Reading Wednesday

[lunabee34]

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is . . . a really weird book, and I don't know what to think about it.

The basic premise (and it's not spoiling anything to say this because Ehrenreich tells you this in the first chapter) is that she has an experience she can't explain as a late teen and continues to periodically have similar experiences throughout her life though none with the intensity of that first instance.

The book uses a journal she wrote starting when she was 12 and going through her undergraduate degree to help her construct the narrative, and part of the weirdness of this book is the erudition of the journal and discussion in it of what she was reading. I mean, I don't think she's lying about it because the journal exists and she can just show it to people to prove that as a thirteen year old she really was writing disquisitions on the existential meaning of life and Camus or whatever. But it's just weird to read that level of intellectual prowess in the journal entries from someone that age when I struggle to get my college students to successfully read Kant. LOL

I appreciate that she comes to the conclusion that connecting to other people is the answer to her existential questions, but the conclusion of the book is so abrupt and also, well, weird. She spends the whole book being uber rational and scientific and exploring all kinds of explanations for her experience, including dissociation because of her abusive family (which I think, honestly, is the most likely explanation), only to end the book in the last like ten pages by saying she's now not really an atheist and thinks there's an Other out there that she connected with. I think that's actually a fine conclusion to come to; it's just that she doesn't spend enough time on it compared on the 200+ previous pages of how nothing like that could be possible for the argument to be successful.



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Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line by Charles W. Chesnutt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an excellent collection of short stories set during slavery and Reconstruction. Most of them are deeply sad, but humor runs throughout.

It's not 5 stars for me because I find reading dialect such a slog.



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Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Part of my re-read books from childhood project except I'm keeping this one.

Excellent YA fantasy novel with beautiful prose. Features a talking, mischievous, adorable animal.

I had no idea this was part of a trilogy, so I'll be reading the other two at some point in the future.



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Dubliners by James Joyce

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Well, my distaste for modernist poetry and prose sure is coming to a middle.

These stories are boring or bleak or boring and bleak, and most of them lack any kind of satisfying resolution.

No thank you.



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Helianthus by Ouida

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is not my favorite Ouida novel. It was unfinished at the time of her death, so it lacks resolution. It is entirely devoid of humor, and while there is a plot, pages and pages go by of social commentary and critique rather than anything happening. The balance is definitely off compared to other novels.



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Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel by N.N. Feltes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Discusses the ways that books were published and marketed in the late 19th century.

A bit dry.



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The Paris Review, Issue 196, Spring 2011 by Lorin Stein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed reading the writer interviews in this edition.



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Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series Volume XXI, 3-4 Leaving & Coming Back; The Bone-Duster; Gate of the Lions; A Blessing of Safe Travel; Poems. by T. & Renee (eds.) / Jane Flanders Anne Herbert Weiss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really enjoyed Jane Flanders's collection and Sidney Sulkin's play about Agammemnon and Clytemnestra. Jean Foster Hill's collection was fine, Anne Hebert's was incomprehensible and weird, and John Morgan's was utterly meh. If I never read another poem about male ejaculation again, it'll be too soon.



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Comments

[gloss]

That's too bad about the Ouida. And I'm like you-- reading dialect sucks.

[lunabee34]

It just takes so much mental bandwidth to slog through dialect; I have to slow down so much and in some cases read it out loud.

I read Helianthus because a friend was presenting on it at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and it was a Ouida novel I hadn't read yet. As political, social, and cultural commentary it's fantastic; as a story it's a failure.

[sheafrotherdon]

I read the Ehrenreich book in 2020, when I would have still said that I believed in Something, and I found it moving and affirming. It'd be fascinating to read it again now and see what I make of it, because I no longer believe in Something, and I suspect my positive feelings toward the book reflect the moment I was in?

I totally agree with you about it being dissociation - and I'd be interested to reread with that in mind too. I know I found the idea of dissociation as a gift rather than a burden 100% novel and something I wanted to think about. I'm not sure I ever did?

[lunabee34]

I believe in Something.

For me, the book just wasn't effective from a structural standpoint. Her epiphany comes out of nowhere right at the very end, and there's not enough time spent on it. It feels unearned or tacked on in some way. IDK It just felt tonally off or something to me.

I have never disassociated, so I have no idea what that experience is like. But I found her dismissal of her experience as disassociation a bit odd.

[princessofgeeks]

Your reaction to Dubliners made me chuckle.

[lunabee34]

I wish anything in Dubliners had made me chuckle.

:D

[tabaqui]

Whooo! Black Unicorn is fun as hell, as are Gold Unicorn and Red Unicorn! I've read the trilogy many times. The Peeve is the best. :D

[lunabee34]

The Peeve is delightful.

I can't wait to read the other two.

[lokifan]

Huh, very interesting review of the Ehrenreich! I'd never heard of it. I wonder if it's meant to be "I resisted a mystical explanation until I couldn't any more", or something? That structure sounds so weird.

If I never read another poem about male ejaculation again, it'll be too soon.

I will only read them if I'm provided with three female ejaculation poems first.

[lunabee34]

I think it's supposed to be exactly that except she resists so hard throughout almost the entire book that her conversion experience doesn't make any sense.

*dies laughing*

I think that's a sensible rule.