28 Books in 28 Days

For the month of February, I read a book a day (or, more properly, 28 books during the month; I wasn't interested in actually completing one whole book every single day).  It was awesome, and really not that hard (granted, I read pretty quickly); it just cut into my internet time, and a little bit of my cuddling time and a little bit of my sleeping time, but nothing too drastic.  Obviously I deliberately selected books of a length and complexity that I felt appropriate to this challenge -- no Les Miserables or War and Peace!

1.  We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, 308 pages, Feb 1

Loved this one. Memory and family and '70s psychology and animal liberation. “Language does this to our memories -- simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies.  An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

2.  This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman, 222 pages, Feb 2

A “golden boy” forwards a sex video an eighth-grader crushing on him sends him, and everything is ruined.  I’m not sure how I feel about this, particularly the ending, since it’s all him-centric (until the end where she’s fine?) and I’m not sure where the judgment falls.  Or I suppose there’s not any and that’s the point, but I don’t like that either.

3.  Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer, 309 pages, Feb 3

Autistic Maxon and bald Sunny are living a perfect suburban fake life.  He goes to space to start a moon colony of robots but a meteor hits the spaceship.  Meanwhile her mother is dying, she’s taking her autistic son off medication, and she’s refusing to wear the wig anymore.  General theme, I guess, is be wonderful and weird and yourself.  The sex scenes were surprisingly hot.

4.  The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, 253 pages, Feb 4 [for Cambridge’s February book club], reread

Technician Harlan lives in Eternity, which is where the Eternals who manage Reality (century by century) live.  They make carefully plotted Changes that are intended to better the human race by altering reality in the future Centuries. Very man-centric (as per most Asimov), though the woman turns out not to be completely useless.

“...and we and we try to plot out all the infinite possibilities of the might-have-beens and pick out a might-have-been that is better than what is and decide where in Time we can make a tiny little change to twist the is to the might-be and we have a new is and look for a new might-be, forever, and forever…”

5.  Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, 299 pages, finished Feb 5

More explicitly political than the TV show, but also less interesting and not especially well-written.

6.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, 335 pages, finished Feb 7

Good, but weird, and difficult to read since obviously I don’t speak Spanish.  Not one I super loved, but I’m glad I read it.

7.  Zone One by Colson Whitehead, 259 pages, Finished Feb 8

I’m kind of tired of zombies, but this was less about the zombies and less about survival and more about human psychology and culture (and trying to rebuild), which I liked.  He really writes very beautifully and strikingly, and I plan to check out more of what he's written. I liked all the nonsense with the provisional governor soliciting sponsors, whose products were the only ones one was permitted to use (no looting), which is not something I'd encountered before but seems spot-on.

8.  Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler, 274 pages, finished Feb 9

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” Rebecca feels her life took a wrong turn when she married Joe and ended up stuck with his three daughters and his family party-planning business after his death, so tries to get back her old life (meeting up with her high school boyfriend, reading more intellectual things, etc.) before she realizes that this life is pretty good.  There’s a lot more bittersweet in there.  I was not completely enthralled the entire time, but if I’d known it was going to end the way it did I might have been more at peace. “Look...face it...there is no true life.  Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be.  You just do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

9.  Arcadia by Lauren Groff, 289 pages, finished Feb 10

About Bit, who grew up in a hippie commune that later sort of fell apart, and the lives he and the other now-grown children try to make in the "real" world. I liked the first half better than the last half (I have a soft spot for communes), but the best part was the language and how it was written, with such joys as:

“Ike tries to answer, but his mind jitters off like a lizard when he thinks, and he is left with a handful of tail-thought.”

10.  Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, 243 pages, finished Feb 11

Short stories, with a bit of the magical about them. One of them was about a bunch of horses who were reincarnated presidents and kept arguing about whether they were in heaven or hell or what.

11.  The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane, 241 pages, finished Feb 12

An older woman living alone is surprised by a ‘government carer’ who appears and seems to solve all her problems. It was beautiful and well-done, but I am kind of indignant on behalf of the character, whom I feel that the author betrayed.

“...and afterwards in conversation -- just a few days later -- Ruth realized he’d forgotten all about it, and she was furious at the way she fell in love with small things that turned out to be meaningless.”

12.  Room by Emma Donoghue, 321 pages, Feb 13

From the point of view of a kid born to a woman who had been kidnapped and kept prisoner for years, about their life in the shed where he spent his whole life to that point. I thought, from hearing so much about it, that this was going to be a lot more traumatic and grittier than it was, but I really liked it.  This is probably the thing I've read from the point of view of a child which I think is most authentic and interesting and properly done. I also love a lot of what the mother has to say to people in the latter half of the book.

