Wish I was still there.
I read:
Thoughts:
- The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro: I go back and forth on Alice Munro: I find her overrated, then I get to a story I really like, then it goes back to being overrated or dull or not my style or whatever you want to say. Of course, I can only recall everything about the stories I didn’t like and very little of the stories that I did. I guess she always surprises me. I can say that at least.
- Canada by Richard Ford: I try, but American novels, so American. I don’t care about white male problems. Plus such a slow moving structure (50% of the book goes by before they even get to Canada) and each chapter seems the same – a minute movement forward of the plot, followed by a paragraph of self-reflection or summary that stays the same for large chunks of time and which I feel like yelling I know your parents robbed a bank because you tell me every other page. My anger is a shame because the writing is good but there is no purpose to anything that happens. I know I am rapidly approaching old age and nihilism so maybe when I’m in my seventies, nothing mattering will all make sense, but right now, don’t put the gun on the mantel unless you’re going to do something with it, you know? Besides, the guy goes to Saskatchewan and doesn’t say bunny-hug even once.
- Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer: So, an ecological Roadside Picnic/Stalker then, eh?
- Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson: That’s right, I read a book I put on my most promising list ages ago!
- Uzumaki 3 by Junji Ito: Not as creepy as #2
- Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos by R.L. Lafevers: Tesfa liked it, I found it tedious.
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Reviewed earlier this month.
- Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers: Oh my, Mary Poppins is so vain and strict and grouchy in the book. Also, for the fact that Travers rewrote a chapter because of racist undertones, the book doesn’t seem to think that calling people Arab and Red Indian as an insult is also worth excising.
- Little Birds by Anaïs Nin: Some tingly in the nether-regions stories, some dull ones.
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: The introduction talks about how the work doesn’t feel dated, and it’s true. It doesn’t feel like it’s written in the 1960s. It could have been written now. It’s really good.
- Someone Is Watching by Joy Fielding: Reviewed earlier this month.
- Elle by Douglas Glover: I read one of his short story collections last year and it didn’t gel for me, but I really liked this. It was something else.
- Viviane by Julia Deck: What’s this? A second book I put on my most promising list! Meghan reading lists FTW!
Favourite book of the month:
I have a new favourite book to read and re-read. But oh is this book decadent, like a really fancy dessert with cheese and chocolate and cream; I can only read about twenty pages at a time before feeling ill.
Most promising book on the wishlist:
For the name alone.
I watched:
I wrote: Re-did a start of the wolf children story. Faerie work. Slush pile work. I wrote a poem today.
… is either coming tonight if I get myself organized enough or not until maybe around May 9. So if you’re waiting around with baited breath to know what books I read this month, either yay, you’re going to get it early or (more likely) you will forget you were waiting for it and then it will pop up suddenly partway through May.
It snowed here yesterday. I think that’s all that needs to be said.
When I was twelve, my mother gave me a copy of See Jane Run by Joy Fielding. (For those that have read that book, is that an odd book to give one’s twelve year old? Given what it ultimately ends up being about?) Since then, I’ve had a soft spot for Joy Fielding, although I don’t think I read any of her other books. I guess that’s like having a soft spot for a restaurant you went to only once and don’t want to go back to lest the experience prove less auspicious than on the first visit.
But, obviously, I went back to the Joy Fielding restaurant and read Someone Is Watching. It’s a decent thriller/mystery. A bit of Mary-Sue-ing with the protagonist (rich, super skinny but blonde with big breasts. I’m not quite sure why that was necessary to tell me that in the opening pages. I am capable of caring about protagonists that don’t look like super models and who have only a little cash.) No huge twist at the end and the book has enough clues throughout the text that the twist that does occur doesn’t feel like a punch-to-the-head or a cop-out. It takes place in Miami, and right now, outside my window, it’s raining into the snowbanks that still haven’t melted, so reading about warmth and sunshine might have been just what I needed. The book is decent and it’s good for what it is, but I read it because I wanted brain popcorn, not anything taxing.
