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| 0385533314
| 9780385533317
| 0385533314
| 3.48
| 6,962
| Mar 22, 2011
| Mar 22, 2011
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it was ok
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I feel as if I just read the autobiography of someone who doesn't know her subject very well. A lot of reviewers here have said this book is intensely I feel as if I just read the autobiography of someone who doesn't know her subject very well. A lot of reviewers here have said this book is intensely self-involved, and it is. Which makes it that much stranger that, having read it, I still don't know some basic facts about the author. I don't know why she became a journalist. I don't know why she fell in love with Afghanistan. I don't know what being in love with anything or anyone means to her, since depth of emotion seems something she instinctively shies away from. I will give Kim Barker's writing this much: she doesn't mind letting other people have the good lines, even at her own expense. This snippet of conversation between her interpreter and a warlord she desperately wants to interview represents the best this book has to offer: Farouq tried to sell my case in the Pashto language. The warlord had certain questions. "Where is she from?" Pacha Khan asked, suspiciously. "Turkey," Farouq responded. "Is she Muslim?" "Yes." "Have her pray for me." I smiled dumbly, oblivious to the conversation and Farouq's lies. "She can't," Farouq said, slightly revising his story. "She is a Turkish American. She only knows the prayers in English, not Arabic." "Hmmm," Pacha Khan grunted, glaring at me. "She is a very bad Muslim." "She is a very bad Muslim," Farouq agreed. I continued to grin wildly, attempting to charm Pacha Khan. "Is she scared of me?" he asked. "What's going on? What's he saying?" I interrupted. "He wants to know if you're scared of him," Farouq said. "Oh no," I said. "He seems like a perfectly nice guy. Totally harmless. Very kind." Farouq nodded and turned to Pacha Khan. "Of course she is scared of you," Farouq translated. "You are a big and terrifying man." I read this passage, loved it, and read the rest of the book in the hope it would give me more: more of this wit, more insight into its writer, more of an understanding of Afghanistan and America's involvement there. I got some, but not enough. I was often entertained and occasionally informed, but ultimately unsatisfied. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 31, 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0385347138
| 9780385347136
| 0385347138
| 3.46
| 9,364
| Apr 21, 2015
| Apr 21, 2015
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it was ok
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The short review: Occasionally interesting, but ultimately self-absorbed. The details: I keep reading books that I think are going to be discussions of The short review: Occasionally interesting, but ultimately self-absorbed. The details: I keep reading books that I think are going to be discussions of a subject when really they're about the author. I read The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee because I thought it would be about Harper Lee. I was rewarded for my nosiness by learning everything I never wanted to know about Marja Mills, the author. Similarly, I heard an interview with Kate Bolick on a book review podcast. She talked about the evolution of the word "spinster," the history of how unmarried women in America are treated, and some important "spinster" authors. I came to what I still think is the understandable conclusion that those were what this book would be about. I mean, I have a copy of Marilyn Yalom's A History of the Wife. It is, quite literally, a history of what being married and female has meant in the Western world throughout recorded history. I figured Spinster would be a sort of bookend to that work. Such a bookend is still needed. Bolick didn't feel like writing one. Which is fine. She can write whatever kind of book she wants to. If she wants to write an autobiography and she can find a publisher, good on her. I just wish she'd made it a bit clearer that this was a memoir with a certain slant, rather than a study of spinsterism. To be fair, I did learn a lot about some authors I hadn't heard of, like Neith Boyce, and some I had heard of but didn't know much about, like Maeve Brennan. I added a lot of books to my "must read" list after finishing Spinster. (Considering what an out-of-control monster that list is, maybe I shouldn't be listing this as a positive. But I'm not willing to be cured of this particular addiction, so I'll just go with it.) The problem is, I learned a lot more about an author I had no interest in whatsoever – specifically, Kate Bolick. Her autobiographical forays weren't nearly as tedious as Marja Mills', and she sounded like a really nice person in that interview. Still, I found myself asking this book time and time again, "Sweetie – why do you think I care?" Speaking of people talking to writers who aren't actually in the same room with them: Bolick considers herself friends with the five female authors she focuses on in this book. The fact that they're dead just makes it that much easier for her to get away with routinely calling them by their first names. Seriously – could we stop doing this, please? Could we all please FOR THE LOVE OF MY SANITY STOP referring to, say, Austen as "Jane" and Dickinson as "Emily"? Look, I get it. There are authors who are so brilliant that they make you feel as if they're right there in the room with you, telling you a story you already know and at the same time can't wait to hear more of. They make you feel the way you did the first time (or maybe the last time) you fell in love: "This is it. This is THE ONE FOR ME." I get it. I've been there. And that's just it. We've ALL been there. The fact that you happened to notice – all by your little self! – that an author is amazing doesn't make you special. It certainly doesn't make you part of that author's inner circle. It means that the writer is a genius. You may feel you know her, but let me assure you: she doesn't know you. And when you call her by her first name, you're implying she does. You're also not-so-coincidentally indulging in exactly the kind of disrespect female authors have suffered since there's been such a thing as a female author. I know writers who are absolutely batty about Shakespeare. Norrie Epstein is so infatuated with the Bard, she wrote a whole book called The Friendly Shakespeare in an effort to convert more people to the cause. You know what neither she nor any other author IN THE HISTORY OF THE FREAKIN' WORLD ever calls Shakespeare? William. True fact: I homeschool my son and wanted him to grow up reasonably literate. I thought a good first step in that direction would be to make sure he didn't suffer from a widespread epidemic I call "fear of Shakespeare." Someone who knew how much I love his plays once gave me a small stuffed Shakespeare doll. When my son was little, I referred to this doll as "Billy." I made him talk, and I always made him sound drunk, and he frequently roared out for more cakes and ale. "Stop yelling, Billy," my then-five-year-old-son would say. "You've had too much ale already." Mission accomplished. My son spent his younger years absolutely infatuated with A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. He often asked if Ariel could please come over and give him magic lessons. I wanted my son to have a comfortable relationship with The Bard, so I took him down a notch by referring to him by his first name. Women writers, even the ones who win awards and write classic novels and get their stuff on required reading lists, are not exactly suffering from a surfeit of respect. It would be nice if a writer like Kate Bolick, who identifies as a feminist and who actually has some good stuff to say on that subject, could consider setting a good example. Kate – since I'm sure she won't mind me calling her that – refers to Edna St. Vincent Millay as Edna, Maeve Brennan as Maeve, and Neith Boyce as – well, I'm sure you can guess. She also implies that she has a chatty relationship with them, or possibly she thinks she's channeling them: Maeve didn't get what all the fuss over sex was about. Sure, she said, she was no prude, but the men seemed to like it a lot better than she did. Neith argued that this was purely a historical-moment problem: practicing free love had made the men really good in bed; however, by Maeve's time, they'd all forgotten about the clitoris. Edna was skeptical: perhaps you prefer women? Bwahaha. I guess I should offer an award to anyone ballsy enough to brag that she began to experience a growing interest in the life and work of Edith Wharton, and "soon enough I was calling her Edith." Instead, I'm going to recommend that anyone who reads Wharton's autobiography and thinks she's on a first-name basis with the writer should see a doctor immediately. Or maybe just go in for a basic literacy test, because seriously those words on those pages do NOT mean what you think they mean. Of course, I guess I shouldn't expect better from a writer who talks about how boring other people's dreams are and then proves it by taking three pages to describe a dream she had. And I definitely shouldn't expect anything but on-the-page self-indulgence from a writer who'd hoped to be a professional poet and whose biggest objection to her own early efforts were that what she'd written didn't "remotely convey what I actually felt." If the poems you write are for your own pleasure or your therapist's use, that's important. If you want to go pro, shouldn't you be worrying less about your precious feelings and more about, I don't know, how GOOD your poems are? Believe it or not, I started this review thinking I'd give this book three stars. I'm going to go ahead and give it two because I'm grateful for the book recommendations I gleaned from it. And then I'm going to return it to the library (two days late, dang nab it) and get an early start on my anticipated New Year's resolution to ease up on the library stuff and start reading the books I already own. I'm thinking Marilyn Yalom's A History of the Wife might be a good start. But if Yalom – may I call her Marilyn? – starts starts talking about her own married life...seriously, heads are going to roll. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 25, 2015
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Sep 11, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1590517512
| 9781590517512
| 1590517512
| 3.49
| 8,433
| Oct 2013
| Jun 02, 2015
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it was ok
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The short review: Some good writing, but ultimately a letdown. The details: I got all excited when I read Musa, the snippet of Meursault that was excer The short review: Some good writing, but ultimately a letdown. The details: I got all excited when I read Musa, the snippet of Meursault that was excerpted in The New Yorker. Not only was it very well written, but I'd just reread The Stranger and this is a retelling of that story from the point of view of the brother of the man who was shot. I thought this book would be a lot like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a brilliant retelling of Jane Eyre from the madwoman's perspective. And the two novels do have a lot in common. Both of them address Western xenophobia, colonialism, the fear of "the other," and the significance of names. The one place where they differ is, to me, a weakness in Meursault. Rhys' novel acts as if it's a story being told in the same universe as Jane Eyre. Meursault goes one step further: the action takes place in a universe in which The Stranger is a nonfiction work. There are a lot of problems with this premise, at least the way Kamel Daoud handles it. In The Stranger, the murdered man is never named. Daoud's narrator is incensed by this, and rightly so. Imagine: your brother is murdered, and the murderer cares so little about who he killed that he can't even be bothered to learn his name. Worse: your brother is murdered for no particular reason by a descendant of the French colonizers of your native land, and thanks to the fact that this murderer is a good writer, your brother is now known only as "the Arab." A man who knows how to write kills an Arab who, on the day he dies, doesn't even have a name as if he'd hung it on a nail somewhere before stepping onto the stage. This is good writing, and fine so far as it goes. The problem is, Daoud takes it too far. The narrator's brother isn't just killed: his body disappears and his name is never mentioned by anyone, even in accounts of the murder trial. Then why was Meursault put on trial? If there's no corpse and no name, who was he accused of killing? Maybe this works as symbolism, but Meursault is supposed to be the story of something that really happened, written by a grieving brother. That's another problem with this novel: it can't make up its mind what it is. Sometimes it's grittily realistic. Sometimes it melts into metaphor. Oh, and the first half of this novel is so repetitious and so completely empty of plot or action that on page 71, I put a Post-It in to mark where I shouted, "Could something please HAPPEN, already?" Something does happen almost immediately after that. On page 75, to be exact. But by then it was too late, at least for me. A novel this short shouldn't have time to get boring. This one managed to. Here's how the first half of the book reads, in a nutshell: My brother is dead. He was murdered. He was murdered by a guy who wrote a famous book. So now everyone cares about the murderer instead of my brother. Who is dead. Because he was murdered. Specifically, by a guy who wrote a book about it. And now the book is famous and nobody cares about my brother. You know, the dead guy. Who was murdered. I wish I were exaggerating. There's some lovely prose here, and some clever references to Camus and his work; but eventually that stops being enough to keep a tired reader going. (I did finish this book. I'm stubborn that way.) Daoud's narrator also insists that the narrator of The Stranger was a sympathetic character: Everyone was knocked out by the perfect prose, by language capable of giving air facets like diamonds, and everyone declared their empathy with the murderer's solitude and offered him their most learned condolences. I know plenty of people who have read Camus, and I don't know a single person who thinks the narrator of The Stranger is anything but creepy. Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. I read Meursault because I liked what I saw in Musa and I was hoping for more. Unfortunately, more of the same was all I got. Wide Sargasso Sea changed Jane Eyre for me profoundly. They're both brilliant novels, and one of them now haunts the other in my mind. No such magic happened here. Meursault, like WSS, is not a book to read without reading its parent first. A reader should also bone up a bit on Algeria and its war for independence. But honestly, unless you're very curious and/or a completest, I'd stick to reading the excerpt. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 20, 2015
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Jun 12, 2015
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Paperback
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| 031636987X
| 9780316369879
| 031636987X
| 2.81
| 10,431
| Jun 12, 2014
| Jan 06, 2015
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liked it
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Hmmm. This book was beautifully written and masterfully creepy. Quietly terrifying -- it reminds me a lot of Rebecca in that respect. Gorgeous prose. A Hmmm. This book was beautifully written and masterfully creepy. Quietly terrifying -- it reminds me a lot of Rebecca in that respect. Gorgeous prose. A strong premise. A swift read. I have to give it a full three stars for all of that. The ending, however, was a huge disappointment to me. It's not just the ambiguity, though I'm human enough to be annoyed by that aspect of it. It's the abruptness. It felt rushed. It also felt utterly unrelated to the rest of the story. What I could understand I just didn't buy. What I was left to guess didn't terrify me the way it should have because it didn't ring true. I feel very let down, because Harriet Lane is a brilliant writer and Her shines a merciless light on marriage and motherhood. It starts as a top-notch psychological thriller and then goes to pieces literally in the last two pages. I still want to read Lane's previous novel, Alys, Always. Her writing is beautiful, and I'm in the mood for more even if this ending felt like a bit of a cheat. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Apr 24, 2015
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Apr 24, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0938190520
| 9780938190523
| 0938190520
| 4.22
| 1,491
| 1985
| Jan 03, 1995
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did not like it