13.  One of Ours by Willa Cather, 371 pages, finished Feb 16

I was surprised how much I liked the writing, but the story really makes me deeply uncomfortable.  Here, this young man is too sensitive for life and wants more than this provincial life (basically), so then he goes off to war and finally finds likeminded fellows and blooms (uh, seriously?), and then dies and his mother is glad of it because he would have been disillusioned by the world afterward.  Meh.

“He was a jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not thin-skinned.” (I feel like this is the saddest line ever, much in the vein of Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

“[...]a broad yellow beam shone out into the choked air, and down it millions of snowflakes hurried like armies, an unceasing progression, moving as close as they could without forming a solid mass.[...]  There was a solemnity about a storm of such magnitude; it gave one a feeling of infinity.  The myriads of white particles that crossed the rays of lamplight seemed to have a quiet purpose, to be hurrying toward a definite end.”

14.  The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.  by Adelle Waldman, 240 pages, finished Feb 17

I saw this reviewed as a description of the kind of guy who’s enlightened, not an asshole, but who wastes women’s fertile years and never settles down with them, etc.  Which I guess it is; it’s the most reasonable indictment (if it is one) of the Millennials I’ve seen thus far.  I find it vaguely anxiety-inducing to identify terribly closely with some of these thoughts and scenes (some from the male and some from the female perspective).

“Contrary to what these women seemed to think, he was not indifferent to their happiness.  And yet he seemed, in spite of himself, to provoke it.”

15.  See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid, 182, finished 2/19

So I actually didn’t especially like this, though I had expected to.  The “lyricism” etc. turned out to be just thoughts going in circles, and while bits of it were intriguing, I didn’t really like the effect.  Or the characters.

16.  Lexicon by Max Barry, 388 pages, finished Feb 20

I really liked this.  Poets using words to control/persuade people, the bareword, all the drama, the psychology, the shielding, the plotting.  Tied in to Tower of Babel mythology.  I especially liked the news stories (cover stories) about the events in the book.

17.  Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin, 343 pages, finished Feb 22

About an intesex kid being raised as a guy (he apparently was never informed there were other options, but he does identify as a guy, so there's that) who is raped by his best friend and winds up pregnant, just as he's starting his first serious relationship and while his dad is running for office. Lots of secrecy and shame and confusion. I think it's a good book to exist and for kids to have access to, but I imagine it's a kind of triggering read for people who have similar experiences or thought patterns. He ends up in a good place, but there's a lot of blame-taking and gender essentialism and suicide ideation stuff in the middle. It's told from several characters' perspectives (him, the girlfriend, his little brother, his mom, the doctor).

18.  Love is Power, or Something Like That by A. Igoni Barrett, 199 pages, Feb 22

Short stories about family and such set in Nigeria.  I liked “My Smelling Mouth Problem,” “Trophy,” and “The Little Girl with Budding Breasts and a Bubblegum Laugh” best.

19.  Tampa by Alissa Nutting, 263 pages, Feb 22

Very much a gender-reversed Lolita (a 24-year-old woman becomes a teacher specifically so she'll have access to the specific type of 14-year-old boy she's attracted to -- quite the sociopath) except much more sexually explicit.

20.  The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, 217 pages, Feb 24

Actually pretty good.  A young man marries instead of pursuing the not-yet-divorced (and with pressure, presumed never to be) cousin of his fiancee, regrets it and keeps trying to set up an affair, but she finally leaves and he doubles down on his life and such.  Very duty-driven, and then at the end, about the change in New York society in a very short generation.

“He reviewed his friends’ marriages -- the supposedly happy ones -- and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland.  He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were:  a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

21.  The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty, 109 pages, Feb 24

Laurel comes home to be with her father when he gets eye surgery, from which he never recovers.  The funeral, complete with everyone from the town, the new (younger) wife Fay who is terrible, and a couple days reliving the past in the old house.

22.  Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan, 280  pages, Feb 26

Memoir about parenting (and a lot of ruminating about the difference between fathering and mothering and what doing either says about you and your gender that I'm not really personally sold on) by a transgender woman who transitioned while her children were fairly young.

“But then, this is one of the fundamental contradictions of parenthood -- the unending necessity to teach your children lessons that you yourself still have not learned.”

“Is this one of those moments you always remember because it’s so adorable?  Or because it was the first clue you had that your child would someday grow up to shoot the president?”

23.  Virgin:  The Untouched History by Hanne Blank, 257 pages, Feb 26

History of virginity, what it's meant (physically, socially) at various points in time. I was pleased to learn that it has at some times been much more a thing of power, like the vestal virgins and women who went into convents in order not to marry and thus to retain legal personhood.

"This isn't to say that virginity is relative and therefore irrelevant. To the contrary, we have more than two and a half millennia of written history that make it abundantly clear that virginity is relative and therefore immensely relevant."

24.  Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell, 290 pages, Feb 27

A father vanishes without giving any indication of why, which gives way to some family drama.

"Aoife has to resist the urge to grind her teeth, to throw something at the wall. Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?"

"He feels, he realizes, jealous of himself, as if he is looking back at the scene from a distance."

