Saturday, February 26, 2011

Currently NOT in love with...

Oh, you guys. I have been reading and decidedly NOT liking some books lately. Do you want to hear about them? Of course you do.

The first book I read and didn't like very much was Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, And Love. I wanted to like this book. I wanted to like it very much. It's a memoir of sorts in which the author describes how she, a Harvard graduate living in NYC and making her living as a writer, fell in love with a hippie farmer type guy and chucked everything to run off, marry him, and start a new farm. I mean, that sounds good, right? That sounds INTERESTING. Their farm is a whole-diet farm, meaning they aim to provide their subscribers/customers with EVERYTHING they need to eat, from dairy products to a variety of meats to flours to dried beans to MAPLE SYRUP, for crying out loud! How could a book about THAT go wrong?

I'll tell you how: tone. The author has one, and it can be described in one word, and that word is "elitist". She is an elitist, and she has an elitist tone. At first I thought she was doing it on purpose, emphasizing the fish-out-of-water thing and setting herself up for the big epiphany she has halfway through the book in which she realizes that hey! Maybe farmers aren't stupid after all! Yeah, maybe some of them are even every bit as smart as the ad execs she knew back in NYC who went to college and stuff! Mind-blowing, eh?

But no, the tone continues far beyond that light bulb moment. After a few too many comments about how the impoverished kids she went to school with were snot-nosed and filthy, and how Amish men wear the same glasses that the kids in shop class wear (what?!), and how she eventually built up enough upper-body strength that she was able to make her way through the barn with a full pail of milk in each hand "like a Chinese peasant", I just ... yeesh. I decided she wasn't doing it on purpose. She was just kind of a jerk, and she probably didn't even realize it, and that made me kind of sad while reading the book. It was certainly well-written in terms of her ability to put a sentence together, and parts of it were fascinating, but I ended up not liking it (or her) very much.

So then I started The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot and hey, guess what? I didn't like that one either. I bought it because it won the Pulitzer and because I had heard someone talk about it somewhere, sometime, I don't know. I almost gave up on it just a few pages in, because there were FOOTNOTES, which I find obnoxious in a work of fiction. But I stuck with it for 50 pages, and then I had to bail out. I just didn't care about the characters at all, despite the fact that the main character was from the Dominican Republic (I had a childhood friend from there) and was a giant sci-fi nerd (I married one). I found the writing sort of dense and disjointed and borderline incomprehensible. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for that sort of book, I don't know. But life is too short to read books you don't love, right? Right!

After bailing on Oscar Wao I started reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, and it LOOKS good and I think it probably IS good but I'm having a hard time getting into it for some reason. I'm reading the hardback version because that's what was available at the super cheap library bookstore where I buy most of my crack books, but it is unwieldy (duh). And it's long. And there are a lot of chapters. And ... I don't know, you guys. I think maybe I'd rather be re-reading Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking for the umpteenth time.

I should probably just go do that then, eh? Yep, I think so. Glad we got that all worked out.

16 comments:

  1. I read the Oscar Wao one. But I have no memory. Did I like it? Can. Not. Recall.

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  2. Oscar Wao gets better - I promise.
    Try last year's winner, Olive Kittridge.

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  3. I did read Olive Kitteridge! I don't think I loved that one, either. I can't really remember much about it.

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  4. "...there were FOOTNOTES, which I find obnoxious in a work of fiction."

    Me too! That made me laugh and laugh.

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  5. A book club I belonged to last year chose the Oscar Wao book. Wow, we all HATED it. It seemed really misogynistic to us too. I have to admit, I really hated the language --it just seemed really gratuitous.

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  6. I must be going through a sensitive phase because I read your title and first line and thought "What did we do?!"

    I'm reading Mark Twain's biography. I'm all a-gush in love with the man.

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  7. LOL @ CL ... when you read a LOT it's hard to remember all the books, me thinks.

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  8. I hated the Calamity Physics one too much to finish it, because it was SO PLEASED WITH ITSELF.

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  9. We're on the same wavelength. I have been throwing books back into the library bag before page 20. One or two more and I can do a blog post.

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  10. Renee: Yes! The language! That type of thing usually doesn't bother me at all, but in this book it really did. I think you are right that it just seemed gratuitous. It reminded me of a tween who has only just discovered that certain words are shocking, and using them A LOT is even MORE shocking. Yeesh. Yeah. That bugged me.

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  11. "Elitist Farmer Girl Trampled by Cows Who Didn't Realize She Was All That Special." I would read that. Weren't you going to read "Zippy"?

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  12. You can't go wrong with Laurie Colwin!

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  13. I'm very sad that you didn't like Oscar Wao, because I really, really loved it. But I don't mind footnotes at all, ever, unless they're really snotty and pretentious. I found the ones in Oscar really informative, especially since I didn't know anything at all about the history of the Dominican Republic before reading it. But anyway, to each their own, right?! Speaking of Pulitzer winners, have you read Empire Falls by Richard Russo?

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  14. Empire Falls is on my to-read stack next to my bed!

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  15. Thankyou for not liking books everyone else does. I recently hated two much-lauded novels - Jonathon Franzen's 'Freedom' AND 'The Slap' by Christos Tsoliokas.

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  16. ...and the worst thing was that I finished both of them. Smart-arsed Franzen (I used to love him..) because it was for book club. And the other sex-obsessed bloke because...I dunno, maybe I was too depressed to decide not to, or something. Why is cynicism taken as cleverness??

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