meghan rose allen

Norway: Kristin Lavrandatter by Sigrid Undset

Thoughts: So sometime in, I’ll say December, someone I know posted a link to a list of books about strong women to read your daughters (I don’t know why we can’t read books about strong women to our children but that’s a whole other rant), and I’d try to find it on his facebook feed, except he posts like 800 things a day. Maybe it was on mental floss, I can’t remember? So Kristin Lavrandatter and I thought to myself Hey, that sounds interesting, so I put it on hold at the library and a week later in it came and into the library went I and saw that it was an 1100 page book in small font and tissue-thin paper and I then thought to myself I just fucking finished War and Peace, but checked it out anyway, in part because I didn’t want the librarian to get annoyed at me for having brought the book in through the library-loan system only to have me not take it out, and then it sat on my book-and-chapstick table (what some people call a night stand, except mine is overflowing with books and chapstick) for two renewals, and then it had to go back to the library in a week and a half, so I took a deep breath, cracked open the very broken spine (the library’s copy is from the 1960s, it isn’t the nice new Penguin translation that came out a few years ago), and started to read.

Now, having finished the 1100 page book in ten days, I must say that Kristin Lavrandatter has some things going way more for it than War and Peace:

1. the font is bigger than War and Peace so I didn’t get eyestrain and headaches from reading it;
2. Kristin is only about 50% as silly as any of the female characters in War and Peace. She is still annoyingly silly, but it isn’t as bad;
3. there is no Tolstoi spew. There is no Undset spew. Basically, stuff happens the whole time with no philosophical digressions. Sometimes the priests admonish someone (it is a very religious book), but it is usually only a paragraph here or there, not like the last 100 pages or anything where there are no characters and only Tolstoi telling you what he’s already said about sixteen times previously throughout the novel.

That being said, War and Peace is probably still a deeper book, but in terms of what I liked, I liked Kristin Lavrandatter so much more.

Cons: The middle section drags and drags. I had a hard time keeping the Norwegian/Swedish royalty straight in my mind. There are many people who have very similar names and having a few family trees in the front might have been helpful (perhaps this is included in the new Penguin edition).

But now I’m done and I have that book hangover one gets after finishing a long book with characters that one grows attached too. And now I have no excuse to go around talking like a character from the book, i.e. Ere ‘tie aught I trowed, yet liefer do I now suspect more. Or, I suppose, I still could. Considering it.

Rating: 4.5/5

Previous Readings Around the World.

Today I bought this book: Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia. A while ago, I saw the call to submit, but didn’t. I thought maybe I should, but I don’t know if I have anything meaningful to say. I don’t even know if I’ll manage to read the book, but bought it more out of solidarity, because here is my confession: I am still horribly ashamed that I left academia.

It doesn’t matter that I was ill-suited for a job as a professor or that I never really committed to being an academic. It doesn’t matter that I wrote papers and went to conferences, the entire time the inside of my palms cut to ribbons from digging my nails in so deep to keep from screaming. It doesn’t matter that all I really enjoyed about academia was having license to work quietly by myself and learn things, something that I can do now as a writer without all the additional stress of being in a university setting.

What does matter is that I hate the way people look at me when I say I have a PhD but no, I’m not working at the university in town. What matters is that I hate the way some of the other child-free academics talked down to me because if my husband has a PhD and I have a kid, then I couldn’t possibly be anything more than a child-minder. What matters is that I feel like I let my gender down because I was a woman in STEM and I quit and now my husband is the primary breadwinner, although the $100 I made from writing last year did cover the cost of two tanks of gas.

I made a mistake. I admitted it. I got out before I made more mistakes. And having a Phd in Mathematics is a pretty good fall-back option.

Still, why do I feel so ashamed about walking away from the academy?

I’ll let you all know if I ever manage to steel myself up to read the book.

Because I used to be a mathematician, there are charts.

I read 108 books in 2013, mainly novels.

In 2012, I read over 150 books, so this was a slower year for me. I plead that I read both Swann’s Way and War and Peace and that took up much time.

I stuck to English a lot.

When I did venture out of English, I did as below.

In terms of gender:

In terms of Canadianess, which is rather vague, basically encompassing a wide variety of born Canadian, chosen Canadian, living in Canada, etc.

Ratings from zero to five, although I’m pretty sure that you can’t give a zero on librarything so maybe from 0.5 to 5, not that there were any 0.5 rankings in 2013.

And here is a list of the 4.5 and 5 star books I read in 2013 (alphabetically).

1. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
2. HHhH by Laurent Binet
3. The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
4. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
5. Drunk Mom: A Memoir by Jowita Bydlowska
6. The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
7. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. The Lightning Field by Heather Jessup
9. The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits
10. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
11. Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella
12. Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee
13. Anastasia Again by Lois Lowry
14. Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne
15. When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne
16. Little Children by Tom Perrotta
17. The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan
18. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
19. Ru by Kim Thúy
20. The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
21. By Blood by Ellen Ullman
22. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
23. Sorry Please Thank You: Stories by Charles Yu

Awards!

Best novel (in English): The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe. I’ve read this book before and I still love it. I could just wrap myself up in it forever.

Best novel (in translation): HHhH by Laurent Binet. I’d previously thought The Kindly Ones was the contemporary Holocaust novel. I was wrong, and Binet completely savages The Kindly Ones as well (Houellebecq does Nazism).

Best novel (Canadian): The Lightning Field by Heather Jessup. Just such a kind-hearted novel with a formica tabletop within.

Best short story collection: Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee. Every story was perfect. I am jealous.

