What I'm reading this week (2/12/18)

Well, it's one of my favorite weeks of the year. Not only does it Valentine's Day, which we don't really celebrate in a big way but makes us feel cozy and lovable anyway, but it's the week of the Westminster Dog Show (today and tomorrow). I love those dogs, and I'm glued to the television both nights--I don't even crack a book.

Last week I finished:

Angela's Ashes was a re-read for me. I read it shortly after it came out in 1996 or 1997, and at the time I thought it was the best book I'd ever read. I still think it's one of the best. I tend to spend a lot of time with a book looking at how it was written, watching it come together, looking for seams and loose threads. This book is nearly flawless. It's Frank McCourt's memoir of growing up in poverty in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s and '40s. And while that sounds depressing and dark, and while you just want to shake the alcoholic father who drinks his wages, while you shake your head over the odd Irish superstitions of the adults, and while you want to rail against the Catholic church and its prejudices and injustices, how the book is told is what keeps you reading. Seldom have I read a book that keeps me reading like this one does. McCourt is a born storyteller. I don't know how well this book is known anymore. It won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out, and everyone read it then. It was also made into a film, which didn't really do the book justice. Having loved it for 20 years now, I don't have a frame of reference for how well-known it is anymore, but if you love memoirs and haven't read it, remedy that right away. I consider it one of the finest books ever written (how's that for lofty?) and a cornerstone of the memoir genre. And I'm so glad to see it stood the test of time for me. My rating: 5 stars.

In my quest to read some of the books that "everyone but me" has read, I picked up a copy of Station Eleven. Then I chickened out a little and decided to listen to it on audio in case I needed to tune out particularly dark parts. Post-apocalyptic novels hold no appeal to me, and while I can handle heavy books, I don't care much for dark books. But I'd read a review over the years that said the book was hopeful and the sense of community created by the survivors (can I ask: how can you call it post-apocalyptic if there are survivors?) was heartwarming. I guess I beg to differ. While I'm sure it could have been much, much darker, I wasn't impressed by any hopeful or heartwarming feelings. To me it was just depressing and heavy and bleak. The story is this: the Georgian flu, a strain of flu deadlier than any previous strain, nearly wipes out human civilization on earth. The world goes dark, and the people left concern themselves with little more than survival. The book follows a dozen or so characters through the barren world and offers flashbacks to their pre-post-apocalyptic lives. (Did I just coin a term there?) It only took me a few days to listen to it, I purposely sped through it to have it over with quickly and before it got too far into my head. What kept me listening was the hope that it would all come together in an imaginative way or that there would be a great hopeful conclusion. While I didn't end with a total fade to black, it didn't seem to resolve at all, and I was disappointed. The writing wasn't bad, but it wasn't stellar, and the characters seemed real enough, though I didn't care deeply for any of them. I will say that I was annoyed by the number of diverse groups the author ticked off her list. We had white, black, Asian, Middle Eastern, gay, disabled, mentally ill, rich, poor, young, old, etc. The diversity seemed forced (or maybe Toronto is a much more diverse place than I know?). Also, I wanted an explanation as to why these folks survived when everyone else perished. But overall, my main problem with the book is that the author and I just have a vastly different world view. In a post-pandemic world, I would expect that people would come together with love rather than live in suspicion and kill in fear; I would expect people to pull closer to God rather than become fanatics and their own prophets. It all just left me depressed and ready to move on to something brighter. My rating: 3.5 stars.

I finished two short books of poetry last week, and I loved them both. First was Jill Bialosky's The Players. I read Bialosky's Poetry Will Save Your Life last fall, and I loved it so much I just had to find a book of her poems. I bought The Players and finally got to it last week. It's a wonderful collection. Bialosky's poetry is accessible but not without depth. When I finished, I downloaded an older collection, The End of Desire, to my Kindle for future perusal. Here is one of my favorite poems in the book: The Mothers. My rating: 4 stars.

The second book of poetry I finished last week was Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda's Love Poems. I adore pretty much anything Neruda writes, but he's known for his Odes and his love poems. These are very sensual (not necessarily sexual), and they show Neruda's overall style pretty well. The collection includes both the original Spanish and the English translations, and it was fun to try to puzzle out some of the lines with my very rusty Spanish. I recommend this to anyone wanting to try Neruda's work without too much investment. My rating: 3.5 stars.

Last week I abandoned:

I didn't dislike Howards End, but I definitely didn't feel drawn in. I read maybe 50 pages and put it aside without much guilt.

This week I'll be reading:

Having given up on Howards End, I needed to choose another book in its place. I chose the second in the Maisie Dobbs series, Birds of a Feather. I read the first last month, and I didn't want to have too much time between the first and second. Plus, I wanted something historical and not too action-packed to give my brain a bit of a rest.

 

Last week I began:

I'm not far in at all, but I finally started my Kindle read for the month. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. Because I'm a nerd.

I'm continuing with:

 

I'm still loving both Church of the Small Things and The Curated Closet.  

 

My audiobook:

I wasn't sure if I wanted another fiction audio after the string of rather dark books I'd listened to lately, but I was happy to see that A Piece of the World is quiet and calming. It feels very much like a middle-grade book, in fact I double-checked on Amazon to make sure it wasn't.

If you missed it last week, check out my two-part series "How to get high schoolers to fall in love with books." Part 1 and part 2.