What Are You Reading (Not On A) Wednesday
Jun. 12th, 2014 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricMy usual fortnightly WAYRW post would have been LAST week, but life happened. With prejudice.
What Are You Reading Wednesday:
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
What Are You Currently Reading? The best thing about my current reading list is that it NO LONGER CONTAINS HIGH SCHOOL EXAM TEXTS. It does have quite a range of leisure reading that I've been puttering along with for weeks or months, including 'Best Australian Poems 2013', 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage' and 'Visit Sunny Chernobyl'. The most recent and most fun addition is Diccon Bewes' 'Swisss Watching', which is providing me with MANY MANY FACTS. The average swiss person eats 12 kg of cheese per year! And 10-ish of that is domesticly produced cheese.
What did you recently finish reading? Where 'recently' means 'in the last three weeks'...
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I actually quite liked this, although I wasn't fond of the semi-mythological set-up. I'm not sure how to feel about whitedude Steinbeck writing about native south americans, but in many ways it seems to me that he afforded them more dignity than the poor white dudes in Of Mice And Men.
The Statement by Brian Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have very conflicted feelings about this book. I don't think it was *as good* as the jacket covers praised it to be. Masterful portrayal of evil yadda yadda yadda... hmm, no, maybe not. Or at least, that didn't seem to be the driving force of the book.
It *was* a good suspense thriller, and Moore did a fantastic job of making Brossard an... empathetic but not sympathetic character? You could understand all his motivations even as he was in fact a Not Nice Person. Most of his pursuers were well-fleshed out and whenever each of them was the focalising POV you kind of wanted THEM to succeed. I wish there'd been more of Judge Livi, I liked her and wanted to know more about her.
What I find weird is that, in a novel about anti-semitic crimes against humanity... there were no jews. Unless Judge Livi was, as Brossard suspected, jewish, in which case, not clarified. Jews were scapegoated and blamed for his eventual murder, but there were *no actual jews* anywhere in the story, except the fourteen Brossard had killed.
What else? I became frustrated with myself for not being able to fact-check his portrayal of Vichy France. Brossard and his allies and semi-allies believed that most 'small business owners' and middle-class people supported the Vichy leadership, and I want to know where that came from and, if true, why so?
Finally, I felt smug when I caught Moore out. One of several murders takes place in Villeneuve, near Nice, in a cafe on the Rue Obscure. I've been there: there are no cafes in the Rue Obscure. HAH.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I admired the *artistry* of this, but I didn't enjoy it. I usually quite like bleak rural stories, but in this case... eh. I'd rather Annie Proulx.
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm sure this would be brilliant on stage (of course, it's Wilde), and in many ways it's a more complex play than Lady Windermere's Fan, but I liked the latter better anyway. This play takes on quite seriously the question of how to be a good man, Lady Windermere was more concerned with what constitutes a good woman. The two use some very similar plot devices, but I felt Ideal Husband lost something for not investing Mrs Cheverley with the same degree of complexity as Mrs Evelyn in Lady Windermere.
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Oh, I *did* like this. Lucy wasn't a *nice* person but she was a good one, and the people around her recognised that and loved her for it. Lucy's awareness of the racial difference and distance between her and her host family was well-drawn, and the close first-person narrative made it impossible to avoid dealing with race, but also made race very present and easy to trace. I can see why the teacher set this novel for a swiss matriculation curriculum, AND I liked it a lot.
I don't mean to suggest that my experience as a white expat in the 21st c is significantly similar to that of a carribean expat in New York in the 50s, but nevertheless I identified strongly with Lucy's expat experience and the sense of dislocation that brought her. Her outburst at her hostess-employer, 'Do you realise I learned by heart a poem about flowers I wouldn't see until I was nineteen?'... yeah. Ouch. Colonialism feels. On the other hand, Lucy's antipathy toward books on feminism as an explanation or framework for her problems was foreign to me - the line about all the books in the world not being about *my mother* cut close, but ultimately, I LIKE book explanations and have many books about white women to provide those explanations. *I* wanted to read the books Mariah was bringing for Lucy, but the narration kept kicking me around to seeing how insensitive or inept that move was.
Finally, I was impressed by this book's handling of Lucy's relationship with her home and her mother. It would be easy to write a novel in which she learned the importance of family and home while in New York - and to some extent, she did. But she also valued independance, self-discovery, and the opportunities available in New York. Kincaid doesn't make that an easy answer, but handles it well.
Cal by Bernard MacLaverty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Look, this was well-written, and emotionally pretty demanding. But why spend all that effort getting you emotionally hooked on Cal and Cal alone when you could've had a novella about Marcella, or a longer novel alternating their PsOV? I want an ending that acknowledges that Marcella has been really, thororughly screwed over. Your husband is shot, you're living with your inlaws, and you finally start letting yourself recover by having it off with a farmhand. Then said farmhand is arrested and you find out he was in the IRA cell that shot your husband. WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU DO FROM HERE?
What do you think you'll read next? I'm going to try to knock a few items of my currently reading list first... Then I have a Melissa Lukashenko book to read, in aggravating Adobe Digital Editions format. I also ordered 'Muriel at Metropolitan', by Miriam Tlali, which I think might be the first novel by a black south african woman - to wash my brain out after some very worrying readings of white south african lit encountered while marrking exams.
