Things are wet here. The lake that used to be my backyard is back. There is also snow that is sort-of-melting, with the melting part of that last hyphenated word being more wishful thinking than not. I think we’re still below freezing and cloudy, so the snow may not be melting for a while yet. And things. There are always things. Hopefully next week I can sit down and make about a change in my brain.

In the wetness, I have been re-reading. I re-read Plain Jane by Eve Horowitz. Last time we talked, I talked about over-reading through my tween years (not that they were called tween years then. I think in the early nineties, we still went by the moniker Young Adult). Then in high school, I slowed down. Ninth grade I read what was assigned for ninth grade English (all two books, pathetic), the two books for ninth grade French, and two other books (Fifth Business and a non-fiction book about the Holocaust, but I can’t remember which one.)

So I was not much of a reader in high school. Or much of a writer (see my About Me page for my failed foray into high school Writer’s Craft). I wanted to be a writer, yet didn’t write much. I suppose that’s like now. I want to be a writer, and although I write an exponential amount more than in high school, I likely still don’t write enough.

I didn’t stop reading entirely. Clearly I still went to the library because in either the spring of grade twelve or the spring of OAC, I took Plain Jane out of the library (I’d like to think it was OAC, because for some reason doing things in your last year of high school makes things more meaningful than doing things during a placeholder year). I don’t remember many books in high school, but this was a book that I left right by the front door so that the minute I came rushing home from the school bus, I could pick it up to read it (I rarely took the school bus in OAC, so likely this story happened in grade twelve. Boo.). It was the first time in a long time I remember enjoying a book.

So I read it again. I can see why seventeen/eighteen year old me liked it. I still do, but there’s a lot there that I can see my teenage self not really understanding why she liked it so much. I know I’m being vague and frustrating, but I guess around going off to university time, that’s a breaking-free time, like you don’t have to be this person anymore. You can be someone else. Not that I went to university and started writing more (pretty much the opposite being a math major). Not that I even went to university and changed that much (bigger changes happened more after I moved to Halifax in 2004).

Maybe I felt like I was in high school this week. As the pudgy, quiet, geeky kid with no self-esteem in high school, these have not been the most pleasant of feelings. But I still liked the book. It was comforting to re-experience something and not have it be a disappointment.

See earlier post here.

The last time I read and read and read and read, more for something to do than for enjoyment, was grades six, seven, and eight, when I was bored and without many friends, being an awkward and pudgy pre-teen. I guess I’m bored now too. I wasn’t so much last year, even when I had a longer day to fill with Tesfa away from eight-thiry to four, as opposed to now from eight to two. Writing isn’t as much of an intellectual exercise because I don’t know how to write intellectually taxing stories. Lately, I write straightforward ones, like my story about summer, if I could ever figure out an overarching conflict rather than the string of microconflicts that are keeping the story going forward right now.

I’m working on embracing the sameness. It doesn’t get green here until June. Maybe more sun will cheer me up. Maybe writing more stories of summer will trick my brain. I feel like I’m using all my brainpower deciding on children’s bicycles at the Wal-Mart and making small talk at the bus stop. I should pick some extreme books and work out my brain.

Or something.

Because everyone and their dog seems to love Harriet the Spy, I gave it another go. I had enough sense this time to not read it aloud to Tesfa so I could form my own opinions without having to skip over sections inappropriate for a five year old.

Here are my good/bad thoughts.

Good: The book is well-written. It isn’t smaltzy and it doesn’t talk down to children. It doesn’t assume they are stupid. And, as an adult reading it, it isn’t eye-gougingly tedious (I’m looking at you Magic Treehouse stories that Tesfa loves and that I am eagerly awaiting until she is literate enough to read herself).

Bad: I know in my previous complaint post regarding Harriet the Spy, I said I’d read Harriet the Spy before. I don’t actually think that’s true. I think I read The Long Secret because I remember there being a beach and the cover of The Long Secret seems to be a beach, and the internet also tells me that The Long Secret has less to do with Harriet and more to do with Beth Ellen, one of the minor characters in Harriet the Spy. So oops on my memory.

Good: Even though we stopped reading it together when we got to the DOES HIS MOTHER HATE HIM? IF I HAD HIM, I’D HATE HIM part in the first twenty pages (which is also put on the back cover as a, I don’t know, advertisement for this book?), Tesfa asks about it all the time. When are we going to read the spy book again? she asks me. I need to return my copy to the library because I have run out of excuses.

Bad: The kids in this book are cruel. A lot of the time they act like nasty little hellions. And not just Harriet. They say mean things, they hit each other, the throw things at each other. I understand that people, kids in particular, are antisocial monsters, but did no one ever say to any of these kids If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all? Or maybe Don’t throw pencils at people? (this happens frequently in Harriet the Spy). I tell Tesfa she doesn’t have to like everyone, she doesn’t have to go out of her way to be nice to people she doesn’t like, but she still has to treat them respectfully. I have a feeling that if I read her the rest of Harriet the Spy now, my lessons will go right out the window because the vague anarchy in Harriet the Spy is far more exciting than me nagging her to be respectful of other people.

Good: I actually enjoyed Harriet the Spy. I would rate it 4/5.

Bad: The lesson at the end: Harriet is told either to lie or apologize. So she lies and to an extent, everything returns to normal. What the fuck poor lesson is that? If you do something hurtful, intentionally or not, just lie and then everything will get better? Not really what I was hoping for. Harriet having to apologize for her behaviour, to learn that actions have consequences, that other people, even if she doesn’t think so, do matter, nope. Just lie. Problems solved.