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Boy howdy, do I feel like an idiot. Not one reviewer here says anything along the lines of, "Um, guys – what just happened?" Not one reader I could fin Boy howdy, do I feel like an idiot. Not one reviewer here says anything along the lines of, "Um, guys – what just happened?" Not one reader I could find rated it lower than 3 stars – and the vast majority of reviewers give it four or five, and swoon in their reviews. So I guess it's just me. I'm the dork who feels as if I stumbled into someone else's drug trip when I thought I was supposed to be reading a book about a poet and her work. I thought I was reasonably literate (for a civilian), but reading this book felt like having books flung at my head by an invisible assailant. If you know me, you know I'm all about the Post-Its when I read. And my library copy of My Emily Dickinson is stuck with its fair share – but all the passages I found worth hanging onto are quotations from other people's works. The only bits I marked that Susan Howe actually wrote are things I wanted to mention here because I disagree with them strenuously. "Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse," Howe says at one point, because apparently being a poet herself means having permission to speak on behalf of a long-dead writer. (Hint: NO.) And "Elizabeth Barrett Browning...failed as a poet herself." Excuse me? EBB wrote poems even non-poetry lovers can admire: If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Does that sound like the beginning of a failed sonnet? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote beautifully, and her writing is remembered – people quote her all the time. (She wrote the sonnet that begins, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.") By any reasonable standard, she did NOT fail as a poet. So I couldn't keep up with most of Howe's writing here, and I didn't like the few opinions I could understand. I feel like a weirdo and an idiot; but other than being glad to see some of the quotes Howe passed along from other writers, I did not enjoy this book, nor did I get much out of it. Back to the library it goes, and on to the next book about Dickinson I go. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 15, 2015
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Mar 15, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0547615590
| 9780547615592
| 0547615590
| 3.84
| 7,046
| Jan 22, 2013
| Jan 22, 2013
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it was ok
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I feel sad and kind of guilty that I didn't like this graphic memoir as much as I expected to. Sad because, well, duh – it's disappointing to be disap
I feel sad and kind of guilty that I didn't like this graphic memoir as much as I expected to. Sad because, well, duh – it's disappointing to be disappointed, and this sounded so promising. Guilty because Nicole Georges definitely had a story to tell, and I feel as if I caught maybe half of it. Partly that's because of Georges' style. I read plenty of comics and graphic novels, and I've never found it difficult to tell who was talking. In this book, I often did. Partly, though, I kept looking for an arc that just wasn't there. Georges keeps bringing up ideas and events that feel as if they're leading to some kind of payoff, and then it all fizzles out. Things happen almost at random, without much in the way of analysis. The story is vague and melancholy and the wrong kind of quiet. True fact: Nicole Georges' response to stress is to doze off. That's exactly how this story felt to me – as if she weren't quite awake through the telling of it, but expected me to be. I love graphic novels, but this one just didn't work for me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 26, 2015
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Jan 03, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1594205191
| 9781594205194
| 1594205191
| 3.45
| 7,862
| Jul 15, 2014
| Jul 15, 2014
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did not like it
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Marja Mills' The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Marja Mills. Negative reviewers on Marja Mills' The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Marja Mills. Negative reviewers on Goodreads are often urged to give a thought to the writers behind the books. These writers have hearts and souls and hopes and dreams. They care about what people say about their books. Fair enough. But what if all we ever hear about in a book is the heart and soul and hopes and dreams of the author in question, when what we were really hoping for was a peek at the person the book's supposed to be about? Perhaps reading this book is fitting punishment for anyone who wanted to read this book in the first place. Harper Lee, after all, insists that this book was not written with her approval or consent. If you need a better reason not to read it, how about: it's boring. Even if every word Mills wrote about Harper Lee is God's own truth, you're better off reading Lee's Wikipedia entry. It has more information, and it's short and to the point. Reading this book will expose you to such deathless prose as Marja Mills taking an entire paragraph to knock on Harper Lee's door: I raised my hand to knock and stopped. It occurred to me my cardigan might smell like the mildew that was my unwelcome roommate for the time being. The baskets of scented Walmart pine cones I placed strategically around the house only meant that the place now smelled of mildew with an odd note of cinnamon. Me, too? I lifted my forearm to my face and sniffed. Not great but passable. I knocked. That's right, kids. She gets to Lee's door, thinks about knocking on the door, and then knocks on her door, only taking about a hundred words to do so. If the door drama sounds almost too exciting, bear in mind that there are also paper towels. Julia put the bowl on the counter to my left and set out a paper towel. "For the seeds." Mills obediently slips her scuppernong seeds into the paper towel a few paragraphs later. And then, on the next page: I realized I was still holding the crumpled paper towel. "Is there a..." "I'll take that," Julia said. She threw away the paper towel and returned to the stove. If that's not enough paper-product drama for you, have no fear! About forty pages later, there are: more paper towels! The paper towel dispenser was on the wall, several steps from where Alice stood. To reach it, she would have had to grip her walker with wet hands. I handed her a paper towel. Alice dried her hands and then matter-of-factly wiped clean the area around the sink. There's more, but I'm having a hard time staying awake so you're just going to have to imagine it. If you need more reasons not to read this book, or something to help you fall asleep tonight, I offer you the following lengthy, pointless mess: Late one morning, Nelle [Harper Lee] and I were taking the long way back from McDonald's to West Avenue. Instead of making the usual right onto Alabama, Nelle took the back way out of the McDonald's lot. She made a left onto the Highway 21 Bypass. We sped along past the Subway sandwich shop and the Ace Hardware store, both to our left, and up the incline to the intersection with Pineville Road. The Bypass ended here. Turn right and you were on the rural stretch of highway to Julia Munnerlyn's house in the country and, just beyond, to the tiny town of Peterman. Turn left on Pineville, as we did, and you were headed toward the Methodist church. Immediately to our right, we drove past a couple of abandoned structures, a weathered house and a dilapidated gas station, neither of which looked to have been occupied since the Depression, give or take. We passed Dale's large redbrick Baptist church on our right. Nelle slowed and glanced over at me. We were coming up on First Methodist, its white steeple stately against a blue sky. "Do you mind if we stop off in the cemetery?" I did not mind. She knew her way around the cemetery and idled the car in front of a few headstones. They weren't names I recognized. She didn't volunteer information about the interred and I didn't ask. Something reminded her of a story and a smile spread. "Has Alice told you about our Aunt Alice and Cousin Louie encountering a problem at the cemetery?" Nelle laughed. I'd heard about other Aunt Alice capers, to be sure, but none in a cemetery. "You see, Cousin Louie took Aunt Alice and a couple of other old ladies to pay a visit to the cemetery." This was not in Monroeville but, she thought, Atmore. They paid their respects at a number of graves, and were having a perfectly pleasant outing, as cemetery visits go. Then Louie, who was driving, got the underside of the car caught on a mound of grass – more of a small, steep hill – she tried to drive over. The car was stuck there, like a turtle on a short pole. Louie tried to go forward. Nothing. She tried to put the sedan in reverse. Nothing. They were stuck. The ladies peered out the car windows. They would have to half-step, half-drop out of the car to get out. And then there still would be the problem of what to do next. Louie clambered down onto the grass from the driver's seat. She took several steps back and surveyed the situation. She walked around the car, perched firmly atop the grass mound, and issued her report to the others, who remained in the vehicle. "What confronts us," Louie declared, "is a problem of physics." Nelle dissolved into laughter as she said this, so much so that I never did hear the solution. I hope you didn't doze off and miss key details like passing the Subway sandwich shop on the way to that unfinished, only-funny-if-you-were-there-for-it non-story. If reading that made you hunger for a couple of hundred more pages of such writing, read this book. If it inspired you to Google Steve Martin's frenzied rant on how not everything is an anecdote, don't. