I don’t even know the last time I heard this song. So why is it stuck in my head on a Thursday afternoon?
I read:
Thoughts:
Edge the Bare Garden by Roseanne Cheng: Reviewed earlier this month.
Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack: Reviewed earlier this month.
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout: Reviewed earlier this month.
Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap: Review will be posted closer to the publication date.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff: My opinion: pretentious American twaddle. The establishment’s opinion: Amazing, award winning, wonderful.
Private Beach by David Jerome Hahn: Reviewed earlier this month.
My Life Before Me by Norah McClintock: A YA novel that I guess is supposed to be good for you, like kale. I don’t much like eating kale. Geoff puts kale on pizza though.
P.S. Your Not Listening by Eleanor Craig: Reviewed earlier this month.
The two Elena Ferrante books I read this month: These books are like cream, like chocolate milk that simply slides down my throat. I read and think of the few female friends I’ve known; I don’t have many. One in particular though, where our relationship is as long as the toxic and intoxicating one Ferrante writes about. I don’t know. I was never good with friends, especially female ones. Sorry.
Favourite book:
Most promising book on my wishlist:
I watched:
Thoughts:
Odd Squad: I don’t know if I can love the new agents as much as I love Olive and Otto.
The Mindy Project: It hurts my heart the Mindy and Danny situation.
I wrote: Faeries faeries faeries.
First, can I just say, unrelated to the content, but totally related to the content, the font? All sans-serif Arial style? That’s a bit much on the eyes. We don’t have to go all super serifed or ugly serifed or anything, but it looks cheap. I powered through, but I guess I like books in serifed font.
Now, to content that’s actually content.
Ups and downs. Some stories I thought clever — Fable for instance, with every sentence getting its own moral. Others were those what is real? what is imagined? style stories that simply don’t turn my crank. Most stories were short and sweet, seventeen of them gently placed into 163 pages. The stories are airy, some no more than an idea let loose onto the page. That’s fine. Sometimes wisps are all that’s required. Most aren’t about youth, the way so many stories and books and movies and plots assume that all we lose the ability to care about those who aren’t under the age of thirty-one. People are in their fifties, in some of these stories, people are on their third marriages, someone bred peacocks (so we aren’t devoid of quirk).
When I write stories, I feel they are like Coffin’s: a tiny bit out of sync somehow that I’m not talented enough to articulate. Things are there, but it feels like a morsel without the ability to stretch into a meal. I like them though, for what little that’s worth.
The First Honeymoon by Lyn Coffin went on sale March 29, 2015.
I received a copy free from Librarything in exchange for an honest review.
Some time ago I read an article online, now lost to the pits of the internet found it! about libraries weeding books. All through reading P.S. Your Not Listening, I kept coming back to that thought of weeding. Would I weed this book? Or would I let it be, with the understanding that it’s a product of its time? On one side, it’s an sweet, slightly bland, story about a teacher’s first year working with “unteachable” kids. On the other side, it’s from the 1970s, the language is dated (mongoloid, retarded, etc.), and other than a testimony of its own existence, there’s not a lot of depth there. Or, I suppose there is depth there but, it’s not the depth that was put there at the time of writing, but rather reading the book now, from a 2016 perspective, man, being a working woman was awful back in the 1970s. Sure, it’s fine for your husband to go out for drinks in the evening, but if you’ve got a work meeting in the evening, well then, aren’t you just cutting into family time. Aren’t you just a lousy wife and mother, which should always come first.
So yay second wave feminism.
But, yeah, probably not the point of the book.
So weed or not? Clearly, as it’s being republished in 2016, there’s an argument for letting it lie. But, as for a purpose in the larger universe of books, I’m not sure. Short and quick to read (although did she get consent from the kids she’s writing about? How much exactly is fictionalized? I guess that’s another whole issue to consider with this book), interesting from a sociological/historical standpoint, but also dated. Hedge-clippers or not, you be the judge.
P.S. Your Not Listening by Eleanor Craig was re-released on May 13, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Every single one of my unpublished short stories is now out there, submitted all over. On a Monday, which likely doesn’t bode well, but on a Monday none-the-less.
