meghan rose allen

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.

Because of the unending parade of snow days and school holidays coming up over the next few months, I have been trying to find interesting (to me) longer chapter books to read to Tesfa, but books that are still somewhat interesting to a five year old. The intersection is non-trivial, but I’ve exhausted our home stash, having read all our Franny K. Stein books, Roald Dahl ones, Og, and Jacob Two-Two a googol times each. And I keep seeing all these great reviews of Harriet the Spy, of which I know I bought a copy at Fair’s Fair in Calgary, but I can’t find anywhere. So I took another copy out of the library and since today is the (third) snow day (in five days), I sat down to read it to Tesfa.

Now I know that Tesfa is outside the age range for this book, so it may not be appropriate, and I know that I read this book when I was a kid because I remember thinking afterwards I should keep a notebook, which lasted for about eight seconds until I decided I did not want to carry a notebook around with me everywhere I went, and I know that 1964 was different than 2014, but damn I’d forgotten how mean and judgmental Harriet is. I stopped reading midway through Chapter Two with:

DOES HIS MOTHER HATE HIM? IF I HAD HIM, I’D HATE HIM. [caps lock from source]

Seriously?

I didn’t read that bit aloud and then told Tesfa that my throat hurt too much more to continue.

Kids are cruel. I understand that. But this? This is just too much for naive, rose-goggled meghan. I keep reading about how engaging Harriet is and how curious Harriet is and how non-traditional Harriet is. Well, what about how mean Harriet is and how unnecessarily cruel she is? The internet tells me she gets her comeuppance and then learns that writing down and saying cruel things have consequences, but I don’t know. Tesfa’s too little for that action-consequence logic right now. Back to Franny K. Stein for another week.