25.  Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, 247 pages, Feb 27

Lovely even if I don’t agree with the faith.

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.  Every one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.  We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity.  But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.  Maybe I should have said we are like planets.  But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations.  The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.”

26.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, 336 pages [audiobook, though], finished Feb 27

A precocious girl contemplates burning down her apartment as sort of a protest against her parents and the world, while the concierge in her building persists in hiding that she's actually a very cultured woman.

27.  Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout [Pulitzer], 270 pages, Feb 28

A series of short stories set in one small town.

“[She] felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.”

“Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts.’  Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents.  Which is why you need the little bursts as well.”

“[...] she had the sensation that she had been seen.  And she had not even known she’d felt invisible.”

28.  The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, 218 pages, Feb 28
“I don’t know why I did it.  But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a life-long pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together -- I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not.  Often enough in my life I have done things I had decided not to do.  Something -- whatever that may be -- goes into action; ‘it’ goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, ‘it’ makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, ‘it’ keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be.  I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior.  But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided.  It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.”

Little House part 3: Almanzo

I don't remember especially noticing this or thinking about how it might have affected their married life previously, but what struck me the most in Farmer Boy was how much more money, and especially food, Almanzo's family had than Laura's. A lot of the Little House books include the Ingallses stretching food, worrying about the lack of animals to be hunted, having bad crops, etc. After the grasshoppers, Pa has to walk East for days on boots that hardly still had any structural integrity at all. There's near-constant sacrifice and saving and frequent disaster. But Almanzo doesn't have these worries. His father is repeatedly referred to as one of the most important men in town, someone whom everyone respects and a leader in the community. The list of their livestock is quite lengthy. And the food Almanzo eats! One unremarkable dinner:

Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. he bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he hate a large piece of pumpkin pie.

And then after dinner the family makes popcorn and he eats that with apple cider! Then at breakfast the next morning:

There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar. There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat cakes, as many as Almanzo wanted to eat, with sausages and gravy or with butter and maple syrup. There were preserves and jams and jellies and doughnuts. But best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice, and its crumbly crust. He ate two big wedges of the pie.

One afternoon when he's out sledding he comes in "several times" for apples, doughnuts, and cookies. There is just so much food and so much eating, and nobody seems to mind if he eats constantly, without asking, or whether it's mealtime or not. (Incidentally, I like this paragraph about the doughnuts his mother made: "They rolled over, Mother said, because they were twisted. Some women made a new-fangled shape, round, with a hole in the middle. But round doughnuts wouldn't turn themselves over. Mother didn't have time to waste turning doughnuts; it was quicker to twist them." When I was eight, this blew my mind!)

Aside from the abundance of food, there's the two-story house with the fancy parlor (white and gold wallpaper, marble table, haircloth sofa, fine china, fancy knick-knacks), and a much bigger percentage of what the Wilders have and wear is store-bought. They get $200 (apparently fairly regularly) for selling a team of horses, and at the end Father even gives nine-year-old Almanzo his prize colt to train and then sell and keep the money! (Of course, this is basically a bribe to keep him interested in being a farmer instead of a merchant like his brother plans to. But still, hundreds of dollars to a nine-year-old in the nineteenth century?!)

The next time Almanzo appears is once Laura and her family are living in De Smet. He and his brother have claims and a store in town. Laura only seems to know who he is because of his beautiful horses, and they probably never would have gotten married without her desire to ride behind them as the catalyst. What I really don't understand is why Laura Ingalls Wilder felt the need to make him younger in the books. In reality, they were ten years apart, and the way she relates to him up until well into their courting seems to fit with this; she always sees him as a friend of Pa's, as a grown man, as "Mr. Wilder," while Cap, who is "actually" the same age as Almanzo, is a school friend in her own class (though apparently still four or five years older; as I mentioned before, education was a little off). Especially since closing the gap involves requiring Almanzo to lie about his age ("You can put me down as 21"), to explain how he had a claim of his own when he was "really" only 18.

During the Long Winter (seven months of blizzards during which most of the town nearly starved and/or froze to death), Almanzo and Cap were the ones who ventured out south of town to chase down the rumored farmer and his stockpiled seed wheat to live off until the trains can come through in the spring. This was widely seen as heroic, but it rubs me a little wrong. Early on in the winter, Almanzo, who has seed wheat of his own, builds a false wall in the living area behind the his brother's store and pours his wheat in so nobody will know he has it and try to buy it. (Since the trains aren't coming through, he won't be able to buy seed wheat before after he'll need to have planted it and will miss a whole year getting his claim established.) At some point he calculates that even if he were to be generous and sell it all off as food, everyone would likely still starve before spring, which is I guess supposed to make you feel like he's not being a totally selfish jerk (he and Royal still have plenty of food, apparently; they're constantly eating bacon and pancakes even once everyone else is down to nearly nothing), but I'm not sure I buy it. During the negotiations with the farmer south of town when they find him (who is reluctant to sell his wheat for the exact same reasons as Almanzo), he strongarms him with the same arguments Royal and Mr. Ingalls have been using on him: "A man can always buy seed. Most folks out here are going to. You're throwing away a clear profit of eighteen cents a bushel above market price, Mr. Anderson." I think I'd feel better if Almanzo had been more willing to sell a portion of his wheat and thus not push the entire burden onto Mr. Anderson.