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 10, 2014
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Sep 15, 2014
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Sep 10, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0440212561
| 9780440212560
| 0440212561
| 4.26
| 1,082,375
| Jun 01, 1991
| Jun 02, 1992
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did not like it
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I gave up on this book because I was sustaining permanent damage from reading it and I was afraid I'd start hitting back. And it's a borrowed copy, so
I gave up on this book because I was sustaining permanent damage from reading it and I was afraid I'd start hitting back. And it's a borrowed copy, so that wouldn't be cool. In fairness, I should say there's a lot of good writing here. I really enjoyed the beginning chapters. They even kind of cracked me up, because I have friends who love genealogy and their husbands always get that look when they start talking about it and that's exactly how I imagined Claire looking when her husband Frank started droning on and on about his ancestors. And Claire is a nurse, which is a really good transportable skill if you're going to be thrown back in time which it turns out Claire is. (Sorry. Spoiler alert.) Can you imagine if you were one of those Nerds On Wheels computer repair people and you got sent to eighteenth-century Scotland? You'd be totally screwed. But Claire's skills come in handy without seeming out of place. A woman who's a dab hand at healing is always welcome in Olden Tymes, so Claire is able to land on her feet and kind of get a job once she figures out what happened to her and comes to terms with it. Which is pretty much immediately. Which is when the book started to lose me. There's, like, no culture shock whatsoever. She gets knocked back two hundred years or so. She goes, "WHOA. What the flimminy?" She starts being The Lady To Go To With Your Eighteenth-Century Scottish Boo-Boos. That's it. There are a few mentions of things like how shoes fit differently back then and anachronistic language, but there's no sense of the kind of thing a person from the future would be startled by. Not the food, not the weird underwear, nothing. Claire just settles in and starts being the resident nurse at a castle. She keeps half an eye out for a chance to get to the place that can take her back to the future, but it has all the deep emotional urgency that I feel when I really should stop by the grocery store on the way home but it won't kill anybody if I go tomorrow instead. Like, whatevs. Still, there was plenty to keep me interested. Like – leeches! The stuff about leeches was cool. And the info about healing herbs. And that kid getting his ear hammered to a board because he was caught stealing. Really, this book would have worked fine for me if it hadn't been for what everybody else seems to love about it, which is the Romantic Interest. Which still would have been fine, even with the whole SHE'S MARRIED ALREADY thingy. But, okay – let's say that she has to marry that guy. They aren't in love when they get married and so the whole point of the book is to watch their relationship develop, while Claire struggles with guilt and fear and thoughts of how her real husband must be worrying about her and how the heck does time-travel work in this book and WHY IS SHE JUST ASSUMING THAT TIME IS GOING BY IN THE FUTURE AT THE SAME RATE IT IS FOR HER? WHY, I ASK YOU? (Sorry. I'm a minor-league nerd, and this part really bugged me.) So what I just described would have been a book I could read and enjoy, or at least read and not scream in pain. But apparently someone gave Diana Gabaldon the creepiest piece of writing advice EVER, and it was this: "Listen – you know how if you're cooking and you're worried it's not turning out very well, just add bacon if it's savory and chocolate chips if it's sweet and everybody'll love it? Well, if you're working on your first novel and you don't know what to have happen next, just throw in some rape! Or attempted rape! Works like a charm!" She follows this advice to the letter, and I'm sorry but I have to go home now. I managed to read the "she disobeys him so he beats her with his belt" scene. I almost punched the book right in the face, but as I said, it's a friend's copy so I had to be nice. Then I managed to get through the "she forgives him for the beating, like, the next freakin' day" scene. I started fantasizing about this book getting stuck in the elevator of a burning building, but I was able to hold on and keep going. Then there was the scene where Big Kilted Oaf – I mean, Jamie – starts laughing about the whole beating thing and reminiscing about how hot she looked when he was holding her down beating the crap out of her and she forgives him for that, too. Like, instantly. And I'm all, "WHO AM I AND WHAT AM I DOING HERE?" And still I staggered on. Heaven only knows why. And how did the author reward me for my perseverance? What is this book all about? What's the recurring literary theme? Rape. Attempted rape. More attempted rape. Marital rape. A little more marital rape. Conversations about rape. GIGGLING during conversations about rape. And I'm all, "I'M OUT OF HERE AND I DON'T CARE HOW MANY OF MY FRIENDS HATE ME." I read 444 pages in a row, plus I skimmed a lot of the rest of it including the creepiest, rapiest Chekhov's gun I've ever seen fired. Do NOT tell me I didn't give this book a fair chance. I TOTALLY DID. In case you need proof, here's a list of all the things I learned about rape from Outlander. 1. It's a bummer for the woman involved, but save your sympathy for her brother. (Assuming you have any emotional response at all, which you won't if you're Claire.) Jamie tells Claire about his sister Jenny being raped by a dastardly redcoat. He has a good chuckle talking about how Jenny punches and kicks her attacker. She isn't able to hold him off forever, though. And Jamie gets flogged for trying to defend her. Claire's response? "I'm sorry. It must have been terrible for you." It is terrible for Jamie to have his sister "dishonor herself wi' such scum." (Nice.) So terrible that he can't bring himself to go back home to her when he gets out of prison, and "see her again, after what happened." She's impregnated by the rape. Left on her own both emotionally and financially, she is forced to become the mistress of another English soldier. Jamie finally sends her what money he can, but can't bring himself to write to her. Because, you know, "what could I say?" Claire's response? "Oh, dear." (Really -- how could I give up on this book when the main character is so sympathetic?) 