Good: Ignoring the rather antiquated parental roles (mother’s going to the salon and playing bridge all day, sure), the kids are relatively gender-free without a lot of negative backlash about it. Harriet dresses in pants, Janie does science experiments, Sport cooks, all the children (minus Harriet) come together to build a fort, all the students are expected to dance in the school play, etc.

Bad: Everyone in this book seems to be rich and white. It’s a very thin slice of life. It might be why no one seems to mind the kids being themselves as they are rich enough that it doesn’t matter.

Good: I’m kind of running out of the good here.

Bad: Harriet hates math. I can’t really get behind anyone who hates math. Math is awesome.

So I read Harriet the Spy and now I can complain as much as I want because I read the whole damn thing and I am informed. Because of the quality of the writing and the non-standard gender roles, I can’t help but feel a lot of people are giving this book a pass to ignore a lot of the book’s problematic issues. Harriet’s curiosity and intelligence doesn’t give her the right to be a dick with only short-term, rather than long-term consequences. Likely, I’m in the minority here and oddly, since I did really like the book. I would rather Tesfa be as bland and kind as Beth Ellen then as thoughtless and cruel as Harriet.

I wonder if I’ve started to treat reading the way I used to treat television, when I had television, just hours of staring at American homes on HGTV when I lived in Halifax, NS with no plans to buy anything. That is, as a way to pass the time. Am I using books just as a way to pass the time? I read and read and read but it feels like enjoyment has been stripped from the process. I get breathless, my heart races, and I start to feel sick when I look at my wishlist on librarything. I’ll never read all those books. Then I put hundreds more books on the wishlist and just hope that something will happen and I’ll just spend every second reading rather than being productive. But there’s not even enjoyment in that, in putting books on the wishlist.

Right now it is March (April really, but it looks like March since winter lingers). Some of this has to do with the dreariness of half-melted snow piles with gravel on top. Some of this has to do with the bragginess of the other kindergarten mothers I meet. Some of this just has to do with small town living. Some of it has to do with my general, melancholic disposition.

But am I reading too much? I’ve read 55 books this year so far, but some of those are Tesfa’s chapter books I read aloud to her over and over again to the point where I don’t even need to look at the words on any of the hundred pages. Those are books. Those count.

I’m reading because that’s like work that isn’t work, procrastination that I can say is important somehow. Expanding my brain with no carpal tunnel from clicking around click-bait stories on the internet. Tomorrow I have a two hour block where I sit and wait for Tesfa’s art class to finish that I can read some more of a book that won’t even stick long enough in my mind that I’ll remember what happened at the beginning when I get to the end. So what’s the point? If it weren’t grey, I’d stare out at nature instead for the two hours. But it’s all grey here still. The snow is so deep that being above freezing hasn’t melted any of it yet. There are piles in the yard taller than me, not that I’m tall. I’d be taller if I didn’t slouch but the piles of grey snow are still there, depressing in the yard.

So I read to pass the time, until something better comes along. Until I can fix my stories that are broken or write new ones or find new books to add to my wishlist, to add to my heart palpitations.

Summer, at this point, is purely imaginary.

Hungary: They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy

Synopsis: (from amazon) Painting an unrivalled portrait of the vanished world of pre-1914 Hungary, this story is told through the eyes of two young Transylvanian cousins, Count Balint Abády and Count László Gyeroffy. Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament, and the luxury of life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abády becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. The first book in a trilogy published before World War II, it was rediscovered after the fall of Communism in Hungary and this edition contains a new foreword.

Thoughts: So much of this book actually takes place in modern day Romania, but, at the time set, Transylvania was a province of Hungary and the plot concerns the Hungarian ruling class, plus with all the other scenes in what we would consider Hungary-proper today, I’m going to keep this book as my Hungarian entry in my round-the-world book journey.

So this is one of those books that is more important than it is enjoyable; it’s not a fun book and the characters aren’t overly sympathetic, or maybe they were to the author and other members of the Hungarian aristocracy in the dawning days of the twentieth century. Nowadays, that whole dismantled universe is so foreign (although maybe if I flip through the pages of Paris Match, it still exists as a sliver of its former self) but Bánffy has a knack for drawing the proletariat reader in enough, especially one that’s read any large party scenes from Tolstoi and the like. It’s actually very Tolstoi-esque, like the Peace parts of War and Peace, managing forestry estates and trying to set up co-operatives for the peasants and being cheated by your employees, then having doomed love affairs, gambling and gamboling at fancy dress balls while being unquestionably rich.

This is the first book of a trilogy. The other two books aren’t (in the library and in English) (brackets for logical statement, not distributing over the and), so I have to buy them if I want to read them. I guess that will be the test of how much this book stays with me – will I be compelled to buy the following two books or try to read the library versions in French?

Not so great thing about the translation: They took out the accents in the names because it would be too confusing. That is what the translators said in the introduction. Accents would be too confusing for the sort of person who picks up a six hundred page novel about the Hungarian aristocracy? It seems like they may be underestimating the intelligence of their potential readership. I put the accents back in myself in the synopsis for y’all.

Also, bonus – this was the first e-book I ever bought, way back in June 2012 for my iPad, before I learned that reading on the iPad was an eyestraining nightmare. Now I read this on my kobo and it was much better.

Rating: 4/5

Previous Readings Around the World.

Stolen shamelessly from Reading In Bed.

So here are some quarterly stats of my reading so far this year.

Recommended reading (i.e. rated 4.5 stars or above out of 5):

Diversity

• 47% female authors
• 24% Canadian authors
• 23% writers of colour
• 2% originally in Ukrainian, 2% originally in Hungarian, and all the rest originally in English

So, could be better, could be worse.

And today is the fourth snow day since last Wednesday. Too miserable to go out with less and less to do. Plus Friday is another day off. Tesfa and I might kill each other soon.