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Wednesday Will Tear Us Apart
Sep. 22nd, 2021 02:20 pmWhat I Finished Reading A While Ago
I'll confess that I thought Hard Feelings was going to be enjoyably dumb and a little exploitative, and that's why I brought it home in the first place. It turns out to be pretty good. It's an honest attempt at literary versimiliude about being a sixteen-year-old tennis player in 1978, which means the perspective is sometimes brutal, sometimes painfully ignorant, unhelpfully reflective in unreliable spurts, and wildly inconsistent in all things, up to and including tennis. Is unrelenting versimilitude the best thing to shoot for when writing a novel about teenagers? It's hard to say. There's no real resolution to any of the plot threads except one (and that one is the least convincing thing in the whole book) but the half-formed muddledness of everything is part of what makes it feel so much like real life.
In My Dog Rinty, an extremely meandering picture book from 1948, Rinty is such a bad dog that David's family can no longer justify their leash and doghouse budget (Rinty keeps destroying them both). Eventually he has to be sold to a rich lady, who promptly takes him to obedience school and turns him into a good dog. But then the rich lady's landlord tells her that his building no longer allows dogs, so she gives him back to David. There's a happy ending, sort of, that turns on New York housing stock being full of mice.
What makes My Dog Rinty the absolute gem it is, though, are the beautiful quotidian photographs of 1940s Harlem on every page: children in living rooms, scuffed shoes and church shoes, a dime store and a hotel lobby, a fat baby (now over seventy) being bathed in a basin at someone's kitchen table). Two real-life children's librarians get a loving portrait each.
What I Finished More Recently
All I can say about Lent is be prepared for plot twists. And a pun that is also a punch. And take the dust jacket off if you can, because the cover copy is full of spoilers. Not that you have to be surprised to enjoy a book, but I was and I did.
I loved With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, even though (because?) the main character was so horrendously frustrating and I kept wanting it to turn into a kinder, less thorny, less hopeless story, like a chump. Basically, it's about a mother who doesn't understand her difficult son, or her wife, or any other human being, or herself. There's some deliberately disgusting cockroach content that hit a little too close to home, and a lot of miserable petty failures ditto. Nothing ever gets better for more than 30 minutes at a time and everyone ends up worse than they started. It's utterly bleak (and also funny) and I wish I were still reading it.
What I May Someday Finish Reading
Despite my long-standing promise to finally read some Jonathan Franzen fiction, I gave up on The Twenty-Seventh City about two-thirds of the way in. I didn't hate it, I wanted to like it, but I just got tired of not caring about any of the characters or the stupid edgy plot. Which might have been a perfectly good plot if I'd been in a better mood, who knows? It's a baroque city-corruption-plus-kidnapping plot, an odd clothesline to hang Franzen's large collection of coldly observed marital and municipal minutuae on, and I never got around to believing in it, for whatever reason.
A Milestone Is Reached
For the first time since I got it six years ago, there's space for new books on my little "to read" shelf. I've read all the unread books in my room! (I haven't read all the unread books in the apartment, but that's Phase Two, maybe).
I'll confess that I thought Hard Feelings was going to be enjoyably dumb and a little exploitative, and that's why I brought it home in the first place. It turns out to be pretty good. It's an honest attempt at literary versimiliude about being a sixteen-year-old tennis player in 1978, which means the perspective is sometimes brutal, sometimes painfully ignorant, unhelpfully reflective in unreliable spurts, and wildly inconsistent in all things, up to and including tennis. Is unrelenting versimilitude the best thing to shoot for when writing a novel about teenagers? It's hard to say. There's no real resolution to any of the plot threads except one (and that one is the least convincing thing in the whole book) but the half-formed muddledness of everything is part of what makes it feel so much like real life.
In My Dog Rinty, an extremely meandering picture book from 1948, Rinty is such a bad dog that David's family can no longer justify their leash and doghouse budget (Rinty keeps destroying them both). Eventually he has to be sold to a rich lady, who promptly takes him to obedience school and turns him into a good dog. But then the rich lady's landlord tells her that his building no longer allows dogs, so she gives him back to David. There's a happy ending, sort of, that turns on New York housing stock being full of mice.
What makes My Dog Rinty the absolute gem it is, though, are the beautiful quotidian photographs of 1940s Harlem on every page: children in living rooms, scuffed shoes and church shoes, a dime store and a hotel lobby, a fat baby (now over seventy) being bathed in a basin at someone's kitchen table). Two real-life children's librarians get a loving portrait each.
What I Finished More Recently
All I can say about Lent is be prepared for plot twists. And a pun that is also a punch. And take the dust jacket off if you can, because the cover copy is full of spoilers. Not that you have to be surprised to enjoy a book, but I was and I did.
I loved With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, even though (because?) the main character was so horrendously frustrating and I kept wanting it to turn into a kinder, less thorny, less hopeless story, like a chump. Basically, it's about a mother who doesn't understand her difficult son, or her wife, or any other human being, or herself. There's some deliberately disgusting cockroach content that hit a little too close to home, and a lot of miserable petty failures ditto. Nothing ever gets better for more than 30 minutes at a time and everyone ends up worse than they started. It's utterly bleak (and also funny) and I wish I were still reading it.
What I May Someday Finish Reading
Despite my long-standing promise to finally read some Jonathan Franzen fiction, I gave up on The Twenty-Seventh City about two-thirds of the way in. I didn't hate it, I wanted to like it, but I just got tired of not caring about any of the characters or the stupid edgy plot. Which might have been a perfectly good plot if I'd been in a better mood, who knows? It's a baroque city-corruption-plus-kidnapping plot, an odd clothesline to hang Franzen's large collection of coldly observed marital and municipal minutuae on, and I never got around to believing in it, for whatever reason.
A Milestone Is Reached
For the first time since I got it six years ago, there's space for new books on my little "to read" shelf. I've read all the unread books in my room! (I haven't read all the unread books in the apartment, but that's Phase Two, maybe).