The less decent parts: I’m tired of rape as a plot device. It always seems a bit cheap to me, like an pre-made obstacle that an author can pop in. While this book I think takes place in 2015 (or 2014 or whenever Fielding wrote it), it seems to take place in some sort of alternate universe where smartphones and tablets haven’t penetrated this reality. One of the characters is a surly teenager going to a very fancy private school, who spends her sulking time watching television on an actual television. No selfies, no texting, no sexting. Equally, this is in a universe where twenty-nine year olds wear pleated skirts and talk about wine-coloured dresses and refer to their ex-boyfriends as “lovers”. I don’t think this is how teenagers and twenty-nine year olds talk and act and do. Just throwing in a few references to Teen Mom and 1000 Ways to Die doesn’t mean the book is authentically 2015. This is a story about eighties characters who somehow are living, untouched, in 2015. This disconnect doesn’t really take anything away from the plot, but it kept annoying me as I read through.
Passable mystery if you like to read mysteries. If you don’t, you’ll likely find it hard to suspend disbelief.
Someone Is Watching by Joy Fielding went on sale March 24, 2015.
I received a copy free from a goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review.
I got a nibble on my query letter — please send full manuscript. So there’s that 🙂
Let’s read a book about having sex with a dead squid. Because that happens in this book. Somehow I have an ability to pick out books like this. I suppose it’s a gift. Just something about me that makes me me.
(Squid sex is only like two pages of three hundred and fifty, but I feel it’s one of those things that sort of encapsulates what type of book a book is.)
The Sympathizer is a long book that could have been about one hundred and fifty pages shorter. It’s a book of contradictions, such as the narrator incensed about other people erasing his comrades’ proper names, ignoring the fact that he doesn’t give proper names to a bunch of people either. It’s a book where you keep thinking there’s going to be a flashback with an origin story, except that flashback never comes. There’s a lot of adjectives and description and over-writing, those stylistic quirks that other people find charming or engrossing, but which I just get annoyed with. And I got annoyed.
Repeatedly.
There’s some stuff that isn’t so bad. I appreciate the narrator tells you right away he’s a double-agent. None of this sudden-surprise-twist-ending nonsense that has become so popular. He’s a double-agent, his one friend Man is a communist, and his other friend Bon, is not. This is where the one hundred and fifty pages of completely transparent criticism of Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now could be cut (What’s the point of that sidetrack? Unnecessary. Lose it.) and replaced with something, even a sentence of why, of three close friends, one-third went to one ideology, while two-thirds went to another.
The book isn’t free of some twists, although they are obvious so I don’t know if one can call them that. I’ll say reveals instead I suppose. There’s a lot of what I call blah blah blah political discussions, as one might assume would happen at the locale in which they happen in the novel (trying to avoid spoilers I am).
I don’t know. It took me forever to read this book. I feel bad saying anything negative about it since the author clearly worked hard. So I’ll say nothing and laugh because nothing ends up being vital to the story: Nothing is less precious than a bad review.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen went on sale April 7, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
My sad and distant story is making me sad and distant.
I need to write something happy and hope it affects me the same way.
I chucked the first fifteen pages of my wolf children story (fifteen pages in my writing notebook, so about three thousand words) because it was all wrong. So that was a waste. Restarted and switched the narration from first person to third person omniscient. Like Tolstoi, I lord over all my dystopic characters, seeing all, deciding on their fates on my whims. I’m also going to delete any internal thought and adjectives. So basically I’m going for dry and unappetizing.
Still, wish I could have realized all this the first time through.
I was sick this week and spent six hours arranging my books by colour because I couldn’t think of any other clever way to arrange them. The perspective of the above picture is a bit screwy since it’s three pictures photostitched together with a ninety degree turn smushed flat.
The two days I managed to stay awake for, I did write some Wolf Children story. It’s not good. I’m not quite clear why I thought I could write fantasy, considering how little I partake it in. But I’ll keep going. Got to get back in the writing world somehow.