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 09:23 PM | Comments (10)

March 05, 2007

Yes, I Still Read Books

What with all the viruses, sock-knitting, house-buying, house-impaling, three-turning and such, you're probably wondering if I'm once again listing all the books I'm reading this year as I did last year. Or maybe you have important things to worry about. I don't know.

Yes, I'm still reading, despite everything else that's going on. Remember, I'd rather read than sleep. That's how I fall asleep most nights - with a book still clutched in my hand. I finally took a minute tonight to set up the 2007 list.

Yeah, it's pretty meager so far. In my defense the last book I read in 2006 (King Dork) ran into the first 10 or so days of 2007. I tend to fall asleep rather quickly these days.

After that I read Possible Side Effects, the latest from Augusten Burroughs. It's fun. Nothing much to seperate it from any collection of essays from any skilled humorist. It's worth the read, especially if you have to spend a few hours on a plane and need something to keep you amused.

Then it was on to Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry. Again, a pleasant enough read. It's a memoir of a year in a tiny Wisconsin town, told by a writer/volunteer firefighter as he falls in love and restores his truck. Now, I know that with a title like Truck: A Love Story, there's going to be a lot of stuff about trucks. Too much stuff about trucks. Perhaps I'm not very bright for spending three weeks reading this book and constantly thinking, "Damn. There's a lot of detailed information about really old trucks in this book." Still, it was engaging enough to keep me going, although a bit slow at times. Like when there are huge 27-page passages about the transmissions of 1957 International trucks.

Okay, maybe those passages weren't actually 27 pages long, but sometimes it felt like it.

I needed some fiction, so next I went for The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. This was recommended to me by Kathie, a reader of this-here blog who teaches high school English.

If Kathie ever recommends a book to you, listen to her. She knows her stuff. Loved this book. Really. Loser alcoholic named Smithy in Rhode Island loses his parents in a horrific auto accident, then learns his long-missing sister has been found dead in Los Angeles. Despite being nearly 300 pounds and addicted to beer and smokes, he takes off on his bike in a drunken haze one night that leads him to pedalling cross-country to claim his sister's body.

That would have been plenty for me. There's a subplot involing Smithy and his parents' paraplegic next-door neighbor that I could have done without.

While shopping at Target one day recently, I noticed The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish. It's about a bunch of women in rural Wisconsin who up and start walking.

Hey! It's in rural Wisconsin, like Truck! And it's about wandering off in search of ... something, like Memory of Running! This is a great idea! In 2007, I'll read nothing but books that are interconnected in cosmic ways like that!

This might possibly be the worst reading decision I've made in my entire life.

Seriously. I'm 150 or so pages into this thing. Today, Clara Jane yanked the bookmark out of it, and I honestly think the work required to find the proper page just isn't worth it, despite the fact that once I hit the 50-page mark, I pretty much refuse to quit a book, no matter how awful it is.

This is possibly going to be the exception to the rule.

Now, there was a time in my life when I really liked "chick lit". Back before it was called "chick lit". While I don't think it was particularly well-written, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood struck a chord with me. I also liked Bridget Jones' Diary, along with a lot of other books about women struggling to find their place in the world.

I wonder, though, if I'd like those books if I read them for the first time today, at this stage in my life.

I've always considered myself a feminist. Always. I remember arguing about the Equal Rights Amendment with my father when I was eight years old. In my mid-twenties or so, back in the late '90s when such books started appearing, I was delighted. Finally! Women writers are getting attention and making serious takes on what womanhood is like!

But then it turned into a genre. A big, money-making, cheesy genre. Publishing houses love genres; it's what keeps them in business, those paperbacks with cute (or sexy or scary, depending on your genre) covers that catch your attention more than the title or description. It gauls me that some really great books written by women, about women get lumped in with some real crap. But I'm not going to go on that tirade. There was an anonymous editorial published in Boston's Weekly Dig last August that hits a lot of the key points. I don't feel the need to reinvent that particular wheel. I just wish the author of the article had put her name on it.

Anyway, back to this abomination of a book I can't be bothered to finish reading. It's a great example of faux feminism. Eight women are so fed up with ... what? We're never really told ... that they just get up and start walking ... where? In a circle around the county, as far as I can tell because ... um, I haven't figured that out yet.

And yet, this little constitutional garners national media attention! Women! Out walking! Oh my Jesus God, alert Walter Cronkite! Wait, isn't he dead? No? Well, get that hot guy from CNN with the gray hair! We need to cover these walking women who are changing the world by walking!

How are they changing the world? Why, through the power of female friendship and that special bond all women inherantly share via the commonality of similar pelvic organs.

Bullshit.

I know the power of female friendship. I do. I have some amazing friends who've overcome incredible odds. I have friends who, like me, struggle with the crap our society foists on us about what it means to be a woman/wife/mother/daughter.

I've also had plenty of women friends who damn near sucked the life out of me. Women who couldn't or wouldn't do a damn thing for themselves if their lives depended on it. Women who often called themselves feminists, or sang the praises of the strength of women (while poking great fun at the weaknesses of men), who didn't have the guts to get up and walk, regardless of how many friends were standing behind them, screaming, "Stand up and walk! You can do it! Here, I'll hold your hand. I'll even pull you. Oh, what the fuck. Just get on my back and ride. I'll haul your weak, lazy, entitled ass around because that's what girlfriends are supposed to do. Women never turn their backs on their friends!"

I no longer believe that just having womanhood in common is enough. We're not all sisters and never will be. As I've gotten older, I've preferred to create friendships based on who I am as a person and who my friends are as people. I don't want to be friends with people who constantly needed to be hauled around by me. Not that I won't stand by a friend who's going through a rough time. That's different entirely. There's a difference between dealing with the crap life deals and playing the victim.

Anyway, as I'm reading the atrocity, I keep thinking that on the surface it's supposed to be a pro-woman, feminist story, but it's anything but. Well, I don't know. Maybe it is, but the writing's so vague and there are so many plot holes that it's impossible to tell. All I know is I've yet to find anything I can respect in any of the characters. Nothing. They're weak, most of them stuck on shit that happened to them years ago.

Guess what. We all have bad shit that happens when we're young. We have bad shit that happens when we're middle-aged. We have bad shit that happen when we're old. Such is life. Strong people deal with those things, learn from them, and don't let them ruin their lives. Sure, those ugly things will rear their nasty heads at times. The difference is whether you plow through it with all your might, or let it dictate the rest of your life.

A book about women who have the strength to wander around the county? That's not pro-woman at all. That's "Oh, look at the poor little women who've suffered so and have finally, after decades, gained the strength to deal with their shit and move on." That's pro-vicitm.

And yet, I wonder why I'm being harder on the women in An Elegant Gathering of White Snows than I was on Smithy in The Memory of Running. Is it because they're women, or because they have the misfortune of being trapped in a really badly-written book? I'm going with the badly-written option. Smithy was weak and had let a traumatic youth dictate and nearly destroy his life, only getting his shit together years later when he lost everyone. But at least his author did him the service of letting the readers in on why he was the way he was.

Yep, I think I'm gonna quit this bitch, maybe move on to Candy Girl - A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody. I have a feeling its message is going to be better for women than the dreck I've been reading.

Posted by Robin at 09:20 PM | Comments (14)