Laura and Almanzo's courtship is kind of strange. He starts out giving her rides back home from the country school she's teaching at, but when a friend teases her that he's "beauing" her, Laura says (and apparently actually thinks) "Oh, no! He isn't![...] He came for me as a favor to Pa." She even tells him at some point that he mustn't think he's getting anything out of it because she's only riding with him to get home (but then after she's home for good and everyone else is having such a grand time sleigh riding and he stops by to see if she wants to go, she forgets and says yes). But it really does seem almost throughout their whole courtship that the horses are the driving force. Almanzo basically isn't a character at all; he's just a man. Even once they're going on regular buggy rides every Sunday and then to singing school, their time together is focused on breaking his colts. Once they're engaged Ma says as much: "Sometimes I think it's the horses you care for, more than their master." (But "Laura knew they understood what she was too shy to say." Which is nice and all, but the reader doesn't really see that.) Later Mary asks if she really has to get married and leave "to marry that Wilder boy," and Laura's a little more open: "He isn't that Wilder boy anymore, Mary. he is Almanzo[....]I guess it's just because we seem to belong together." (But why? She doesn't want to live the hard life of a farmer and his wife and they have to drive a bargain that she'll give him three years (later another's tacked on) to make a decent life or he has to move on and do something else.)

The First Four Years really confuses me. It doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the series in the slightest; in fact, it wasn't written until a decade or so after the other books were published, and it wasn't published until 1971, after her death, when it was found among her papers. But it seems incomplete. It's very short, and while the structure is all there (though rather awkwardly: "It was the twenty-fifth of August. And the winter and the summer were the first year."), there are very few anecdotes filling in. The house Manly (as he's now called) built is described in detail, and their getting settled, and a bit is mentioned about her pregnancies and the birth of Rose (and the son who died almost immediately) and some about their dog, the rides they go on, and her helping Manly in the fields sometimes, but it's very skimpy. (Speaking of the pregnancy, this struck me as rather odd this time through: she had very bad nausea throughout her pregnancy, so "As she went so miserably about her work she would smile wryly now and then as she remembered a saying of her mother's: 'They that dance must pay the fiddler.' Well, she was paying." Oblique, yes, but I still find that a rather risque thing to say, especially since she was so incredibly circumspect about their entire relationship through the courtship.

But most of all, this book is just depressing. Manly is in debt on the house, he goes into debt to buy a pair of horses and a new stove and various new-fangled farm implements, continually asserting that "just one crop" will make everything right and they'll pay for themselves. But crop after crop fails (a dry year, then a horrible hailstorm right before harvest time), and then the house burns down. And that's basically where the book ends! From what I've read of her life, the rest of their time together wasn't so bad, but this book is just so tiring. Basically half of it is Laura doing the calculations in her head of the payments and the interest and how much they owe and what price they'll need to get to be in a good place going into the next year. And then it doesn't even work out.

But going back to the beginning, I wonder if the difference in their stations growing up had anything to do with this. Throughout the whole series it seems everyone is entirely averse to debt (well, except that one time Pa does basically the same thing with building the house before the crop comes in and then the grasshoppers destroy it so it never does) and that the whole ethic is working hard and being self-sufficient and beholden to no one. But maybe because Manly had never lived through rough times (at least, not that we're privy to; even during the Long Winter he and Royal are flush) and his family always had quite the cushion, he was a little cocky and never considered that things could not work out well for him even if he worked hard and did everything right.

Little House part 2

It's weird how my conception of this series is always just the first couple of books, and then I apparently forget that the last five books are all set in the same place, no pioneering really involved, settled down with/in a town, and suddenly shifting largely to buying things and less to making them.

After the break in Laura's childhood to tell a brief segment of her future husband's story in Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek picks up rather seamlessly, which is why the abruptness at the beginning of On the Shores of Silver Lake is so disorienting. For no real reason the story skips several years (Laura goes from eight to "nearly thirteen"), picking up with the last few days on Plum Creek and spending a mere seven pages briefly mentioning everything major that had happened (surprise, everything's awful now, there's no food, everyone had scarlet fever, Mary's blind now, Laura's brother was stillborn, though that's not mentioned, and oh, here's another sister) as the sudden decision to take off for the Dakota Territories is made. (Even Jack the brindle bulldog's death gets nearly the next full chapter!)