2. Rape can lead to comically inaccurate ideas about how people do "the nasty!" After Jamie and Claire consummate their marriage, Jamie confesses that he "didna realize that ye did it face to face. I thought ye must do it the back way, like; like horses, ye know." Claire tries to keep a straight face as she asks him why on earth he thought that. "I saw a man take a woman plain, once, out in the open. But that...well, it was a rape, was what it was, and he took her from the back. It made some impression on me, and as I say, it's just the idea stuck." So of course Claire flips out and asks him what the heck that was all about. Who was it? Why was he witness to a rape "out in the open"? Was he able to help the woman? What happened to her? Oh. Wait. This is Claire the Emotionless. She doesn't ask him anything, and he doesn't say anything else on the subject. Instead, they cuddle and talk about how much fun what they just did was. Because a story about rape out in the open is just the kind of pillow talk a woman wants to hear when she's relaxing after a nice bout of bigamy. I mentioned I loved this book, right? I didn't? Good. 3. Nearly getting raped turns you on for Mr. Right! Jamie and Claire are off on their own in the woods for a spot of marital bliss when they're set upon by highwaymen. Claire is nearly raped, but manages to kill her assailant. Yes, she was a nurse during World War II, but I think there's a difference between witnessing violence and inflicting it yourself. She kills the guy in the nick of time. He's on top of her, so she undoubtedly gets his blood all over her. Meanwhile, Jamie manages to dispatch the other two guys. And then Claire flips out about the fact that she was just attacked, and she had to kill a guy, and she had to kill a guy at close quarters with a knife. Oh. Wait. This is Claire. She has no response to any of this, now or later. Well, she does have one response: When I put my hands on his shoulders, he pulled me hard against his chest with a sound midway between a groan and a sob. We took each other then, in a savage, urgent silence, thrusting fiercely and finishing within moments. If your marital love life has been a bit blah lately, why not get attacked and then kill the guy? It'll spice things right up! 4. It's not rape if it's your husband and he promises he'll hurry... "Jamie! Not here!" I said, squirming away and pushing my skirt down again. "Are ye tired, Sassenach?" he asked with concern. "Dinna worry, I won't take long." (next page): He took a firm grip on my shoulders with both hands. "Be quiet, Sassenach," he said with authority. "It isna going to take verra long." I gather it's especially not rape if your husband has an ethnic-slur nickname for you. He should use this at least three times a page. (Yes, "Sassenach" is derogatory. It'd be like if you were white and your husband called you his little gringo. Although that would actually be kind of funny if he's white, too. I think I want to get my husband to start calling me that now. But I digress.) 5. ...or if it's your husband and he just really, really wants it. Claire is saying no, and no again. She's still in pain from the last time they did it, because he didn't take no for an answer even when she told him quite honestly he was hurting her. So how does our romantic lead respond? James Fraser was not a man to take no for an answer. ...Gentle he would be, denied he would not. I quoted that last line to my husband, and he got the same look on his face that I had on mine all through a two-day bout with food poisoning. If this book works for you, fine. I'm not here to judge. I'm just asking that you understand how completely creeped out I was by all this, and not tell me I didn't give it a fair chance. I did. I really hate not finishing a book once I start it, but I just couldn't stand it any more. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 05, 2014
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Aug 25, 2014
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Aug 05, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 145550176X
| 9781455501762
| 145550176X
| 3.35
| 4,767
| Apr 08, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
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did not like it
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The short version: This book started out good. Then it got boring. Then it got irritatingly tedious. Then it got offensively bad. True fact: It's impo The short version: This book started out good. Then it got boring. Then it got irritatingly tedious. Then it got offensively bad. True fact: It's impossible to read while simultaneously rolling one's eyes, smacking the book in question on the nearest hard surface, and yelling, "Oh, come ON!" I was doing all of those things on a regular basis by the time I hit the halfway mark. That's why this book took me so long to finish, and why I'm going to have to pay a library fine on a book I hate. Which only makes me hate it more. Specifics: Barbara Ehrenreich was an intelligent, sensitive child. She was raised by dogmatic atheists who taught her to despise dogmatic religious beliefs. Her parents were also extremely unhappy – one of them eventually committed suicide. Everybody who thinks this is a recipe for growing up to have the kind of midlife crisis that leaves you deeply religious, please raise your hand. (In case you can't see from where you're sitting: Everyone in the entire world just raised their hands.) Ehrenreich spends an entire book refusing to make this kind of obvious connection. The adolescent experience this book is supposed to be about is so poorly described that it's hard to sum up here, but basically: she took a trip to the desert. She arrived there after having had very little sleep and very little to eat. She'd also spent her entire adolescence on a ferocious quest to define the meaning of life. (Ehrenreich seems to think this was an unusual thing for a teenager to do. Ehrenreich has apparently never bothered paying attention to any actual teenagers other than herself.) When she gets to the desert, exhausted and hungry, she has a startling experience that I'm sure would have resonated profoundly with me if Ehrenreich had bothered to tell me what the heck actually happened. Here's the closest she comes to explaining: At some point in my predawn walk – not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time – the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with "the All," as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. She couldn't just be a sensitive, intelligent teenager made emotionally vulnerable by hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and a landscape entirely new to her. Those couldn't add up to a sudden terrifying sense of her own insignificance. That would be too simple. Too ordinary. All her life, she's felt herself to be someone special – an atheist in a country of believers, a skeptic among people who value conformity. Now suddenly she is nothing but a pitiful creature who could die of want and be swallowed up, utterly unnoticed, in these terrifyingly stark surroundings. That emotional moment couldn't be meaningful in and of itself – a humbling experience that would prompt anyone to consider her life from a new and different angle. No, of course not. Being shaken up in this way must mean – duh! – that there really is something out there, some "Other" that needs to be found and defined. I'm not objecting to the idea that there may well be "something out there." I'm arguing with the premise that having a gut-wrenching emotional experience while wandering young, hungry, thirsty, and tired in the desert makes someone an expert on how the universe works. That's how Ehrenreich presents herself: the ultimate expert on the ultimate question. She never says "might be" when she can say "must be." She never says "I think" when she can say "I know." She trash-talks science for not exploring religious and spiritual matters, which makes about as much sense as sneering at Stephen Hawking for not being a concert pianist. The scientific method is not equipped to grapple with philosophical questions. Why is this a problem? It's simply a statement of fact. Science is good at what it does, and what it does is narrowly defined. My food processor isn't equipped to make my bed for me. It's still a good food processor, and my bed still needs making. Well, okay. Wild God reminds me of my favorite book of the Bible – an apocalyptic, apocryphal work called The Second Book of Esdras. Esdras is visited by the angel Uriel, and is understandably curious. Specifically, he asks some pretty heavy questions about the nature of God, good, and evil. Uriel listens patiently enough and then says, sure, he'd be happy to answer Esdras' questions. But – fair's fair – Esdras should answer some questions first, mmkay? If Esdras can answer three questions about three ordinary earthly matters, Uriel will tell him everything he wants to know about how things work in the rest of the universe. Aw, what the heck – Esdras only has to solve one of the Earthly problems Uriel sets for him. Esdras thinks this is fair: I said, "Speak on, my lord." And he said to me, "Go, weigh for me the weight of fire, or measure for me a measure of wind, or call back for me the day that is