Fail! (March Reads)

One from the archives, a photo I called "Failure!" when I posted it on this day last year. (Ugh, has it really been a whole year?)



So March then might just be failure month for me. Want more proof?

I'm didn't make my monthly thirteen book goal this month. (So it's good that I'm six books up from January and February.) I'm going to blame the copious amounts of benadryl I've been taking for my allergies. I just wasn't feeling the books and the reading this month. I was mostly feeling the napping and the sneezing.

Anyway, this month's reads were a mixed bag: some emotional wallops and several busts. I wrote each little "review" as I finished the book (usually I wait until the end of the month and then do a massive round up), which is probably why there are fewer books and longer reviews.

Some of next month's books are already on their way from Amazon: I Await the Devil's Coming by Mary MacLane, True Grit by Charles Portis, Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Richard E. Byrd, The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I've also got a biography of Lynda Barry (Lynda Barry: Girlhood Through the Looking Glass by Susan E. Kirtley) and a book called Ancient Rome in So Many Words by Christopher Francese in my basket, not yet ordered.

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis^

I picked up this book because someone on AskMetafilter recommended it. And I've been on a kind of Brit lit kick recently, what with the Churchill and the Mantel and so on. The novel's introduction is hilarious and makes it sound like the novel is also going to be hilarious. But. But instead of hilarity you get a kind of frantic energy that is supposed to be akin to--what?--some kind of "comedy." The novel ended up reminding me of an extended remix of every episode of Frasier ever.  Now, I happen to like Frasier, but what I learned about Frasier after watching eight seasons worth of it on Netflix in the span of about two weeks is that every episode has essentially the same plot (misunderstanding, frantic running around trying to cover up misunderstanding) and the main guy, Frasier, is the least likeable guy on the planet. I mean, you don't hate him (he is funny after all), but you don't much like him either. And that is the same thing with the main character of Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon. You won't hate Jim, but you definitely won't like him. In fact, there isn't a single truly likeable character in the novel. (In many ways very Brit lit, that.) Still, I'm glad I read it, if only because it often hits the top 100 novels you should read (or die trying) lists that get compiled by the pompous asses who work the lit crit angle and, since I'm apparently never going to get around to, say, Infinite Jest, at least I can bring knowledge of Lucky Jim to the party.

2. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

I liked this short collection of eleven strange short stories, each somehow linked to another. They had the definite sense of the uncanny that marks many Japanese ghost stories--and even  Japanese non-ghost stories like The Tale of Genji. I actually picked this book up because I mistakenly thought it was by another author, Yumiko Kurahashi, who wrote another book of eleven strange short stories, The Woman with The Flying Head. (Kurahashi's book is far superior.)

3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and
4. Maggie-Now by Betty Smith*

I actually didn't pick up either of these books for the first time until I was an adult, sometime in my mid-twenties. And, saying that, I should add that though they have a reputation for being children's books, they aren't really; Betty Smith intended them to be novels for adults.  The copy I have is a two-fer, both novels together along with an introduction by Smith. I loved them immediately and have read them many times in the last 15 or so years. This time I was in tears from page one, not even the novel proper, but the introduction.  I know nothing about Betty Smith, though casting about online, I read that she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn--her first novel--when she was in her mid-forties and that none of her subsequent novels (Maggie-Now was her third) reached the same success. I imagine that this is not the last time I will read these novels. Of the increasingly fewer number of books that I will re-read in my lifetime, this one has a permanent place on the list.

5. Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayals of Unconditional Love by Marilyn Van Derbur^

Holy shit, this book kicked my ass. Marilyn Van Derbur is a former Miss America. Her father began 
raping her when she was five years old and didn't stop until she was 18. She confronted him when she was 40, and he seemed contrite, but she later found out that he continued molesting and raping young girls until just before he died at the age of 76.  Her eldest sister, and possibly all three of her older sisters, were also raped by the father. (The mother, who later admits that she had some idea that it was happening, never apologizes or even acknowledges it beyond asking her daughter to not tell anyone in order to protect her (by then dead) father's reputation.) It might seem like the whole book is just violation after violation, but in fact the bulk of the book is about the long and painful process of recovery (most incest victims come undone in their 30's and 40's and can spend decades recovering, if they ever do) and about what parents can do to protect their children. It's definitely worth reading, but it packs a devastating emotional punch. There were times when my eyes were swollen almost shut from crying during the two days it took to read this book.

6. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling^

Reviewers have compared this to Tina Fey's Bossypants, but in fact, it's funnier. There's less substance to it (which Kaling admits, saying that it's a two day book at best, so if you're reading it every night for a month, you've got a problem), yes, but there are more laughs.  It was a quick, light read. I needed that after Miss America by Day.

7. 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill***

I abandoned this collection of short stories about halfway through the first story, midway through a description of a boy whose eyes have been gouged out by a serial killer who's curious to see how long the boy will live after being thusly mutilated. Don't need such images in my brain, thanks.

7. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen^

I've been wanting to read this young adult novel by Paulsen for a while now, so I kindled it. It's a relatively bare bones story about a thirteen-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a plane that crashes in the Canadian wilderness. I probably would have rolled my eyes at this book when I was younger, but then again maybe not; I mean, when I was younger I thought that Judy Blume was an interesting and credible writer. (I was gullible, a gullible pre-teen reader of fiction, is what I'm saying.) One of the things that struck me as I read Paulsen's novel was how generally devoid of complex emotion it was. In that regard, Blume (and even Paul Zindel, another of my pre-teen/teen favorite authors) have him beat, hands down. Still, I found this short novel interesting enough that I might read the four follow up novels that Paulsen wrote involving the same character.

8. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver^

Should have called it "Animal, Vegetable, Insufferable." The first and last Kingsolver book I will ever read. (However, if you decide to read it, here's my suggestion: Skip all the preachy parts. Then you're really only looking at reading, like, ten or so pages of a 400 page book. So there's that.) Want a summary? Rich white lady and her family move to a farm, spend thousands and thousands of dollars to renovate it, then raise their own food for a year so as to have more ammunition to make you feel bad for ever eating packaged food. Or something. Something? Anyway, lots of lecturing from a very high horse for those of you into that sort of thing. For example: A young guest's request for bananas at the grocery store is haughtily and very publicly denied (and then later mocked in print) because--quelle horreur!--bananas are not locally grown. (But, shhhh, ignore the man behind the curtain that delivers the family's monthly rations of equally non-local coffee, wine, wheat flour (from which they bake their own bread, natch), pasta, oatmeal, spices, olive oil, hard cheeses, and on and on.) Same ole, same ole hypocrisy.

9. Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte^

I'm not well-versed in the Bronte sisters' work to be honest. And I only kindled this one because it was free. However, turns out that I actually liked this surprisingly modern novel (that was published 166 years ago). The first part is an honest in its depiction of the kinds of nuclear family-oriented parents and children that likely have always and will always exist, as seen through the eyes of a young governess. (Turns out that spoiled, brutal, selfish children and their indulgent parents are a transcultural phenomenon.) The second part is pure Bronte sisters, as I understand it: a presumably unrequited love turns out to be very much requited. I enjoyed this book very much.

10. Villette by Charlotte Bronte^

Thought I'd pick up another novel by another Bronte after liking Anne's book so much. This one though--ay yi yi--reads like a semester-long survey course in British Victorian Gothic literature. Creepy stuff. And tedious. And it beat me. I'm not proud to say it, but I got my ass kicked by a Bronte sister. I gave up on it about half-way through.

10.  George's Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl

A book for children 8-12, so says the cover. I picked it up because we have a shelf of Roald Dahl books--why?--that I never touch. I mean, I like Roald Dahl; didn't read him until I was an adult though, when I picked up his autobiographical books Boy and Going Solo, but I like his stuff for adults. For some reason (I'm going to egotistically suggest--ha, ha--that it's because I was such a precocious young reader), I never picked up his stuff for children when I was a child. The Dahl books we have are used bookstore finds reaching back to my 20's. So what about this book? Would've made a fine bedtime book for children who had parents who read them bedtime books, I imagine.

11. The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras by J. Michael Orenduff^

My first foray into local fiction, recommended by one of the men at the studio. I laughed at least once, when the main character is talking with another about Socrates and he says about The Cave, "It was an allegory," and she replies, "No, I think it was a real cave." Otherwise not an amazing book; I suspect all the good Amazon reviews were written by J. Michale Orenduff.

12.

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_______________
This is the legend:
*-Re-read
**-Finishing a previously shamefully abandoned book
***-Begun and shamelessly abandoned
^-Kindled