February Reads
One of my literary counterparts, Neon Gods, posted a “February Reads” article. In general, she’s more organized, I think, in her reading ventures. We’ve kept track of each other’s reading habits for years, having met on Shelfari about 5 or 6 years ago. Despite my aversion to meeting people on the internet, she has been a pretty stellar internet friend. I’ve never met her in person, and yet she has influenced me – my reading life, atlas – greatly.
My reviews these last few months have felt less consistent than usual, so I thought I’d take a page from her book and do a monthly summary. At least for this last month anyway.
We wrapped up January with One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. 
The original, not these new media tie ins you’ll find with the Glenn Close movie cover on them. For once I can actually say, No, it’s not the same book! Typically you can tell book buyers that it was just a marketing tactic. They put a movie cover on an old manuscript and sold the same book again. That is not the case with One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Pay attention when you purchase. Also… now that we’ve read the original, I’ve discovered that there was a sequel. Of course, now me must find it and read it too. (Until then, we are tackling The Wind in the Willows as our evening family chapter book.)
As previously mentioned, I read Guide to Wild Foods & Useful Plants by Nyerges. But I also read through A Game of Thrones last month. (And caught up on the tv show.) There’s a reason the masses are in love with George R.R. Martin’s world. It’s impressive. It’s grossly human. It’s epic fantasy. The prude in me would like a little less nudity and sex out of the show – the books are far less detailed in that regard – but from a cinematic point of view, I’m blown away. The sets, the actors, the crew, everyone just seems to have nailed the feel for the world. Clearly, I’m very late to this party – as usual – but I love it. Obviously, it brought a whole new appreciation to this moment from Comicpalooza in 2013:
Yes, that would be me, braiding the hair of the Father of Dragons. I knew what I was doing, knew what we were emulating, but I didn’t really have a full appreciation for it all until now.
Then, I kind of went all self improvement in my reading. I read through The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace and The Homeschool Life by Andrea Schwartz. I don’t particularly care for self-help books, but I do manage to keep them in my life via my “read for every discipline” mentality. No section of a bookstore is left untouched by the end of the year, if it’s a good year.
I also read through Garden Crafts for Kids
Finally, I finished The Gardener’s Bed Book by Richard Wright. I’m not going to touch too heavily on the book here, because honestly, I have far more than an online book review in mind for my experiences while reading it. My favorite thing about a reader’s life are the books written in response to other books. They are like love letters through time and space to people you’ll never meet or know, but feel more akin to than any other humans on the planet. I feel like Melanie Kerr’s Follies Past was her love letter to Jane Austen. I have projects in mind that will be odes to Madeleine L’Engle and Richard Wright. They have moved me so completely and become a part of who I am, it’s only right they are responded to with ink and paper.
Blasted Book Bouncing
I have a tendency to bounce from book to book. I read a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Many times I sit and read one book in one sitting, but all the books that don’t get read with such vigor are subject to months on end of a chapter here and a chapter there.
Today, I polished off Cassandra Clare’s City of Lost Souls, and while the kiddo napped sat down with a pile of my ‘bouncing’ books. I started by picking up Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World. I read a few chapters of this throughout the week, and plan to have it completed by the end of the year so that I can spend 2013 reading the sequel The History of the Medieval World. Bauer provides excellent histories, educational guides, and other lovely lists, and at any given time there is something written by her sitting on my coffee table with a bookmark or post it note precariously shoved in its pages.
After 30 minutes or so with Bauer, I meandered over to my lit crit shelf and plucked up a copy of The Bookaholics’ Guide to Book Blogs
The Bookaholics’ Guide is lovely and when I am finished reading it, I shall post a full review worthy of a book dedicated to praising book reviewers. But for now, though entirely riveted and already 50 pages in – I am also distracted. Why? Because while reading about all these wonderful blogs and their dedication to their reading and writing and reviewing, there is a portion entirely devoted to the discussion of how tragedies always seem to win over comedies. That got my brain thinking back to the lovely Susan Wise Bauer and the list of novels she provides in The Well-Educated Mind
So of course, in my blasted book bouncing fashion, I pick up the book I am currently reading on the list: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I read Chapter One the other day and immediately texted my kindergarten best friend who was an African-American Studies major during her undergrad years, that so far I loved it. (Because unfortunately, I hated reading Native Son by Richard Wright, despite the great skill involved in his story telling, and have been feeling incredibly guilty about it.) Of course, in the midst of being made painfully aware of the sad fact that as a human race we are enraptured by tragedies, I became engrossed in Chapter Two of Invisible Man and nearly died of the overwhelming coincidence.