past." I answered and said, "Who of those that have been born can do this, that you ask me concerning these things?" And he said to me, "If I had asked you, 'How many dwellings are in the heart of the sea, or how many streams are at the source of the deep, or how many streams are above the firmament, or which are the exits of hell, or which are the entrances of paradise?' perhaps you would have said to me, 'I never went down into the deep, nor as yet into hell, neither did I ever ascend into heaven.' But now I have asked you only about fire and wind and the day, things through which you have passed and without which you cannot exist, and you have given me no answer about them!" And he said to me, "You cannot understand the things with which you have grown up; how then can your mind comprehend the way of the Most High?" I love this passage so much I want to marry it, but that's not the point. The point is: Somebody, please, read this to Barbara Ehrenreich. And then ask her how exactly she has the nerve to admit that neither she nor anyone else knows everything about the human brain – a thing without which we cannot exist – yet she thinks we should skip past figuring out everything in this world and go right to an Unknowable she insists must be out there. Because, you know, there's no way she could just be feeling something. If she has a strong sense that there's some Other out there, it must be true. Human brains never give us weird signals. Our sensations and emotions are always totally reliable. Ask any paranoid schizophrenic. Read this book if you enjoy arrogant self-importance with a side of angst-ridden teenage poetry. (Of course Ehrenreich quotes her youthful scribblings. And of course the poems and deep thoughts she shares are totally awesome, provided that means something completely different from what the dictionary says.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 23, 2014
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Aug 23, 2014
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Jul 10, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 140168968X
| 9781401689681
| 140168968X
| 3.93
| 17,470
| Nov 05, 2013
| Sep 10, 2013
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did not like it
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Just...no. The premise of this book is good: a sensitive, intelligent girl who was abused by her parents and betrayed by child protection services find Just...no. The premise of this book is good: a sensitive, intelligent girl who was abused by her parents and betrayed by child protection services finds shelter in books and hides her real self behind literary characters. That idea is fine. The execution is an epic fail. Dear Mr. Knightley is also based on Daddy Longlegs, the 1912 novel by Jean Webster. If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. It's aged so well that my 16-year-old son, who sports a Mohawk, teaches LEGO engineering classes, and composes electronic dance music, read it and laughed his head off. It's just that good. Daddy Longlegs is the story of an orphan who's given a scholarship to college. The only condition is, she has to write letters regularly to her benefactor, whom she regularly yells at in print for never writing back to her. The story is terrific and the ending makes you want to hug the whole world. It's my new favorite book ever, and I only read it because another reviewer mentioned that Dear Mr. Knightley is based on it. So I'm grateful to Dear for introducing me to that older, terrific story. But this book still bites. Daddy may not have been particularly realistic in its premise, but the reader doesn't care. The narrator wins you over immediately, and not in some mushy-gushy way – she's sharp as a tack. Transporting that premise to the present day feels weird. The narrator, Sam Moore, is designed to annoy – oh, sorry, I mean she has lessons to learn and lots of growing to do! Whatever. She's irritating. Plus Dear is trying to be a combination of magic-wonderfulness and gritty realism, and it fails on both counts. So what's a reader left with? Hmm. Um. Well, the author comes up with some refreshingly new and original character types! Like a kindly old priest who never loses his temper and is very helpful! And a kindly old couple who have everything they could ever want except children of their own to love! And a seemingly tough high school coach with a heart of gold! And a black teenager who uses the word "ain't" a lot! Okay, no. Well...how about a narrator who's in her twenties and has apparently never even heard of sex, and wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in it if she had? That sounds awesome, right? Yeah, it really isn't. It turns out that any direct, lewd, crude description of sex couldn't possibly be as creepy as the tiptoeing around it this book does. Put it to you this way: Sam is such a freakin' delicate little flower of a thing, she can't even bring herself to say the phrase "sports bra" when describing exactly what attire she needs to go running. As in, it's important to the plot that she's suddenly shopping for top-to-toe coverage for an impulse ten-mile run she's about to take. She can mention needing "shoes." "Shorts," fine. And then there's just, you know, "everything else" she needs. Really? For heaven's sake, somebody tell this author it's okay to talk about sports bras. Like, in front of your grandma and everything. Even if they're there to support "the girls." Some people have pointed out that this is a Christian novel. Weirdly, I would have felt better if it had been more so. If Sam were a character being pulled one way by secular "anything goes" ideas and another by the Christians trying to show her the way to real happiness, that would at least have made sense. As it is, Sam has only a vague idea of what she believes so far as religion goes; but she's kissed for the first time in her twenties, and apparently that's the farthest she ever feels like going. No. Just no. You can have a character who has trust issues too damaging to allow her to feel safe being intimate with someone. You can have a character with strong ideas about sex being Marriage Only territory, and then put her in a setting where physical attraction and moral ideals have to duke it out. But to have a woman in her twenties just kind of floating around thinking, "Wow, kissing is kind of fun! That guy's kind of cute! Wait...he wants what now? Me to 'spend the night'? Well...I guess maybe...if that's what he wants...but no, I think that's sort of supposed to be not something I should do..." Please. Add some lousy scene-setting and a lot of atrocious dialogue, and you've got yourself a crowd-pleaser! If that crowd is people who've never read a good book before and don't know what one's supposed to be like! Also: what is up with that last chapter being in the third-person, when the rest of the book is first-person narrative via letters? Is this supposed to be the novelist character telling things? Why? Why? Why would it be in third-person? Does that mean he's just making stuff up now? Did the whole ending never even happen? That would be fine with me. The ending of Daddy Longlegs works. Borrowing it for a contemporary novel is creepy with a side of stalker. I'm so done with this book. Thank heaven. Save yourself. Read Daddy Longlegs. Read real Austen novels. Do NOT read Dear Mr. Knightley. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 30, 2014
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Jul 07, 2014
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Jun 30, 2014
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1616148519
| 9781616148515
| 1616148519
| 2.99
| 75
| Jan 01, 2014
| Feb 11, 2014
|
did not like it
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I received a review copy of this book free from the publisher, Prometheus Books. I think it’s pretty clear from how many stars I did(n’t) give it that
