Did not finish, a summary

It has occurred to me that I'm blogging only about books I enjoy enough to actually finish, and therefore you are all missing a crucial part of my reading life. So I thought you might be interested in this short round-up of recently abandoned books along with the reasons why I chose not to finish them. If not, just skip the rest of this post. I won't be offended.

Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer (2011)

This is an excellent example of me starting a non-fiction book in an attempt to learn more about something in the world in which I am mildly interested, but apparently not enough to read an entire book. Ironically, I've read and enjoyed an entire book about the author, Paul Farmer, but apparently he is a more interesting person than writer. At the beginning he apologetically explained all the background that the book would contain in addition to the story about the earthquake and its aftermath, and that should have clued me in. There was a lot of information about the history of Haiti's infrastructure, and as much as I was interested in the post-earthquake parts I felt too daunted by the amount of less interesting stuff I had to slog through and the sheer number of pages left in the book. I'm actually interested in the topic of this book, but this is the sort of thing where I should just read an article about the topic or watch a documentary. Can anyone suggest a good novel or documentary about Haiti's post-earthquake recovery?

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre (1974)

I wanted to like it, really I did. After all, it's a spy novel! I kept expecting it to get really exciting, and stuck it out for half the book before calling it quits. I had no idea what was going on and though a friend insisted that's part of the beauty of the novel, I wasn't able to see that particular beauty. I was bored and reading it began to feel like a chore. I think for a while I was reading this at the same time as the Haiti book which only compounded my frustration. I do want to see the movie though.


The Rogue: searching for the real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinness (2011)

I love to hate Sarah Palin, but even I can't stand to waste too many precious moments of my life reading about her. Also, I just thought it was all a bit much - the author was digging so far back in her life it was irrelevant and that made me rather bored and a little uncomfortable. Why must the world know who Sarah slept with in college and what she said about it afterward? Some college-related dramas should just stay in the dorm room. I only made it through a few chapters, too much of which related to the author's experiences living next to the Palin's while writing the book, which was a bit meta. Also, I'll admit the only Palin-related topic I'm interested in is the strangeness surrounding the birth of Trig.

So that's all the recent books I can think of. If you find it interesting I can post this sort of update regularly (though I hope there aren't a lot of books I start and can finish.) Do you think that's a good idea? Let me know in the comments!

Also! What books have you abandoned recently? And do you have strongly differing opinions from mine on the books above? I'd love to hear them!

Annabel

Annabel by Kathleen Winter (2010)

In the late 60s a woman gives birth to an intersex baby in Labrador Canada. Aside from the parents, Jacinta and Treadway Blake, the only person who knows about the strange child is their neighbor and midwife, Thomasina. Both women doubt Treadway's decision to raise the baby as a boy, but realizing the impracticality of raising a child as both boy and girl, they go along with the idea. Soon after Wayne's birth, Thomasina's husband and daughter are drowned while canoeing, and ever afterward she secretly calls Wayne Annabel after her lost daughter. Wayne knows he has a medical condition requiring a great deal of medication, but doesn't understand the truth about himself until he is almost a teenager. Eventually he must decide whether to continue taking hormones and living as a man or discontinue them and allow his true self to emerge.

Treadway encourages all things masculine in Wayne, and tries to discourage his friendship with a neighborhood girl named Wally Michelin. Wayne and Wally built a hideaway on a bridge, decorating it ornately, and spend hours there, Wally with her music and Wayne reading and admiring the postcards Thomasina sends him from Europe. But Treadway wants Wayne to build forts like "normal" young boys and destroys the bridge and everything in it. When Wayne becomes obsessed with synchronized swimming, Treadway gets his friends to perform a synchronized routine with their backhoes. Wayne was not impressed, but I found it rather touching that Treadway arranged this for him.

Wayne seems such a beautiful and vulnerable person, who is only trying to understand himself. He is patient with his father and doesn't get angry even when he is mistreated. There is beauty in Treadway as well. A trapper, he spends much of the year out on his trapline in the wilderness and intimately understands the land of Labrador. As he spends more and more time on his trapline, it was as though he became almost like a wild animal himself. Not in a vicious way, but in a quiet connected-to-the-land way. Indeed, he is quiet by nature and does not tell his family how he feels, though he feels keenly. Jacinta is more talkative, and more inclined to nurture Wayne's feminine side, but usually defers to her husband. She is not from Labrador and frequently dreams of returning to St. John's but knows that too much has changed since her life was there.

