Abort, Retry, Fail?

Phoenix here-- and screw the epithet, I give up. I am not rising from the ashes of the stupid classic books I have burned this month in an act of catharsis so effective I almost had an Herbal Essence moment right there, if you catch my drift.

I mean it. No more classics for me, and that's the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it.

(Till next month, anyway.)

My reading list for the month:

Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you read this... then that is all you need to know about my thoughts on this here book. 136 pages, and I earned every damn one of them. I'm still having nightmares about being trapped underground with only this book for company. Egads.

The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Yes, she has a silly name which is a very bad word if you take out the middle five letters. If you let that stop you from reading this absolutely fantastic book, you are, no offense, a complete loser. A failure at life. I really mean that. You'll never get anywhere making fun of people's names that way.

Apparently because NFU (that stands for "Not For the Unmedicated," in case you were wondering) was such a traumatic experience for me, the reading gods very kindly saw fit to provide me with this lovely tale. It didn't exactly erase the really bad and terrible feelings of inadequacy, just as somebody giving you a really great haircut doesn't quite make up for the fact that you just had your arm amputated.

But it helped. That's all I can say.

I can't talk about this book... the plot is too complicated and yet simple for me to risk not doing it justice by summarizing, the characters need no explanation, and it's the best book I've read since A Thousand Splendid Suns (which is a ringing endorsement a few times over).

Read it. If you don't like it, I'll be glad to take the blame. But I won't understand. 536 pages.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd
This was a recommendation from our very own resident Mother Earth... in fact, she provided me the book. So, I very much wanted to and expected to like it (I really liked The Secret Life of Bees and I was looking forward to seeing what she'd do with nonfictional narrative). Unfortunately, I didn't like it-- or Kidd-- until the very end, and even then I wasn't crazy about her.

Mainly, this is because she reminds me a lot of myself. You can always count on that to be annoying, especially when you don't like the person, but I found it particularly irksome in this context because Kidd seems to be trying to portray herself as this enlightened, wonderful person (I also had issues with her terrible arrogance) when in actuality, she just comes across as pretentious and dull. Worse, her actions throughout the book were very similar to mine in my most selfish years, and I'm 40 years younger than she is. In a sense I respect her journey, but I can't get behind a lot of her actions throughout it.

Unfortunately, I have to give this one a thumbs-down. 228 pages.

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Did I mention that I am so done with classics? I was looking forward to this book. I read a book of Vonnegut's once and I wasn't all that impressed, but he's one of my best friends' favorite authors so I decided to give one of his most famous books a try to see if I liked it any better.

Not so much. I've moved past the trying-to-understand phase and now I'm just flat-out wondering if anyone else struggles with this stuff nearly as much as I do, or if I'm just a dense fog of a reader. I couldn't follow what was going on during well over half the book. The first part was clear enough, but then it went into this stream-of-consciousness pattern and stayed there till the very end.

I should mention that I have a huge problem with stream-of-consciousness, generally speaking. I hate it, I just hate it. The only time I can excuse it is when the writing is out-of-this-world, wonderful prose (Lolita comes to mind). Otherwise, forget it. I need action. I need plot. I really need to know what the hell is going on if I'm not to end up bored and frustrated and, hey, ready to give up on classics and knock back some quality bourbon while I'm at it.

I was really looking forward to reading about Vonnegut's time as a prisoner of war in that biting, satiric, wonderfully witty way he has (and he really does... the few bits I could understand were some damn fine samples of writing). But the way he structured the book, I couldn't tell what was going on and it left me feeling like I'd missed the point, plus an awful lot of brilliant storytelling. In a nutshell, that's my issue with these classic books. 275 pages.

Girls of Riyadh, Rajaa Alsanea
I read about Middle Eastern cultures all the time, because I find their stories, lifestyles, traditions, and laws to be nothing short of fascinating. This goes double for books about the Kingdom... Saudi Arabia. This book is actually a collection of expose emails a young Saudi woman took it upon herself to write anonymously to a group on the Internet... similar to blogging, but before it was popular. The email group grew and spread like wildfire throughout the Kingdom. Everyone began reading them, but the girl herself stayed completely anonymous. (She talks in one email of how she would print out her new posts as soon as they were available and read them to her family, just as every other girl in her age bracket was doing... no one suspected she was the writer.)

The emails chronicle four well-to-do young Saudi women and their lovers/husbands/boyfriends. The writing is only fair (not even that sometimes; she tends to ramble), but the stories are intense and well worth reading. Not to the extent I would certain other books about this country and others in the area, but I would recommend this book. 286 pages.

My new page count is around 6700. I read a lot this month, but mainly reruns because I read Time Traveler's Wife very slowly out of sheer enjoyment and most of the others found me riddled with frustration and not wanting to concentrate on them when I wasn't on the subway.