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.

He read a long debate with the most amiable readiness and then explained it in his most lucid manner, while Meg tried to look deeply interested, to ask intelligent questions, and keep her thoughts from wandering from the state of the nation to the state of her bonnet. In her secret soul, however, she decided that politics were as bad as mathematics, and that the mission of politicians seemed to be calling each other names, but she kept these feminine ideas to herself, and when John paused, shook her head and said with what she thought diplomatic ambiguity, “Well, I really don’t see what we are coming to.”

As bad as mathematics? Oh, we’re on.

The more I read, the less I understand the love for this book. So much stuff is about finding happiness in marriage and being like a doormat to ease the lives of others around you. It fills me with rage.

Ninety percent done, according to kobo. Will likely finish today and then the complaints will cease.

I know there are all these pop-science articles about how classics make you a better person and will clean your oven for you and do your taxes and the like, but I’m starting to really believe that reading Little Women is making me a worse person than I was previously. Case and point: I read an hour of the book yesterday while waiting for Tesfa’s craft club to finish, and then came home angry and sullen for the rest of the evening.

I don’t mind the episodic nature of the tale, but the little morals woven in throughout, the sheer goodness of the characters, how selfless they are, how kind, how nice, it just makes me want to punch someone in the head and then scream at the top of my lungs. Thankfully, I just shut myself away to assemble Tesfa’s new car seat (I am weary of buying and assembling car seats. This is the third one since Tesfa is now too small for her current car seat but does not weigh enough for a booster, so I got to shell out more money on a car seat that converts to a booster eventually, and I’m pretty sure by this point I’ve spent more on car seats than I did on diapers and clothes for Tesfa during her entire existence. Edit: My mother actually bought the second car seat and not me, so I take that back about how much I’ve spent on car seats). One might assume that it was following the ridiculous assembly instructions that made me angry, but no, I was angry before. Angry at Little Women.

I always say I want to be earnest, not as sarcastic, kinder, gentler, warmer. No ironic hipster detachment from life, but embracing it. Clearly, however, I can’t. I can’t read a sweet story. I think there is something wrong with the empathy and caring part of my brain.

My kobo tells me I am 77% of the way through. I’m afraid I’m going to murder someone before I get to the end.

I am trying again. Someone I knew told me that Little Women was worth my time. And now that I have a kobo and Project Gutenberg is at my fingertips, I have no excuse not to read it. My kobo helpfully tells me I am 42% of the way through Little Women, yet it feels like I will never ever finish this book. I will, of course, just due to stubbornness and the belief that I should give classics a fair shot, but I have come to the conclusion that my three degrees in Mathematics have not properly trained me for reading what is supposed to be the apex-time of the novel. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to read these books and enjoy them.

Of course, that last sentence was probably an over-exaggeration. I thought and thought and thought and have come up with all the nineteenth century novels I have read in my life. There is a skewing towards Russian novels, since I took a course on The Great Russian Novel, and maybe I like Russian novels better because they have that weary annoyance with being alive that I somewhat identify with (the bits of Ukrainian in me peaking out).

So, here, to the best of my memory, is my list of nineteenth century novels I have read, roughly in the order I read them in:

1.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells: Read in middle school. Don’t remember much other than I got my copy for 25 cents at a book sale.

2.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Same book sale. Same price. Read the same November. It’s great that my memory recalls I read this in November of my eighth grade year, yet I remember very little about actually reading either of these two books. That much of an impression was left. I mean, I know the story of A Christmas Carol, having seen movies and the like, but there’s nothing specific about the book that remains.

3.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: Okay – I read an abridged version of this in translation. It was still four hundred pages long and I was twelve, so that’s got to count for something. I read most of it outside on the grass while waiting for my sister’s gymnastic classes to finish. There was a pool there to dip my feet into. It was a rather lonely summer. I think I remember a lot of this, shortened, book though. I should read a full version and see how much I actually do remember.

4.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: I remember being more impressed that I could understand the bits of French in the novel. Book was okay I guess. Didn’t really understand the allure of Mr. Rochester.

5.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: I read like a third of this in Grade Ten English. By I read, I should say The class read. My teacher was very much about a Dickensian surgical strike saying we didn’t have the time to read all of A Tale of Two Cities, only the points most salient to the plot with the lookalikes and I guess something about knitting?