What Are You Reading Wednesday:
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
What Are You Currently Reading? The best thing about my current reading list is that it NO LONGER CONTAINS HIGH SCHOOL EXAM TEXTS. It does have quite a range of leisure reading that I've been puttering along with for weeks or months, including 'Best Australian Poems 2013', 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage' and 'Visit Sunny Chernobyl'. The most recent and most fun addition is Diccon Bewes' 'Swisss Watching', which is providing me with MANY MANY FACTS. The average swiss person eats 12 kg of cheese per year! And 10-ish of that is domesticly produced cheese.
What did you recently finish reading? Where 'recently' means 'in the last three weeks'...
The Pearl by John SteinbeckMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I actually quite liked this, although I wasn't fond of the semi-mythological set-up. I'm not sure how to feel about whitedude Steinbeck writing about native south americans, but in many ways it seems to me that he afforded them more dignity than the poor white dudes in Of Mice And Men.
The Statement by Brian MooreMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have very conflicted feelings about this book. I don't think it was *as good* as the jacket covers praised it to be. Masterful portrayal of evil yadda yadda yadda... hmm, no, maybe not. Or at least, that didn't seem to be the driving force of the book.
It *was* a good suspense thriller, and Moore did a fantastic job of making Brossard an... empathetic but not sympathetic character? You could understand all his motivations even as he was in fact a Not Nice Person. Most of his pursuers were well-fleshed out and whenever each of them was the focalising POV you kind of wanted THEM to succeed. I wish there'd been more of Judge Livi, I liked her and wanted to know more about her.
What I find weird is that, in a novel about anti-semitic crimes against humanity... there were no jews. Unless Judge Livi was, as Brossard suspected, jewish, in which case, not clarified. Jews were scapegoated and blamed for his eventual murder, but there were *no actual jews* anywhere in the story, except the fourteen Brossard had killed.
What else? I became frustrated with myself for not being able to fact-check his portrayal of Vichy France. Brossard and his allies and semi-allies believed that most 'small business owners' and middle-class people supported the Vichy leadership, and I want to know where that came from and, if true, why so?
Finally, I felt smug when I caught Moore out. One of several murders takes place in Villeneuve, near Nice, in a cafe on the Rue Obscure. I've been there: there are no cafes in the Rue Obscure. HAH.
Of Mice and Men by John SteinbeckMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I admired the *artistry* of this, but I didn't enjoy it. I usually quite like bleak rural stories, but in this case... eh. I'd rather Annie Proulx.
An Ideal Husband by Oscar WildeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm sure this would be brilliant on stage (of course, it's Wilde), and in many ways it's a more complex play than Lady Windermere's Fan, but I liked the latter better anyway. This play takes on quite seriously the question of how to be a good man, Lady Windermere was more concerned with what constitutes a good woman. The two use some very similar plot devices, but I felt Ideal Husband lost something for not investing Mrs Cheverley with the same degree of complexity as Mrs Evelyn in Lady Windermere.
Lucy by Jamaica KincaidMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Oh, I *did* like this. Lucy wasn't a *nice* person but she was a good one, and the people around her recognised that and loved her for it. Lucy's awareness of the racial difference and distance between her and her host family was well-drawn, and the close first-person narrative made it impossible to avoid dealing with race, but also made race very present and easy to trace. I can see why the teacher set this novel for a swiss matriculation curriculum, AND I liked it a lot.
I don't mean to suggest that my experience as a white expat in the 21st c is significantly similar to that of a carribean expat in New York in the 50s, but nevertheless I identified strongly with Lucy's expat experience and the sense of dislocation that brought her. Her outburst at her hostess-employer, 'Do you realise I learned by heart a poem about flowers I wouldn't see until I was nineteen?'... yeah. Ouch. Colonialism feels. On the other hand, Lucy's antipathy toward books on feminism as an explanation or framework for her problems was foreign to me - the line about all the books in the world not being about *my mother* cut close, but ultimately, I LIKE book explanations and have many books about white women to provide those explanations. *I* wanted to read the books Mariah was bringing for Lucy, but the narration kept kicking me around to seeing how insensitive or inept that move was.
Finally, I was impressed by this book's handling of Lucy's relationship with her home and her mother. It would be easy to write a novel in which she learned the importance of family and home while in New York - and to some extent, she did. But she also valued independance, self-discovery, and the opportunities available in New York. Kincaid doesn't make that an easy answer, but handles it well.
Cal by Bernard MacLavertyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Look, this was well-written, and emotionally pretty demanding. But why spend all that effort getting you emotionally hooked on Cal and Cal alone when you could've had a novella about Marcella, or a longer novel alternating their PsOV? I want an ending that acknowledges that Marcella has been really, thororughly screwed over. Your husband is shot, you're living with your inlaws, and you finally start letting yourself recover by having it off with a farmhand. Then said farmhand is arrested and you find out he was in the IRA cell that shot your husband. WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU DO FROM HERE?
What do you think you'll read next? I'm going to try to knock a few items of my currently reading list first... Then I have a Melissa Lukashenko book to read, in aggravating Adobe Digital Editions format. I also ordered 'Muriel at Metropolitan', by Miriam Tlali, which I think might be the first novel by a black south african woman - to wash my brain out after some very worrying readings of white south african lit encountered while marrking exams.