It's a little strange to me how suddenly the Laura-and-Mary duo gives way to the Laura-and-Carrie one. Carrie's suddenly old enough to be a "real sister," as Laura puts it, and Mary's blindness means she won't be out and about, going to school and such with Laura.

The treatment of Mary's blindness has always made me feel uncomfortable. It may be exactly like it happened in real life (obviously being blind on the nineteenth-century prairie and in twenty-first century cities is very different), but it's still just weird. Mary is of course "patient and brave" and then repeatedly "gentle" and nearly quits being a character for a while. The incessant repetition that Laura "must be eyes for Mary" gets old, and it seems like literary cheating to suddenly replace normal narrator's description with Laura's "see[ing] out loud" of the scenery and the people. (It's particularly strange since both narrators are the same person, so the shift in voice seems rather affected and not significantly different except for added interjections: "and, oh, Mary! the brightest red velvet hat...") It's also a little smug-seeming foreshadowing that Laura chafes at Mary's insistence that her poetic descriptions aren't literally accurate. See, adult Laura seems to say, I was always meant to be an author! (Although she pooh-poohed the idea later on when Mary suggests Laura might fulfill that dream of Mary's as well.) Then there are several occasions where Mary is terribly satisfied with herself that she can sew just as well as Laura despite not being able to see and that she doesn't need the lamp to see to sew by at night like Laura does.

I really wonder if there were truly so many serendipitous re-meetings with old friends and family (and enemies) in Laura's life or if some of those were forced by her rejiggering her life story at the beginning to reduce the number of moves. It seems incredible that Mr. Edwards would reappear so many times (especially that once to fight off a man who wanted the same claim Pa was filing for), Cousin Alice would pop in, Reverend Alden pops by, the Boasts would conveniently appear out of nowhere for Christmas, Aunt Docia arrives to encourage them to make the move to the Dakotas with her, Uncle Tom appears, and Nellie Oleson would show up at school in DeSmet after being left behind at Plum Creek. I'm sure I'm missing a few. I suppose many of those, at least the family ones, could have been precipitated through a series of letters, so at least it was known where they were (though the parents still seem as surprised as Laura), but it seems almost ridiculous, like in Forrest Gump (the book) where every time he turns around he's running into one of the same like three characters from his earlier days.

I've never really enjoyed how much of especially the later books is filled with the songs Pa plays on his fiddle or that they sing in church or elsewhere. I've always found that when only the text of the songs is included and the reader doesn't know the tune, it's just boring filler. I'm sure some of Laura's happiest memories are Pa's playing the fiddle at night, but I think I would be better able to feel that if she didn't feel the need to write in the specific songs. It seems she tries particularly to put in songs where their lyrics further the story (though maybe that's a reflection of Pa; Almanzo later tells Laura, "Your songs are like your father's! They always fit!"), but for me at least, that only works when I too know the song.

Similarly, the later books have rather a few more moments where Laura's political or religious beliefs impinge. (Incidentally, did you know her daughter Rose was instrumental in the formation of the libertarian party?) I've always preferred to skim over the annoying preachy bits of, say, The Chronicles of Narnia and felt especially impatient with them in those terrible Janette Oke books I used to read, finding that they disrupted the actual story. (Sure, the author probably feels that they are the actual story, but they need to do a better job with the integration of it and not just hit pause and preach for a few paragraphs.) One Fourth of July, Laura has the realization, "God is America's king." (Blech.) "The laws of Nature and of Nature's God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God's law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free." If you say so. Laura and Mary also have a little chat on one of their walks before Mary goes off to college, which in one way I love because Mary admits that when they were younger and Laura hated how good she was, that she wasn't really being good: "I wasn't really wanting to be good. I was showing off to myself, what a good little girl I was, and being vain and proud, and I deserved to be slapped for it." ("Laura was shocked. Then suddenly she felt that she had known that, all the time"!). But then somehow Mary is "sure [that God is good] in some special way" (because of her blindness, of course). Oh, Barbara Ehrenreich would have something to say about that! (Read Brightsided.)

The politics of everyone are rather more visible in these books since they're largely centered on everyone's claims. I need to do some more thorough research about the Homestead Act, I suppose, since pretty much everything I know comes from these books, and that's unacceptable. And then in The First Four Years, Laura and Manly buy half a flock of sheep from a neighbor who, as a staunch Republican, "was sure the country would be ruined" if the Democrats won as expected, meaning, apparently, homegrown wool would lose its advantage if the tariff were removed; this apparently didn't happen, though, as the Wilders turned a profit later. (This is confusing me, since it would have to be the 1988 election (three years after their marriage), but a Democrat (Cleveland) was already in office!) I'm generally uncomfortable with everyone's attitudes towards their claims (Pa's view of it as a bet against Uncle Sam seems most spot-on). But earlier, Pa had made a case for taking a claim to make up for the one the government kicked them off in Oklahoma. Um, not so much. Similarly, Uncle Tom told a story of being laid siege to by a bunch of Indians while off prospecting for gold, and escaping into the arms of what they thought would be rescuing soldiers but in fact turned out to be arresting soldiers. Because, you see, that was still Indian territory ("strictly speaking"). But they all seemed put out that the government would dare prevent intrepid fortune-seeking young men from seeking their fortune on land that wasn't even theirs. (Pa: "I'll be durned if I could have taken it. Not without some kind of scrap.")

