Today I was made aware that some people view Roald Dahl’s Matilda as a brat.
Obviously these people are wrong. Matilda is exquisite.
Still, I am really, unbearably sad about this. It’s like someone bruised my heart. I am all those Rennaissance pictures of Saint Sebastien pierced by arrows through the heart, but without the choice saintliness.
Please keep your negative opinions about Matilda to yourself.
I should write down every single one of my books? I mean catalogue them. Just because the last time I decided to do something with my books and it seemed like a good idea when I started (and also had a low-grade fever which is likely why I thought it would be a good idea) and then I realized what a waste of time it was, doesn’t mean this will be too, yes?
I’ll let you know in two weeks, when I finish likely, how I could have better spent my time on Wolf Children.
Geoff (after reading the back blurb of Where Did You Sleep Last Night): How do you even find out about such bizarre books?
Me: Internet.
Whenever I (frequently) feel like I’m not great at parenting, I should remember that Tesfa couldn’t wait until tomorrow to go to the bookstore to pick out her yay-I-finished-grade-one present and insisted that we go today.
Also migraine. So here is my migraine whine: whine.
Wolf Children is (d)evolving. Right now it stands (at least in my head) as a series of interconnected stories that will (maybe) (someday) make up a novella.
But I don’t know if I like that? It’s sort of a cheat — like why can’t I just make it a novel rather than making it novel-length? I did like the way it worked in The Madonnas of Echo Park, but I felt cheated by the form in the The Juliet Stories, where we spiraled out from the parts I was reading the novel for to stuff I cared less about.
Do I hate connected short stories? Ugggg. I don’t know anything any more. I should go study actuarial science and stop with all this free-form open fiction nonsense. Read non-fiction textbooks about macroeconomic policy and Nordic politics and subcontinental linguistics and become even more antisocial than I already am.
Ever since stumbling upon the Katamari comic book on Netgalley, I go through their comics section every few months to see if there’s anything else that’ll grab me. Last time I was browsing through, there was Unicorn on a Roll by Dana Simpson, a kids’ comic, but I thought, why not? I can read it to my kid. She likes comics. She likes unicorns. And I like stories with female protagonists that I can read to her. Besides, I think they had the first book in the Scholastic flyer so I figured it couldn’t be awful (although since it seems like 75% of the books lately have been Lego Star Wars Vs Chimera character dictionaries, so maybe I’m giving too much weight to being included in a Scholastic flyer).
In preparation (yes, I am lame enough that I prep for reading books), I got the first unicorn book out of the library. I read it to my kid and was fairly meh. Phoebe seemed like a run-of-the-mill Disney channel brat, whiny and self-entitled (the introduction said that this was supposed to make her real or relatable or something). It isn’t like I’m a fan of the bland Jack and Annie squeaky clean characters either, but something about Phoebe rubbed me the wrong way. Marigold (the unicorn) too. So with trepidation, we moved on to Unicorn on a Roll.
And…it wasn’t half bad. Maybe exposure to Phoebe and Marigold dulled my initial distaste, or maybe they are just less irritating this time round. Whereas the first book made me cringe, the second was enjoyable, even a bit cute in parts. I love the dad playing video games. Made me wish that we had a console (well, we do have a dusty PS2 whose controllers, the last time I played for five minutes, set off the arthritis in my knuckles so I haven’t played since).
Since this is marketed as a kids’ book, I asked my kid to give me a review. So if you’d rather read her (prompted) review than mine, here it is:
Q: What is the story about? It’s about a little girl and a unicorn.
Q: Tell me two things that you remember from the story: 1. The went to a unicorn party. 2. There was a play but the day of the play Phoebe was sick and couldn’t go.
Q: What are some adjectives that describe the book?: funny, colourful, interesting.
Q: Rate this book: Five out of five stars.
So there you have it.
Unicorn on a Roll by Dana Simpson went on sale May 26, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
One day I opened by email to a message thanking me for agreeing to review Bent by Teri Louise Kelly. I looked around my give-me-free-books sites (librarything, goodreads, netgalley), but I’m pretty sure I never requested this book to review. Oh well. I’m never going to turn down a free book — like the time I got an M.G. Vassanji book randomly in the mail. That was pretty nice.
Okay, but Teri Louise Kelly is no M.G. Vassanji. We have here a rambling and meandering treatise on gender, transgender, drugs, life, writing, poetry, Australia, more drugs, drinking, vomit, first person POV, second person POV, etc., etc., etc. Most of the philosophical component is roughly equivalent to that guy you knew in high school who totally understood Nietzsche and spent a lot of time talking about reality while getting stoned. The gender thoughts are about as deep and very essentialized (girls like makeup, boys like sports!) although there is some glimmer of depth nearer to the end when Teri seems to get away from trying to be one gender or the other, and becomes, in eir words, undefinable. But that’s a long road (or read) to get there. Like like Teri trying on different aspects of different genders, this book tries on a bunch of roles: memoir, theory, fiction, experiment, manifesto. Maybe Teri is satisfied with the gender construct e’s built for eirself, but Bent doesn’t really come up with anything satisfying. It’s like reading Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal without the depth, and even a sprinkling of pithy bon-mots can’t elevate Bent to where it needs to be to be truly transcendent.