6.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Read for OAC English. I got a bad mark (probably a B or something; I was that sort of student that thought anything less that A+ was a bad mark) on an opinion piece because I said I didn’t really understand exactly what Kurtz did wrong? He got chummy with the natives and that seemed to shock everyone’s Victorian sensibilities, but other than that? Apparently to a high school English teacher, that kinda denotes complete lack of understanding because, and I remember this clearly, written at the top of my page in purple ink was You need to re-read this book because you have missed the point. I guess this also just sneaks in as well, being published in 1899.

7.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: This was the book that told me that maybe nineteenth century novels and I were not to be. I liked it until near the ending when the (highlight to see spoiler) spooky secret society as the real villains. In true nineties (1990s that is) style: gag me with a spoon. This book is forever entwined with the summer I worked at Nortel and reading it on the long, round-about bus ride from Nortel Carling to Barrhaven. Three buses and an hour. Driving from my parents’ house to Nortel Carling takes ten minutes. This was not OC Transpo’s finest hour.

8., 9.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll: Okay, these books I actually like a fair deal. All the silly nonsense. But I don’t really know if they can be considered having the same weightiness as say Dickens or Doestoevsky.

10.

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper: I do not remember anything about this book. Daniel Day-Lewis was in the movie though. I saw the movie on a plane. Come to think of it, I think the person who talked to me about Little Women also likes either this book or this movie.

11.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Read on the bench of the Barrhaven Mall while waiting for my piano lessons with Tom Pechloff to begin. Again, not much stuck.

12.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: Ah, now we are getting into my ancestral compatriots! But firstly, how sad is it that this Dead Souls is fourth on the list when you search for Dead Souls on Librarything? Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls is number one. Really? This makes me make that grrrrr sound I make when I’m frustrated with something over which I have no control whatsoever (frequently heard on airplanes or with family members). Anyways, I like this book. I really like this book. It’s so bizarre and Gogol went mad and starved himself to death while trying to finish the trilogy and something inside me emo-nods and says I totally relate to that.

13.

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov: This Russian novel I do not like so much. I fell asleep while reading this book, in a cold room, in the middle of the day.

14.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev: A Russian novel I don’t remember much about. I’m guessing there’s a father and a son. I think they go to England?

15.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: I remember the ending of The Idiot, but I think what I think is the beginning of The Idiot is actually the beginning of Demons, which I was reading at the same time but didn’t finish.

16.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoi: A wonderful story, unfortunately interjected with Tolstoi spew.

17.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Well, this is just the greatest novel ever written. You can’t really say anything other than that. I spent all of May 2002 reading this book and pretty much doing nothing else, ignoring my stupid computer science course I had to take in order to get my undergraduate pure math degree. I learned a lot more from this book than I ever did about Java.

18.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi: Any long-time follower of my blog already knows my views on War and Peace (specifically, Tolstoi spew). I surprised myself my enjoying the war parts more than the peace parts, in prime contradiction to Anastasia Krupnik’s mom in one of the Anastasia books, but I can’t remember which one.

19.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Another failure. Sorry Rebecca who loves this book. I feel bad I don’t love it too. This was the first book I read on my kobo, so we’ll always have that.

20.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: I liked this one! Yay for me! But this book isn’t actually about the nineteenth century, so maybe that’s why I liked it. It’s about the 1640s.

21.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: Not done this yet, but not loving it either. I have a feeling this makes me heartless.

I think that’s it (although I’ll probably hit publish and remember like twenty other nineteenth century books I’ve read). So what’s the total? Let’s see:

• Loved (5): Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Dead Souls, The Brothers Karamazov, The Scarlet Letter
• Okayed (6): Les Misérables, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Little Women
• Did not like (4): A Tale of Two Cities, The Woman in White, Oblomov, Pride and Prejudice
• Cannot remember much of anything that happened (6): The Invisible Man,
• A Christmas Carol, The Last of the Mohicans, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Fathers and Sons, The Idiot

So, is that an acceptable attempt at the nineteenth century novel? A poor one? English-lit geeks, help me out.

I want to enjoy classics, but then I try and get frustrated and my brain rebels. Perhaps I need to be older and calmer and less angry with things. Perhaps I need to mellow out to enjoy stories that aren’t post-modern and stories where marriage and riches are the ultimate goal. Comedies of manners. I don’t know. I give myself pep talks but I just can’t get excited about nineteenth century novels the way I get excited about contemporary ones.

So what nineteenth century novel should I read next that will cause me to fall in love with the whole genre? Internet, please advise me.