Now back to the grindstone to produce more chaff for the literary slush-pile.
Maybe I don’t get comic books. I always think I’m going to like them more than I end up doing. Like Private Beach, which seemed like it would be kind of quirky and sullen, but in a good, spooky way, and then just reads like an idea of a story rather than a story itself. The “newly added resolution” didn’t help much (maybe, like comic books, resolution is something I don’t get either). The idea of the story, I liked that. I liked that a lot. But it’s just a throw-away. There’s more time spent in having the main characters neg on strangers and generally be misanthropic.
Time speeding up so [undetermined creatures] can feed on our misery faster! How can you just dangle that in front of us and then just go back to pedestrian twenty-somethings trying to be hipster ironic and cool? It grates on me to have such a good idea squandered.
Private Beach by David Jerome Hahn went on sale July 20, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Summer is the only time I can be a full-time writer, since Tesfa is in camp from eight to four. Even then, she only has four weeks of camp. But full time writing it is, and so I finally got through my deep read of Chapter Three. As was said by one of my academic siblings: Limited time only! [Don’t be] a sucker!.
Chapter Three starts on page 49 of the PDF file for those who have been following along. For any new joiners, I’d start at page one.
Posted probably until the end of the weekend, then taken down.
Time’s up!
I read this book in one day, in one sitting. Even with the gaps, the lacking years, the bits and pieces that are missing, it’s a full life of a story. An antithetical to our current need to know everything, to dredge up everything, to consume ourselves with the misery of others. What happened in the truck? Or with her father? Or with snakes? We can drive ourselves crazy with the desire to know everything, or, instead, we can wrap ourselves up with what we have, a story like a blanket: a mother visiting her daughter in the hospital. We aren’t there. This story is for the characters and we are already greedily enough peeking in.
Take all you can from My Name is Lucy Barton. Even in its slightness, whole worlds exist.
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout went on sale January 12, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Do I need to put Spoiler Alert for a novel-in-verse originally published two hundred years ago? Because likely Spoiler Alert.
Me: So I finished Yevgeny Onegin.
Geoff: And?
Me: They still don’t end up together in this translation.
Geoff: So what, you’re holding out for a translation where they do?
Me: (shifty gaze) Maybe.
I’ve read Yevgeny Onegin before, and seen the opera (actually in the opposite order in that I saw the opera first then read the book), so I knew what was coming reading this translation. I can’t really recall any issues with the translation I read fifteen years ago, not that I could tell you who was the translator of that version. This translation also seems fine (not being a student of comparative literary translations I doubt I could say much of anything intelligent contrasting such translations in any case). The stanzas rhyme (unlike Nabokov’s version, not that I’ve read that version), so of course I’ve spent the last few days bouncy-bouncy-talking in iambic tetrameter as the rhythm has invaded my brain.
What may be lacking are explanatory notes. It’s been a long time since my Russian literature course. I could remember some things, but others, a footnote or two would have been nice. But maybe the audience for another translation of Yevgeny Onegin are people who already know a whole lot about nineteenth century Russia and mayn’t need such help. But I did. Not enough to ruin my overall enjoyment of the book/poem, but every now and then I had to stop and try to remember what something meant or put it out of my mind that I didn’t know.
But Onegin — he seemed less dickish to Tatyana in this version than I remembered, but far more dickish to Lensky. I guess that’s the point, him being a superfluous cad and all. Still doesn’t change the fact that I secretly hope him and Tatyana will get together at the end of the poem. Or, at least in the book/poem, Onegin throws himself to the ground wailing as he does in the operatic version I saw, at the realization of all he could have had, all that he threw away so carelessly, tearing his shirt open and crying. Instead, Onegin gets rebuffed, Tatyana stalks out, Onegin is like “Oh, okay, I guess” and then Tatyana’s husband walks by The End. But that’s more Pushkin’s fault than Briggs’, so I guess I’ll let that slide.
Onegin, fall to your knees in overwrought operatic emotion. Aah, be still my heart.
Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, a new translation by A.D.P. Briggs went on sale July 12, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.