And I feel bad for Teri’s kids, not because of Teri’s experimentation with gender, but because e seems to walk away from them without compunction. Obviously, it isn’t Teri’s place to say how eir kids feel, but the flippancy with which Teri discusses eir disinterest in eir kids speaks to the way the book lacks an emotional core. It makes Teri seem selfish. It makes Teri less relatable. If there’d been some sort of self-awareness or critique of eir own actions, then maybe it could be understandable, but treating one’s decision to abandon one’s family as glib and inconsequential in eir path to become the undefinable person she is, is unconscionable.
Also, you know what’s boring, let me tell you about this dream I had last night boring: pages and pages of reading about someone getting pissed or high or wasted again and again and again. Other people’s altered consciousness stories are boring. I wish the editors had cut most of the drugged out bits (as well as invested in a proof-reader to catch a bunch of little grammar and punctuation errors throughout).
I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the right person to review this book. I have no set philosophy on gender. In an hour, I can go from a liberal feminist interpretation of gender to a radical feminist one to a post-modern interpretation to anarchic. I’m muddled. Bent didn’t unmuddle me, but that was hardly its aim. Bent reminds me of some conversations I had with autoethnographers a while ago where the importance is the student’s writing of their own story, rather than necessarily the content or the style in which the student writes. I could see studiers of gender analysing Bent for background or colour, but I can’t really say it succeeds as a mainstream memoir. But, then again, maybe that isn’t the point.
I received a copy free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I’m reading Angela Carter rather than working on faerie story and came across the word eldritch, which is a word that I am sad I did not learn until now at age thirty-four. Let’s try out some HTML code for those who don’t feel like clicking on the dictionary link:
The link continues to tell me: From the earlier form elritch, of uncertain origin. The second element, -ritch, is generally taken to be Old English rīċe (“realm, kingdom”) (see rich). Some think the first element, el-, derives from an Old English root meaning “foreign, strange, other” (related to Old English ellende and modern English else); others think it derives from elf.
So Book One of my faerie story is called How To See The Faeries. Book Two can be called Margery Eldritch.
Now to write Book Two. Or have a nap. Or something.
(although MRE makes me think of MRA and then I am stopped up with anger.)
Buried in Print has a Must-Read-Everything list and since I am nothing if not a follower, I have decided I want a MRE list too. Of course, I get all caught up in the details (Will I put authors like Sophia Kinsella on, which I read just because and do not actively search out? Should I put authors I have read lots of, even though my tastes have changed since I stopped reading them? What about kids books and my current love of Lemony Snicket minus the racism? Maybe I should just start and see what happens.)
Kate Atkinson’s books:
✓ Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Human Croquet
Emotionally Weird
Not the End of the World
✓ Case Histories
✓ One Good Turn
✓ When Will There Be Good News?
✓ Started Early, Took My Dog
✓ Life After Life
A God in Ruins
Jeannette Winterson’s books:
✓ Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
✓ The Passion
✓ Sexing the Cherry
Written on the Body
Gut Symmetries
The World and Other Places
The PowerBook
✓ Lighthousekeeping
Weight
The Stone Gods
✓ Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
The Daylight Gate
Zadie Smith’s books:
✓ White Teeth
✓ The Autograph Man
✓ On Beauty
Martha and Hanwell
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
✓ NW
The Embassy of Cambodia
Catherine Bush’s books:
Minus Time
✓ The Rules of Engagement
✓ Claire’s Head
✓ Accusation
David Mitchell’s books:
Ghostwritten
number9dream
✓ Cloud Atlas
✓ Black Swan Green
✓ The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
✓ The Bone Clocks
Slade House
Edeet Ravel’s books:
Lovers: A Midrash
✓ Ten Thousand Lovers
✓ Look for Me
✓ A Wall of Light
✓ Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth
The Last Rain
The Cat
Mischa Berlinski’s books (please write more!):
✓ Fieldwork
Charles Yu’s books:
✓ How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Third Class Superhero
✓ Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
Michel Houellebecq’s books:
Whatever
The Elementary Particles
✓ Platform
✓ The Possibility of an Island
✓ The Map and the Territory
Soumission
It seems so sour to end with Houellebecq, but I’ve got to go to the bus stop for Tesfa, so I guess that’s where we’ll stop.
✓
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.