One thing I think as an adult that I never thought about as a child was that I really don't think Laura liked her mother much at all. Ma is barely a character through the first half of the series at least (potentially the whole way through), and it's evident Laura prefers Pa. Part of this is just that she would rather be outside than in, rather helping with the haying than with the housework, and that, I assume, she sees Ma as a civilizing force to be resisted, always making her modulate her voice ("'Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.'") or behave in more ladylike fashion (Constant reprimanding her to put on her sunbonnet, which inhibited her view, or she'd be "brown as an Indian.") and sew neverending small, smooth stitches (luckily Mary regained her sewing ability after a time). Ma hates Indians, resists moving west, wants to remain in settled lands, while Laura, like Pa, wants to wander further and see more. I think Laura probably started feeling better about Ma about the time Mary left for college: "Laura had never before known that Ma hated sewing. Her gentle face did not show it now, and her voice was never exasperated. But her patience was so tight around her mouth that Laura knew she hated sewing as much as Laura did." And Ma starts actually saying things and being a character, though still a rather dull one. (She did put her foot down once, though, and tell Pa he absolutely was not permitted to be the one to go out in search of the rumored wheat south of town and risk getting caught in a blizzard, surprising everyone with her fieriness.) Laura seems to actually care what Ma thinks by this point, sometimes citing Ma's sayings to herself as rationalization for something. ("Least said, soonest mended," "There's no great loss without some small gain.") And after coming home from her first teaching job, which left her boarding in a terrible situation with a sullen, unhappy family (the woman of which seemed certifiably crazy), Laura is so happy to be at home with her own family that I think she finally appreciates Ma, having until then taken her largely for granted as a permanent, featureless background presence.

Education in these times/places is terribly confusing to me. Laura and Mary didn't start attending school until I think they were seven and eight (I keep getting confused because I think there's only one instance before Laura reaches age 15 that anyone's age is stated straight out; generally they're nearly thirteen or almost nine or something), and Ma and Pa apparently made a bargain that they would stay in civilized lands where they could continue their schooling, despite the fact Ma had been a schoolteacher and could well have taught them at home before this. She teaches them that winter when there's too much snow to go to school, and later on Laura and Carrie do lessons at home in DeSmet, both before there is a school and during bad blizzardy weather during the winters. Yet somehow, despite spotty school attendance and not a lot of years at that, Laura becomes a schoolteacher at age 15! (This description is from Wisconsin schools but seems to roughly fit with Laura's experience and explains a little bit of the difference between first-, second-, and third-grade certificates that were introduced without any context in the books.) Though legally one had to be 16 to teach, Laura was offered a position at a small nearby school ("'Now Laura,' Mr. Boast said to her earnestly, 'there is no need to tell your age unless someone asks you.'") teaching five pupils, three of whom were older than herself, for one term before returning to her own schooling back in town the next term! Then that summer she teaches three small children at another small country school and returns again to the town school again herself. She sits for the teacher examination (a real one this time rather than just the superintendent asking her questions in her sitting room) and gets a second-grade certificate to replace her third-grade one from before and goes off to teach once more before getting married. On the last day of her classes, when her teacher discovers she won't be returning, he says, "I'm sorry[...]Not sorry you are going to be married, but sorry I didn't graduate you this spring. I held you back because I...because I had a foolish pride; I wanted to graduate the whole class together, and some weren't ready. it was not fair to you. I'm sorry." (Laura doesn't care: "It doesn't matter[...]I am glad to know I could have graduated.") It's just weird how totally obsessed they are with schooling at some points and then how little they care at others. When the man is coming to test Laura for the first certificate, Carrie and Ma have the following exchange (which only seems relevant as related to Laura's certificate; at no other point does Ma correct anyone's grammar or does anyone but Pa or whoever the baby is currently speak less than properly):

It was only a moment before Carrie exclaimed, "That's him now—"

"'This is he,'" Ma said almost sharply.

"That's he coming— It don't sound right, Ma—"

"'Doesn't sound right,'" said Ma.

"Right straight across from Fuller's Hardware!" cried Carrie.