I loved many things about this book and was completely engrossed in it until I finished. It's a great story with characters I became very invested in and cared about, and the setting was unusual and fascinating. Labrador seems like the area in Maine where I grew up, only more so. It's a harsh landscape full of rugged individuals who know how to take care of themselves. I loved all the details, especially the ones about food (they ate strange-sounding things like duck jelly and bottled rabbit!) Everything about this beautiful, unusual novel is pretty wonderful.

Sunday Knitting

Here's the heel I wanted to have done in time to show you last week.

Last night I started on the first sleeve for my Coraline sweater finally, but screwed it up so I have to consider it just a practice run. Hopefully I'll be able to share a successful sleeve beginning with you next week.

I'd like to be able to say that the reason these projects are going so slowly is that I'm doing lots of secret gift knitting, but that would be a big fat lie. I kind of feel like a slacker for not having a completed project every time I post like some knit bloggers. It seems like every time I read the Yarn Harlot's blog she's finished another sock or baby sweater. But then I remind myself that knitting is pretty much her job, whereas I have a full-time job in an area that unfortunately doesn't involve knitting whatsoever, and that makes me feel a bit better.

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky (2011)

When Rosa learns that her teenage daughter, Sulfia, is pregnant, she tries everything she can think of to end the pregnancy. But when baby Aminat is eventually born, Rosa is instantly smitten.  She thinks little of Sulfia, though, always complaining that she is stupid and not fit to be a mother. Now Rosa is scheming to get Sulfia married off and keep Aminat for herself, initiating a lifelong game of tug-of-war. As conditions in Russia deteriorate, Rosa becomes more and more determined that she and Aminat must live in the West, with or without Sulfia, and at any cost necessary. The cost is great indeed.

Rosa is one of the best characters I've come across in fiction in quite a while. She is self-centered, over-confident, and cruel. Some of her behavior is truly horrific - she does everything in her power to marry Sulfia off (several times) but at one point intentionally breaks up Sulfia's marriage for her own selfish reasons, with the result that Sulfia is not only divorced, but is living in a different country than her daughter Lena, and will never see her again. (And then is insensitive enough to say one day "Sulfia, you need a man.") Desperate to get them all out of Russia she practically sells Aminat to a German pedophile to get him to marry Sulfia.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. And that's the thing about this book - it's written with so much humor, you almost can't help but laugh at Rosa's antics and the bizarre lens through which she looks at the world. At her mildest, she is an eccentric middle-aged woman who is always bragging about her skills: "I had a way with puff pastry, as with so many other things" or "I was the perfect spouse." But when something terrible happened and she just picked up and kept going, her cold-heartedness became more apparent and even scary. This was her reaction when her husband left her: "Apparently there are women who break into tears at such news. Their legs buckle and they sink to the tiled floor of the kitchen, with its checkerboard pattern, and other people must step over them in order to get to the refrigerator. I wasn't one of those women." And so begins the parade of men in and out of her bedroom.

As awful as she was, she was one tough and resourceful lady, frequently taking the initiative to solve problems for those around her. When she became a cleaning lady, rather than feeling like it was a big step down in her career, she only remarked on how those families would never have gotten by without her to take care of them, because clearly they couldn't handle it themselves. She also takes it upon herself to learn to ride a bike, drive a car, and ski. Rosa harbors no fear or self-doubt whatsoever!

I read a review in which Rosa was described as an unreliable narrator. Although she doesn't fit the term as I usually think of it, the description is rather apt. Rosa has a narrow view on everything and in her mind is always working towards a specific goal that she feels is for the best, and insists that everything is fine if she says it is. Meanwhile, the reader can see her family's lives falling apart in her wake. She claims to always be acting in the best interests of Sulfia and Aminat, even as she destroys both of their lives bit by bit. But she's not completely blind to what is going on around her; a couple of times she comes out and says that she chooses not to understand certain things.

Although it made it onto several "Best of 2011" lists, this novel never achieved the popularity that it deserves. There's a lot to talk about, and many fantastic quotes (I've dog-eared the hell out of my library copy), but I've already gone on enough about it here. Just get a copy for yourself and read it as soon as possible. If you like Eastern European themed fiction, dark humor, or quirky characters then you're sure to enjoy it. 

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

The first time I read The Great Gatsby was in high school, as part of a project on the Lost Generation for which I also read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I always remember that project because it was so different from all my other work - the teacher assigned each student a book (or two) based on what he knew of our personalities and interests. It was a very fun assignment and I really enjoyed both books. Twenty years later, however, I remembered little of the content. Time for a refresher!

Jay Gatsby is an almost mythical man. He owns a large mansion in West Egg, on Long Island, and throws lavish parties. Nobody really knows where he came from or how he obtained such wealth. Some say he once killed a man. Nothing about him is certain, except that he once loved a woman named Daisy.

The narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, has rented a house next door to Gatsby. Coincidentally, his cousin is Daisy Buchanan. Daisy and Tom live across the bay in the even more posh East Egg. They have a young child, though their marriage is strained as Tom has a mistress. She is Myrtle Wilson who lives with her husband George in an area called the Valley of Ashes. George is Tom's mechanic.

When Gatsby learns that Nick is acquainted with Daisy he implores Nick to help him try to get Daisy back. It's pretty much a setup for a mess, with Jay Gatsby is at the center, and of course it ends tragically.

The narrative is unusual, told from the perspective of someone who is not a main character, but that is one of its great strengths. Nick isn't exactly on anyone's side, nor does he really want to be involved in the complicated relationship issues at all. (At times I expect he deeply regretted his decision to go East that summer.) The other characters came off as pretty self-centered and materialistic for the most part, but still rather fascinating. It's a short novel, so it rather feels like a rowdy group of strangers has whooshed in with their fancy cars and bootlegged gin and just as you think you're getting to know them, they make some stupid mistakes, hearts are broken, bodies are left maimed in the street, and the rest of the group has flitted on to another neighborhood somewhere.

I wish I could remember my impressions of this book as a teenager, because I'm sure it's very different than those I had reading it as an adult. I suspect that back then I was more taken with the lifestyles of the characters - their wealth and the lavish parties - than anything else. What strikes me now is the superficiality of it all, the importance of status in the characters' identities - at the expense of things that would have actually made them happy or given their lives meaning- and most sadly, how none of it meant anything in the end when the guy who was the center of so much attention had only a handful of people show up to his funeral.

There is a lot to this short novel, and in fact I got a little sidetracked the other night reading reviews and literary criticism about it. Now that I've rediscovered it I'm sure I'll read it again more than once and I'm curious to see how different the experience is each time.

Have you read this classic? Do you love it? Hate it? And why?

Sunday Knitting

I was hoping to have a beautifully turned heel to show you, but all I've got is the boring first few rows of a heel flap.

The farther along I get on my orange Milo socks, the more I wonder when on earth I will wear them. They are pretty bright and, well, orange. My red socks that I finished back in June have yet to be worn this season. But I suppose it's still early and there are months of boot-wearing sock-covering weather ahead. By January my priority will be piling as much warmth on my body as possible, without caring if I look like a circus clown.

The Knife of Never Letting Go

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (2008)

In Prentisstown, there are no women. They were killed off by a virus which had less serious, but very strange, effects on men - their thoughts are all completely audible. They try to control their Noise, but it's still very difficult to keep secrets in this strange new world. Todd Hewitt is the last boy in this city of men, and in just one more month he, too, will be a man. For now he's alone with no friends, except for his dog Manchee, who is the only one who ever talks to him, but has little of importance to say. But one day as Todd and Manchee are exploring the swamp outside town they come across a very strange spot where there is a marked absence of Noise. Could it be a leftover Spackle, one of the aliens that were supposedly all killed off during the war? Or is it something even more surprising? In this first installment of the much-lauded Chaos Walking series, we follow Todd on an action-packed journey of discovery as he uncovers the truth about his world while trying to save his own life.

The world in this novel is strange and scary, as with any dystopia, but I especially liked the element of Noise, and the way people tried to control their thoughts so as not to give away their secrets. Having the animals talk made it very humorous and I think my favorite character in the book was Manchee. (He reminded me of the dog in the movie Up, who is hiding under your porch because he loves you.)

The story was very fast-paced and I flew through it. Something would happen very quickly --

Todd barely had time to --

And before he knew it --

Something came crashing down --

And Manchee started barking "Squirrel!!"

And then suddenly --

You get the idea. It makes for exciting reading and it's difficult to put down, but it kind of exhausted me.

Usually there is some sort of resolution at the end of a book, even if it's a series and you know the whole thing isn't actually over. Not here - there is no rest after this journey and although I did start on the second installment right away, I just can't keep up this pace. I'm not as young as I used to be.

If you like young adult dystopias, you really shouldn't miss this one. Grab all three volumes, turn your phone off, and immerse yourself in Patrick Ness's world for a weekend this winter.