*SPOILERS*
If you have not read Invisible Man, I suggest you read no further. Unless, you are of the variety of readers who don’t care about spoilers, and then I may cheerfully say, read on.
Chapter Two includes the lengthy tale of Jim Trueblood, a man who has fathered a child with his wife as well as his own grandchild with his daughter in roughly the same time period. I have not yet read beyond Chapter Two, therefore cannot share with you the relevance to the Invisible Man’s story, or the book as a whole, but I can say that I felt ill after reading it.
Poor, oh poor Jim Trueblood (I say with intense sarcasm), who rolled over on his daughter while sleeping and having an odd dream, inserting his penis into her and *accidentally* fathered her child – to everyone’s horror.
Really?! Really!?
Of course, I must read on to discover the significance of it all. But I really don’t want to.
1. If your daughter is that old, she should not be sleeping between her two parents. I don’t care how poor you are. Put the child on the other side of the mother. That’s just common sense. What teenaged daughter wants to sleep between her two parents anyway?
2. I don’t know if I’m supposed to believe Jim Trueblood at this point or not, but I’m with the protagonist on this one – why the hell did Jim Trueblood get a hundred-dollar bill for knocking up his own daughter!? Its absurd. I have a hard time believing that people behave(d) this way.
3. I have a hard time buying this story in the light of the symbolism it supposedly represents: http://students.cis.uab.edu/archived/dlam/Jim%20Trueblood.html, but I look forward to seeing if the rest of the novel makes these proposals more clear. I’ve a huge soft spot for The Great Gatsby and The Natural, so you can imagine how much I adore symbolism.
4. So far, the only African-American/ Black (depending on your version of what is politically correct) fiction that I have ever truly appreciated in my entire life has been the young adult Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
You see, the thing is, I hate reading a book and feeling like the sole purpose is to make me pity the protagonist. Mostly, because I think pity is the ultimate form of disrespect. Why would I want to read a character that I have no respect for? No matter how under the dog, one should not pity the protagonist nor hate them. One shouldn’t see them as less than themselves. I want to read about a fight for equality with some umph. I want to see them prevail over adversity, not wallow in their plight. The things I disliked about Native Son are the same things I disliked about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love
These are the views the politically correct call me racist over, but I assure you that I have great respect for people of every color, culture, generation, and walk of life. Sometimes, I wish they had a little more respect for themselves. Just remember, never fight the good fight with a plea for pity – its a huge turn off.
Granted, I have only just finished Chapter Two… there is yet more to the story to discover. I hope it lives up to its classic reputation. I don’t want my distaste for unrelated titles to taint my views as I read this work.
A Weekend With Murderers
Its been an interesting, though depressing weekend of books, while I was away from the computer. Since my modem had burned up and we were patiently waiting for a new one, I decided to sit down and have as much as a reading marathon as possible with a toddler in my midst. So between a whole lot of picture and board books, I was on a mission to tick some loitering TBRs off my end table…
…Starting with Native Son
So I set it aside, but moved onto to the worst choice ever: Albert Camus’ The Stranger
All these “helpless” humans killing other humans. I got really irritated, more than a little sad, and switched over to some nonfiction where I polished the weekend off with a whole lot of Astrology and Astronomy books for a little research project. As someone who personally knows someone in prison for two accounts of attempted murder, I just have a hard time buying into the helpless unintentional killings, unless we’re talking self defense or the mentally disabled (like in Of Mice and Men).
What have you been reading?
Anakalian Whims 