Even though the requirements to teach school seem rather lax, the school exhibition (which actually prompted Laura's being offered the first teaching job by virtue of the amazing job she did in it) is entirely impressive. Pupils of every age recited poems and speeches, and Laura and her friend Ida gave a recitation of all of American history from Columbus to present (Rutherford B. Hayes) that, from the part reproduced, seemed rather detailed. In addition, they had to do long division (well, she calls it "short division," but I'm not sure what she considers long, then) in their heads (but aloud, which to me would be the hard part): "Divide 347,264 by 16. Sixteen into 34 goes twice, put down 2 and carry 2; sixteen into 27 goes seven times, put down 7 and carry naught; sixteen into 6 does not go, put down naught; sixteen into 64 goes 4 times, put down 4. Three hundred and forty-seven thousand, two hundred and sixty-four divided by sixteen equals—twenty-one thousand, seven hundred and four." They also had to "parse" sentences, which from her later examination seems rather insane (stupid to require someone to do but reflecting a deeper understanding of language and grammar than we certainly require, at least):

Scaling yonder peak, I saw an eagle

Wheeling near its brow.

"'I' is the personal pronoun, first person singular, here used as the subject of the verb 'saw,' past tense of the transitive verb 'to see.' 'Saw' takes as its object the common generic noun, 'eagle,' modified by the single article, 'an.' 'Scaling yonder peak' is a participial phrase, adjunct of the pronoun, 'I,' hence adjectival. 'Wheeling' is the present participle of the intransitive verb, 'to wheel,' here used as adjunct to the noun, 'eagle,' hence adjectival. 'Near its brown' is a prepositional phrase, adjunct of the present participle of the verb 'to wheel,' hence adverbial."

So Laura can do this at the same time Carrie is being corrected for saying "That don't sound right"? (Carrie is I think five years younger, but I still find this unbelievable.)

This is getting rather long, so I guess I'll save Almanzo for another time.

Little House part 1

I'm reading the Little House books (for like the twelfth time, but the first in probably a decade) for a rereading project I'm doing this year. It's vaguely unsettling.

First I had the sudden realization that Ma and Pa, who know the answers to everything and how to do everything and make everything, were probably the age in the first couple books that I am now. But I just now looked that up, and in fact they were 27 and 31 when Laura was born, so they were well into respectable-parent age by the time these books are set. Whew. (Good, nobody will expect me to be able to just up and dig a well or make a straw tick or butcher a hog for the next decade or so at least! Or tell poor little girls that "Children should be seen and not heard" or to put on their sunbonnets because they're turning as brown as little Indians and all that whooping and hollering isn't ladylike or to mind, mind, mind, obey, obey, obey.)

It's weird reading now what was probably my first exposure to conflict between pioneers and Indians as the United States grew. I'm not particularly thrilled. Though Pa doesn't agree with this sentiment, it's repeated multiple times by multiple characters that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," and Ma is permanently scared of them no matter what they're doing. Even Pa, who is largely respectful and friendly to the Indians he encounters and who tries to keep away and give them their space (and later makes a big point of leaving, abandoning the house and barn he'd made and garden and fields he'd planted when it's decided that in fact Washington was not going to open up the area of Kansas where they had already settled, rather than wait to be dragged out by the Army), has some eyebrow-raising views from today's perspective:

"I'm going to sleep," Laura said. "But please tell me where the voice of Alfarata [from a song Pa had just played] went?"

"Oh, I suppose she went west," Ma answered. "That's what the Indians do."

"Why do they do that, Ma?" Laura asked. "Why do they go west?"

"They have to," Ma said.

"Why do they have to?"

"The government makes them, Laura," said Pa. "Now, go to sleep."

...

"Will the government make these Indians go west?"

"Yes," Pa said. "When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move those Indians farther west, any time now. That's why we're here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?"

"Yes, Pa," Laura said. "But Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won't it make the Indians mad to have to—"

"No more questions, Laura," Pa said, firmly. "Go to sleep."

I mean, as it turns out, he was wrong (in the short term, at least, though I guess right in the long term). But yikes. I guess you're supposed to kind of feel like Laura does, though, although it does feel awfully like they're just sitting around clucking their tongues over it while taking full advantage of it. After all, it's not like they're personally kicking Indians out of their homes, they're just operating under the assumption that some nice soldiers are going to and jumping in to beat the rush. Mm-hmm.

It's weird to read about all the stuff that they did and just knew how to do even though it's unlikely they'd ever encountered it before. Like Pa knowing to start a small fire to meet the big sweeping prairie fire so the house would be ringed with already-burned earth, despite never having lived on the prairie before. Or knowing that the Indians regularly burned off the prairie grasses and weren't actually (probably) trying to kill them all, like the neighbors thought. Or (if Laura is a trustworthy reporter, which obviously she's not) being able to build an entire log cabin and fit a door to it and (presumably) cut the windows exactly the right size for the glass panes he didn't buy until months later (at least she didn't mention any problems with the fitting) doing no more measuring than some pacing out the outer dimensions of the house. He just held up the door and it fit perfectly and snugly? He just chopped out the wall against the fireplace he'd just build perfectly, without making it too far one way or the other? A couple days after getting out of bed with "fever'n'ague" (malaria), he was weak and "wasn't able to work, so he could make a rocking-chair for Ma"? (Show-off.) I guess he did at least do a poor job of the chimney, seeing as it caught on fire later...

