup of egg nog and some cookies and read it in one sitting!
Posted by: Hilda at April 27, 2007 09:47 AM
Majal, I'm in agreement. I've read some Capote along the way, and now I want to revisit everything he touched. I'm planning to read "In Cold Blood" as soon as the noose of this reading club is off my neck.
Mrs. Chicken, I agree. Absolutely loved "The Heart is a Lonley Hunter" and I'm ashamed that it took me so long to finally read it. What's worse, "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" has been one of my favorite short stories/novellas for well over a decade.
Mommything!, after I typed that last night, I realized why I had Harlequins on the brain - I almost tripped over someone stocking a shelf of them at Target yesterday morning.
Did you know that Harper was even born on Harper Lee's birthday (which is tomorrow)? That was pure happenstance, since lil' Harper was a couple of weeks early. B. and I have a friend who just welcomed his first child - a boy named Atticus.
Hilda, I've loved everything I've read by Carson McCullers. Weird that we differ on that, since our opinions on so many other things are similar.
I actually craved "To Kill a Mockingbird" when I was pregnant, but I didn't have the brain power to re-read it then. On my due date, I spent the afternoon perched on a birthing ball, trying to get Clara Jane to turn, while watching the movie. I was hoping to go into labor while watching it, but it didn't happen until the next day.
"A Christmas Memory" is one of the three short stories in the collection I'm reading with "Breakfast at Tiffany's", so I'll be reading it sometime this weekend.
Posted by: Robin at April 27, 2007 10:06 AM
My sister loves The Heart is a Lonely Hunter so much that my nephew's middle name is Carson.
I'm one of the few Mississippians that really hates to read Faulkner. Truth be told there's probably more of us be we don't like to talk about it out loud.
You will love In Cold Blood. If you don't, lie to me.
Posted by: Dixie at April 27, 2007 03:48 PM
Paperbacks are a dime each at the garage sale at Brittany Woods Middle School tomorrow. I picked up 2 books both titled waiting, one by Ha Jin, and another was about being a waitress.
And the ones I left were all pretty decent books, not the usual crap.
Posted by: allison at April 27, 2007 06:30 PM
I just finished _To Kill A Mockingbird_ for the first time this past week! Took me forever since I end up reading 5 books at the same time, but it was thoroughly enjoyable. I'm in Ark vising my family right now and since there's nothing else to do here, I finished a book I found in my parents' bookshelf called _The Measure of Our Days_ by Dr. Jerome Groopman. It's a fascinating read--I highly recommend it!
Posted by: Julie Han at April 27, 2007 07:53 PM
Hi,
Have you read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas?
I bought this as part of a deal, buy three for a certain amount, based on the dustjacket. It was ambiguous and unexplaining as to what the book was about. That in itself intrigued me.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Striped-Pajamas-David-Fickling-Books/dp/0385751079
Reading the reviews, I wouldn't say this was an ideal one for children and more for adults who realise what is going on as the story progresses.
It was an easy read from start to finish but the clues are in the book, and the end is truly ... well. You just need to read it.
Posted by: CJ at May 2, 2007 01:52 PM
I was looking at your Amazon links. We've read a lot of the same books. I kind of vacillate from lunchtime (aka, not too difficult, but not total fluff either) books to the "literature" I think I should be reading. I know what you mean by putting yourself in a "show off" position. In high school and college, given a choice I'd always pick the more difficult book (or monologue, in acting).
Posted by: Kathy at May 13, 2007 02:09 PM