I received a review copy of this book free from the publisher, Prometheus Books. I think it’s pretty clear from how many stars I did(n’t) give it that this did not bias me in its favor. Many aspects of Hybrid Tiger are odd and off-putting. Its structure, for instance. There are chapters within chapters. Those chapter-chapters are titled, and they have numbered sections. Sorry to sound narrow-minded, but this is weird. The chapters are frequently interrupted by mock dialogues Huang created, “presenting questions I believe a typical set of parents from each culture [Chinese and American] would ask about my arguments.” Initially, I found these dialogues annoying because they broke up my reading experience. I didn’t understand why, if he thought he had such a good idea as to what kind of questions parents would have about his ideas, he didn’t simply address those questions in the text. Eventually, I found them annoying because they became really, really self-serving. Huang literally writes himself applause lines in these dialogues, and then modestly accepts the applause he’s giving himself. Except he’s saying that I’m applauding him, and excuse me but I’m really, really not. At one point, the American parents say in reply to one of his arguments, “Interesting!” That’s it. That’s their line. It gives Huang the chance to go on being “interesting” without making his paragraph too huge. In another alleged dialogue, the American parents’ side of the dialogue is this: “Very interesting!” “A very meaningful exchange.” “She sounds like a very wise and nice mom.” Seriously. Even if the rest of the book were brilliant, it’s impossible to read this without thinking how full of himself this guy is. And it turns out that the rest of the book isn’t brilliant. Most of it is just muddled. Huang insists, in his title and periodically throughout the book, that he thinks a hybrid approach to education is best – neither entirely Chinese nor entirely American, but a blend of the strengths of both. Chinese students are outperforming the pants off American students when it comes to standardized tests, but where are the Chinese Nobel prizes? Where is a Chinese Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates? “As good as Chinese education seems to be at producing high-performing students in the early stages of education,” Huang points out, “American education excels at creating superstar academics in the later stages.” So what’s his conclusion? What’s the perfect hybrid? American parents should be like Chinese ones. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the whole “secret.” Be a “Chinese” parent (regardless of ethnicity), but do it in America. And then some kind of miracle will happen, and your kid will score a million points on every test and become a doctor named Steve Jobs. A Steve Jobs who finishes college, of course. Every time Huang brings up examples of how Chinese parenting and education differs from American, he applauds Chinese methods and urges them on his readers. It never occurs to him that maybe it’s a zero-sum game – maybe a student can’t spend hours every day focused solely on excelling at standardized tests AND possess (or hang on to) the sort of originality of mind that’s required of innovators. He describes in great detail how he got his son performing two years ahead of his classmates in math. He adds, almost parenthetically, that his son now hates math and is grateful that, having finished college, he’ll never have to do any ever again. Conclusion? Huang’s Chinese-based parenting and teaching is awesome, and we should all be like him. Really? Americans are also wrong in focusing too much on the individual and not enough on the group, Huang insists. (Again – where’s the hybrid?) He lambasts a Chinese athlete who refused to throw a match as she was instructed to by her coach in a world championship. Huang says that “the tactic of throwing matches to arrange favorable matchups in future encounters is very similar to changing players in football, basketball, volleyball, or soccer.” Uh, yeah, maybe – except THOSE ARE ALL LEGAL. They’re aboveboard. Throwing matches isn’t “critical strategizing and decision making [sic].” It’s lying. So, yeah. I could easily spend this entire review being annoyed because Huang promises readers a hybrid strategy and instead spends the whole book talking about how awesome he is. But this book doesn’t just fail to deliver on its own stated premise. It completely misrepresents another and much better book about Western vs. Chinese ideas about parenting and education. And it does so in such a way that readers who haven’t read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother will be led to believe she’s a horrifying, abusive parent. Huang supposedly read Chua’s book. He makes it clear throughout his own book that he has no sense of humor, so I suppose it’s understandable that he wouldn’t understand her work. His utter lack of comprehension is still annoying. He spends an entire page talking about how Chua isn’t a “real” tiger mother because tigers are very gentle with their cubs. “Amy Chua’s decision to refer to herself as the Tiger Mother is a confusing choice,” he concludes. Um, not really. Not if you read the chapter where Chua points out that she’s talking about having been born in the Year of the Tiger. Her “tiger” qualities are astrological, not zoological. She refers to this several times in the course of her short book. It’s kind of hard to miss. Ever hear that saying, “You have a right to your own opinion, but you don’t have a right to your own facts”? That applies to Huang's work. Huang insists repeatedly that Chua’s ideas and parenting methods are not, not, NOT Chinese. In order to do this, he has to miss her point so hard and twist her words so vigorously I’m surprised he doesn’t sprain both wrists and give himself a concussion in the process. That’s acceptable, if regrettable. You know what’s not okay? Saying she did horrible things THAT SHE DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO. Sorry to yell, but this really steamed my clams. In the same chapter in which Huang says, “Spanking implies love without saying it outright,” he insists Amy Chua did something much worse to her kids than any physical punishment could ever be: She detailed in her book how she destroyed her daughter’s toys one by one in front of her. This was incredibly cruel. There’s a saying: "Kids treat toys as their friends; adults treat their friends as toys." Children often sleep with their toys; they talk to them as friends. As a result, destroying these toys in front of your child is a brutal spiritual punishment. If Chua had let her daughter choose between spanking and destroying her toys, I’m certain she would have chosen to be spanked. I read Chua’s book years ago, when it first came out. I didn’t remember this scene, so I ran to the library and grabbed a copy. It’s a quick read – and it’s an even better book than I remember, but that’s another story for another review. Guess what? Chua doesn’t do anything remotely like what Huang describes. True tale of terror: I homeschool my son. Mostly it’s awesome. But we do butt heads a lot, because we have a lot in common. Sounds like a contradiction, but it’s true. We’re both anxious, conscientious, high-strung, and literal-minded. It’s amazing we’ve survived as long as we have living in the same small apartment. Chua, who spent as much time educating her daughters as any homeschooler I know, had the same sort of relationship with her younger daughter that I do with my son. She and I also have much the same sort of weird parenting humor. I have asked my son if he’s having trouble with math because he’s on drugs. (“Yes, Mom. Lots and lots of drugs.”) I have demanded that he spend more time on his schoolwork and less time with floozies. (“It’s just the one floozy, Mom.”) If you overheard me, you might well conclude that I’m an antifeminist freak and a horrible mother. Getting back to Amy Chua. She and her younger daughter were butting heads over practicing a particularly difficult piano piece. After a week of drilling, here’s what happened: Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed, and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. What was poor little Lulu’s response to that? “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?” Those aren’t the words of a cowed, abused child. That’s somebody who knows very well her mom is just blowing off steam. The bulk of Huang’s book is disappointing. The parts where he talks about Amy Chua are actively offensive. She can probably afford to ignore his book. I’d recommend everyone else do so, too. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 21, 2014
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Mar 03, 2014
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Feb 05, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0385351232
| 9780385351232
| 0385351232
| 3.66
| 59,713
| Oct 08, 2013
| Oct 08, 2013
|
it was ok