One really interesting thing that I of course didn't notice as a kid (apparently being an adult makes me think more about other kids reading this and how it's beneficial or harmful for them) is how many really detailed explanations there are for how things worked and fit together and everything. If there were no illustrations* it would take rather a lot of effort to puzzle out exactly what they're talking about. Today, reading about the latch Pa was making for the new door, I still couldn't really make out what was going on, even though I know how such things work.

I'm also not especially pleased with how basically the only thing Ma does is say "Oh, Charles!" with "shining eyes."

Of course, they are still largely exciting, and the little anecdotes (Ma slapping the bear, the sugar snow, Charley crying wolf) are quite vivid and amusing (I love where Laura and Mary each only eat half of their cookie and save the other half for Baby Carrie, realize each time that that's not fair because now she gets a whole cookie, but still can't quite figure out how to make it quite fair) and combine pretty well to give the idea of what it feels like to be a little girl living this adventurous life where you never know what's coming next pretty well. But obviously, decades of children (well, I'm guessing mostly girls) have loved these books, myself included, so what sticks out to me are the ways they're not quite living up... (That being said, I think I'm probably going to pack them off to my little cousin in a year or two when she's of the appropriate age.)

So far I've read two of the Little House books in two days. Not too shabby (at least considering I've been experiencing full days of work and cooking and such as well; I'm sure that's pretty much always been my pace with these books). Though I do feel pretty self-conscious reading them on the train when there are pictures on almost every page.

* It seems the illustrator is the same person who illustrated Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. Which are coming up soon in my rereading!

Reason 5,198

Reason 5,198 I enjoy living in Boston:

Nowhere else I have lived (with the exception of a term studying abroad in Oxford) ever pops up in books I'm reading. I love that little shock of recognition when I realize that I know where that character is walking or what shop they're talking about, especially when I didn't realize before that moment where the events were set. I like thinking that authors enjoyed their time here sufficiently to set their works here even when they've since moved on.

I just finished a book (guess what it is) that referenced the YMCA on Mass Ave, the Christian Science Mapparium further down Mass Ave, what I assume is Redbones in Davis Square (where else in Davis would you eat pulled pork?), what I assume is Dali near Inman Square (I don't know, are there more Spanish restaurants with a boar's head grinning down at you from over the bar?), Filene's Basement and the no-dividers dressing room thereof, walking over the Charles via various bridges, someone meeting her husband at Alewife Station after work, Cardullo's in Harvard Square (though I kind of doubt there was no other place to buy bay leaves and cloves, even if those were more exotic in the seventies or whenever this was set), going to Central Square for Indian food, walking around from Downtown Crossing to Park Street, some lawyer guy working down near State Street, etc. Of course, Filene's is now a giant crater, but I did experience that dressing room before it went.

It's just so weird, because if you read the story without being familiar with the setting, you wouldn't feel like you were missing anything, and you wouldn't be. Being familiar with the location isn't at all necessary for reading the story, but somehow it's nice to have that anchor and to envision the characters intersecting with your daily life.

(Sometimes.)

Actually I'm kind of split on this. The last book I read that was set here (36 Arguments for the Existence of God) kind of annoyed me because it seemed very in-grouppy, chummy, like if you got the references you were in the right crowd (and most of them seemed very specifically pointed at Harvard and the professorial circle, so I did not). Plus it was so unnecessarily detailed, describing the exact path characters drove, that it almost interfered with the story because I couldn't help but visualize it and try to figure out exactly where the person's house was that they were going to. That one very definitely referenced Dali, though, which made me feel all in-grouppy for a bit.

Then there was The Handmaid's Tale, which I had read long before I moved here and never really noticed the setting, but then when I reread it shortly after moving here I realized (with a much more unpleasant shock) that the building where one of their ceremonies took place, by the river, where a "banner covers the building's former name, some dead president they shot" was probably the JFK School of Government, so then I paid more attention to where they were were walking and going. Everything else was similarly obscured, but it's still very clearly the Harvard Square area. It ended up kind of freaking me out since it brought the creepiness of the story home to my lovely liberal and decidedly not theocratic Cambridge. I went to a reading of hers last year and she said she enjoys setting her terrible stories in Cambridge (apparently Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are as well, though I didn't notice as much when reading them).

OK, my first sentence wasn't entirely true. Murder in Coweta County does in fact take place in the county I spent half of my childhood (though, if I remember correctly, only barely mentions my town), and The Whisper of the River by Ferrol Sams does indeed take place not only in the town but at the very college where I went. But that was the whole point in reading both of them, not something to stumble over and be delighted about. Plus, The Whisper of the River is based on his life, I think, and reading about him having sex on top of the administration building was just kind of gross.

(The book I just finished was Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.)