Best not-a-fiction-book: Drunk Mom: A Memoir by Jowita Bydlowska. I read lots of books about flawed parents. Then I feel better/worse/the same/everything all at once.

I’m hoping for 125 books in 2014. We’ll see. Hopefully I can steer away from the stack of Solzhenitsyn sitting on my shelf, whose reading would slow me down to a snail’s crawl.

There be spoilers in this post for Pride and Prejudice. Ignore at your own peril.

Confession: I am thirty-three years old and read constantly and only two weeks ago did I read my first book by Jane Austen and … I did not enjoy the experience.

So I read Pride and Prejudice as the first book I read on my kobo (aside: can I say the thing I like best about my kobo is the chibi loading up screen of the happy faced little kobo?) I don’t understand. Everyone seems so horrible, like actually horrible people pretending to like each other and then gossiping viciously about them behind their backs, for example Jane and Bingley’s sisters or Mrs Bennet and the Lucases. No one seems particularly sympathetic. All the women seem rather frivolous and silly, even the ones that are pointed out as not being frivolous nor silly like Jane and Elizabeth.

Read it as a satire, Geoff said. I think it’s supposed to be a satire on manners not actually masking the horribleness of people. Since Geoff comes from a long line of English majors and professors and writers and people who got in feuds with Evelyn Waugh, I tried to take his advice … and still did not enjoy the experience.

Why are there so many characters? I’m pretty sure Mary said two lines in the whole book. Why does Bingley have two sisters when I’m pretty sure one says nothing at all? What is the difference between Catherine and Lydia other than Lydia runs off with Wickham, and since Catherine does almost nothing, couldn’t she be excised? I thought long and hard on the five sisters problems and settled upon the Bennets needed to be wealthy enough to be part of society but have too many daughters to pay good dowries. Maybe that’s my over-reaching. What do I know, I’m not an English major.

And Lydia’s marriage skeeves me out. Rather her married to a rake and a thief and a liar than have shame befall the family. The horror!

There’s no depth to any characters. Most of them remind me of the puppets Tesfa makes at school – those cut out paper heads pasted to popsicle sticks wiggling around. The romance doesn’t warm the coldness that is my heart of stone. The arrogance and ill-temperedness of everyone involved makes me want to throw my copy across the room (which I won’t, see reading on kobo above).

And I read this book last week and I still am having trouble remembering names and what happened, etc., using this website as a cheat sheet. And I’ve seen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice before too, and still reading the plot doesn’t stick in my head. I must have a gaping hole that stories like this fall down into and get suppressed. What is wrong with me that I do not enjoy the most loved novel in the English language?

Since Jane Austen is dead, it is unlikely that I will get a message from her about my unhappy review, but I’ve probably turned off something like 98% of the literate world with my bafflement of why people like this novel. I’m sorry. There is something clearly amiss in my brain.

A few weeks ago, I started porting over my reviews from librarything to goodreads, not because I’m planning on jumping ship, but I thought that having some reviews up on goodreads would help me win some ARC because I like free books. I moved over a review of a book that I hadn’t particularly enjoyed, but I tried to keep the review constructive. I pointed out things that I thought were factual errors or misleading (i.e. calling Calgary a remote Canadian town) or seemed odd in the context of a novel being in Canada (for example, discussing Quebec seceding from the union, which, since Canada is a dominion rather than a union and every Canadian I’ve ever met in my thirty-plus years of meeting Canadians says Quebec separating from Canada, I found seceding from the union an odd thing to have written in the book). I also said what I found frustrating: long sentences I found hard to follow and too many subplots which detracted from the most interesting one.

So I put up a lone bad review for this book. Other people seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t, and considering I have a post in the works explaining why I didn’t like most-loved-novel-in-the-English-language Pride and Prejudice, maybe I’m just a horrible person to book-please.

Then the author of the book emailed me to take issue with my review.

So is this what we’re doing now? We email people if we don’t like our reviews on a social-reading site? This is not something I’ve had to encounter since my stuff on goodreads and librarything have zero reviews (and on librarything, I am the only one to have added my story).

So I took what the author said, edited my review as appropriate (for example, he said the publisher had put in that Calgary was remote, so I edited my review regarding that, and for some of the other points, I put that the author and I had agreed to disagree). I also put that I had updated my review based on conversation with the author at the bottom, so people know why it changed. The author’s email wasn’t mean, but it still left me feeling off.

Not everyone likes my stuff. I know this for a fact because family members have said to me “I don’t like your story.” Or I’ve had many stories rejected from journals. Then I feel a bit sad, but I don’t send an email justifying some of my decisions to them. Or trying to prove my credentials. It hurts, I know, to have people not like your things, but now all I feel is really wary of posting reviews if I’m going to get, even well-intentioned, emails where people want me to understand that I am wrong. And won’t it look odd, in terms of the author, that I’ve updated my review saying that he contacted me regarding it? Doesn’t that make him look pushy or whiny? If I did the same thing (emailing someone about a bad review), would it be more negatively gendered, like I am definitely churlish and thin-skinned whereas maybe this author is confident and ready-to-stand-up-for-himself? Maybe I should just do like Lee Siegel and stop writing negative reviews all together, only talk about the positive. I admit I could have said more complimentary things about the bad-review book, and I didn’t. But the book frustrated me and that is a valid thing to say in a review.

So I feel bad. Geoff thinks it’s insane that I feel bad because a stranger emailed me. But I do. And maybe I won’t be reviewing much on librarything or goodreads for the next little while.