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Hoo, boy. Where do I start? Actually, that's easy. Any review of Longbourn should feature this warning right at the top: If you are an Austen purist, th Hoo, boy. Where do I start? Actually, that's easy. Any review of Longbourn should feature this warning right at the top: If you are an Austen purist, this book will give you a stroke and a heart attack and possibly cancer. So there's that. Oh, also: Any novel written by a non-servant is apparently required by law to feature at least one passage in which a character who is a servant will ponder life as a person of leisure and decide, "Naw. Overrated." Yeah. THAT happened. I wanted to adore this book because I'm tired of people talking about how lovely life was in the Regency. No, it wasn't. Not even if you were rich, although that was *miles* better than being poor. Even if you were rich, there was no plumbing, very little in the way of social mobility, and nothing remotely resembling a maxi pad, let alone a tampon. (Not even, in spite of what the author of Longbourn says, any "napkins." Where would you put one? There wasn't anything in the way of underwear as we know it. See Susanne Alleyn's awesome Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders for convincing evidence of that.) There was no reliable birth control, and no quick-and-easy food for those nights when you just don't feel like cooking. Women spent all day preparing or looking after the work of food preparation, and routinely wrote their wills when they became pregnant. There were no no-fault divorces, and very few "he's TOTALLY at fault" divorces even if your husband was an adulterous batterer. And -- I'm saving the worst for last here -- there was NO CHOCOLATE. Okay, there was a drink called chocolate, but it was outrageously expensive and it wasn't sweet. I love Austen's novels, but I have no illusions about the era in which she lived and wrote. I worked as a live-in domestic myself, and I'm constantly thinking about the servants who made those leisured lives possible. So I was excited to read Longbourn, a retelling of Pride & Prejudice from the vantage point of one of the Bennet's housemaids. I was sold when I read the pull-quote every review featured: "If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she'd most likely be a sight more careful with them." Perfect. Think about that the next time you read the scene in P&P where Lizzy shows up at Bingley's house with her petticoat three inches deep in mud. I admire Jo Baker's determination to show the story from a different angle. Her premise is solid, her prose beautiful. So why am I so put-out by this book? Partly because it's a bummer from beginning to end. It's Les Miserables without the funny musical numbers. I think it's just as dehumanizing to servants to assume their lives are endless misery as it is to ignore them. Yes, this book has a happy ending, technically. But it starts out bleak, it continues dire, and it crosses the finish line with a vague "So that turned out okay, I guess." Speaking of bleak: Anyone who's read Bleak House will probably not find the "surprise middle" of Longbourn particularly surprising. Many who have read P&P will find aspects of it offensive. Jo Baker takes a lot of liberties with P&P. I never thought of myself as a purist, but this bothered me. For instance, she insists on following the heavily trod (trodden? trode? whatever) path of Mary Bennet being infatuated with Mr. Collins. Know what it says in the book about that? "Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him. She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others; there was a solidity in his reflections which often struck her, and though by no means so clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as her's [sic], he might become a very agreeable companion." "She thinks he's a fixer-upper," my husband commented when I read this to him. But everybody -- movie-makers, Austen "sequel" writers -- somehow turns this into Mary adoring Mr. Collins from afar and longing to have him as her own. And of course Baker follows suit. She also features quotations from P&P at the beginning of every chapter. Except in the flashback section, where they wouldn't make sense. Except I don't think they make sense anywhere. What are they supposed to be? Messages from God? Anyway. Back to the liberties. Mary's in love. Mr. Collins is a really nice guy, not at all pompous or judgmental. Mr. Bennet has a lot of lines, and one of them is cuttingly sarcastic. One. Are you ishing me? Speaking of ish: Baker talks about it a lot. By name. It is, apparently, everywhere in Regency England. You couldn't open your carriage door without smacking into a load of ish. I'm surprised the publisher didn't offer a special scratch-and-sniff edition of Longbourn, just to get the point across. Point being: Wow, you guys, was there a lot of manure in the bad old days. You know what there wasn't? The kind of 21st-century thinking Baker gives her miserable underclass characters. The line about how Miss Bennet could be a little more careful of her things was perfect. But there's no way a teenaged maidservant in the eighteenth century was thinking, "Really no one should have to deal with another person's dirty linen." Really? This little revolutionary decided all on her own not that laundry day sucks -- a sentiment that holds true to this very day -- but that all people should have the doing of their own underthings? Similarly, Mrs. Hill the housekeeper is often burdened by Mrs. Bennet's emotional demands. Mrs. Hill has quite enough work to do to fill her day already without having to offer a shoulder to cry on just when the bread is rising. That works. I love that. This very Mrs. Hill -- overworked, miserable, a character who seems to exist only to be taken advantage of -- is the one who decides near the end of the book that, really, there's not much difference between living as a servant and being a genteel lady. "The end was all the same." I mentioned this is a happy book, right? The writing is very, very good. The author has clearly done her research, and it shows without seeming show-offy. But in the end, this book was just. A. Bummer. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 05, 2014
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Mar 09, 2014
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Oct 25, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 1451699689
| 9781451699685
| 1451699689
| 3.54
| 3,193
| Jan 17, 2012
| Aug 07, 2012
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it was ok
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Are all autobiographies and memoirs now required to be vague? First Unorthodox, and now this. Both books were written by intelligent women who had som
Are all autobiographies and memoirs now required to be vague? First Unorthodox, and now this. Both books were written by intelligent women who had something to say and then spent half the book refusing to say it. Look: If I'm reading your story, it's because I want to hear your story. So tell it, already. If you're a Mormon and a feminist, what does that mean to you? What does feminism mean in the context of Mormonism? You mention that when you were growing up in the Mormon church, twelve-year-old boys got the priesthood and girls got a Marie Osmond beauty manual. You mention the fact that men get the power of the priesthood and women have "the gift of motherhood." You claim that Mormon married women are never supposed to work outside the home (though I've known plenty who do and see no contradiction between paid employment and their faith). And then you stop talking. What does all that mean to you? You talk about what the church tells girls about sex and sexuality, and hint at flashbacks of sexual abuse. Then you talk about meeting a terrific non-Mormon guy and marrying him. That's it? Was it hard for you to become a fully realized sexual being? Have you managed that, in fact? Did getting close to you in every sense require a lot of patience on his part? If you don't want to talk about sex, fine; but if you tell me a story about getting felt up in a car as a teenager and then having to confess to your bishop and feeling really weird about the fact that the whole time you felt nothing at all, you've made me want to know when (or that) everything clicked for you in that department. You talk about being terrified of being excommunicated by the Mormon church for your writing, your activism, and your feelings. Maybe that's why so much of this book seems so vague. If you don't give too many specifics, you can't get in too much trouble. I'm not sure that's a tenable philosophy. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 20, 2012
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Oct 20, 2012
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Paperback
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