Other Women's Stories: What I'm reading this week (10/7/19)

Last week I finished:

I'm always looking for a new mystery series, so I finally decided to try the first book in Millennium series by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In this book, a journalist who is going to jail for libel is asked to solve the 30-some-year-old murder of a young heiress. What he discovers along the way is disturbing. I have to assume I am not the target audience for this one, although I am unsure who the target audience would be. This series is beloved by many, and perhaps the subsequent books are different, but I found this one too graphic and disturbing. It was also too long by at least a third. There is a secondary plot of international business fraud (or something) that I never did understand and just suffered through at the beginning and end of the book. It's smart writing, good plotting, and the characters, though rather unlovable, are well-drawn. I liked the mystery: how did a young woman disappear into thin air on an island that, at the time of her disappearance, was inaccessible to the outside world? I did not like the graphic sex scenes, the scenes of torture and sadomasochism, and the strong tendency of characters to exact revenge. It was all a little too dark and nasty for my enjoyment. If you like gritty crime stories, this will likely fill the bill for you, though. My rating: 3 stars.

I cannot tell you the last time I asked a person for advice. I google things all the time to learn how to cook a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker or to double check the definition of sadomasochism (see above), but I'm not one to go in search of human advice. I believe the answers to our problems are within us, because we're all equal parts of divine intelligence--the only kind of intelligence there is. But I know there are a lot of folks who want other people to give them advice. Enter "Dear Sugar." Dear Sugar was (is?) an advice column written by Cheryl Strayed (author of Wild). And a collection of her columns was compiled into Tiny Beautiful Things. She practices what one might call "radical empathy." As someone who recently added a book titled Against Empathy to her TBR, I'm not sure I should have even picked this one up, but this has been on my list of books to read for so long, I decided to knock it off on audio. I know this book is something a lot of people love. I imagine it (and the advice column) has brought comfort and clarity to many. I appreciate that. I just found it disturbing on so many levels. I'll try to articulate that with compassion. Strayed seems to operate under the belief that we are all broken. While I understand this very popular view, I refuse to go through life believing I or anyone I meet is broken. If you look for brokenness, you'll find brokenness, and then you'll never see anything else. Get thee behind me, brokenness. I was also disturbed by the sheer number of people, especially twenty-somethings, but many mature people as well, were willing to give their power of decision-making and the direction of their lives over to a complete stranger. I was also disturbed in general by the kind of things people are sharing with that stranger. The book was full of sexual relationship issues, infidelity, unending grief and the ole gay vs. fundamentalist Christian trope. I found the book exhausting and the situations unbelievable. Sugar (Strayed) answered each question with a lengthy autobiographical essay peppered with terms of endearment (a favorite being "Sweet pea"). She's a master at having a story for every issue she addresses in a letter, and she's lived a lot of life and seen a lot of dis-ease, most of it hard, abusive, and addictive. Perhaps I'm not "broken" enough to appreciate this, but I tend to believe that you will live what you give into. Has my life been touched by infidelity, addiction, grief, alcoholism, poverty? Yes. Is it my choice to let those things own me, or take up residence in my head or heart, or be the undercurrents of my life story? Yes. Lastly, if you are a Christian, you will likely find a fair amount of this advice disturbing. She takes swipes at Christianity and, of course, Republicans (at one point she said she'd rather be sodomized by a lawn flamingo than vote for a Republican), so this book was only meant for half of the country's population. And it was definitely meant for a secular audience. It's not the advice I would have given, but it wasn't necessarily bad, either. (A note on the audio: It was narrated by Strayed, who read the questions and responses in a "poet's voice" [you know, the halting, emphatic voice young poets use when reading their work?], and when she got to her terms of endearment, they sounded faked and staged, like it was her schtick. I would have preferred a different narrator.) My rating: 3.5 stars.

Growing up, family dinner (we called it supper) was a nightly occurrence. We had no idea there were families who didn't eat together each night. What's more, it never really occurred to my brothers and me to have food preferences. There were a couple of things each of us didn't particularly care for, but we still ate it when it was served. Apparently, this is not the norm. Or at least it's not the norm nowadays. Jenny Rosenstrach, author of Dinner: A Love Story, which takes its name from her popular food blog, addresses family dinner head on, especially family dinner with young children. She believes in the nightly family dinner, but shoots for most family members eating mostly the same meal most nights. She also suggests feeding small children (babies and toddlers) their own dinners separate from the parents, which I find a little wacky for my Midwestern sensibilities, but then, we've established that my childhood family dinner experiences may not be average. She offers lots of ways to get children to try foods they say they don't like. One approach to family dining I find kind of genius (once I get past my "wait, who's the adult and why isn't she in charge?" headshaking), is the deconstructed meal, whereby your pasta-hating child can still have certain elements of the family meal while being allowed to ignore a"no-go" food like pasta or eggs or chicken. That way, at least the adult-who-is-in-charge can at least avoid having to make a different meal for each child. This is a re-read for me, and I really enjoy the book as a whole. There are a lot of straight-forward recipes that I have yet to try but really should. And the book, half memoir and half cookbook is beautifully written. I stopped following Rosenstrach's blog a number of years ago out of a frustration with her politics (what ever happened to no politics at the family table?) and her location blindness. She seems to have no awareness that there are folks out here who aren't living her same East Coast life. Still, the recipes are good. My rating: 4 stars.

I've found a new favorite book of poetry for the year. Marie Howe's The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, published in 2009, is one of my favorites of 2019. I've enjoyed her work for a long time (some books more than others), and this is a book very much like her What the Living Do, domestic and everyday, which is the kind of poetry I enjoy most. If you're looking for a short book of contemporary and approachable poetry that will surprise you more with its subtlety than its experimentation, give this one a try. My rating: 4 stars.

This week I'll finish: