Six months of Backlash

It took me six excruciating months, but I finally finished reading Susan Faludi's Backlash.

This is not to say it isn't a good book; it's amazing. The thing is, I started reading it on November 7, 2016. Then ... stuff happened. And every time I tried to pick Backlash up and continue, I'd get maaaaaybe 10 pages in and my head would start to make loud, inaudible car alarm noises, which is my subconscious's way of letting me know that my head is about to explode.

So I spent months of dithering, feeling guilty, avoiding GoodReads, and reading almost anything but Backlash: George Simenon's Maigret novels, Mrs. Polifax novels, Arnuldur Indridason's Rejkyvek murder mysteries, re-reading George R. R. Martin's The Game of Thrones (currently on book three, A Clash of Kings, and wow, it moves way more slowly than I remembered. I blame finally getting HBO. Books longa, TV brevis.)

I finally managed to finish Backlash by making it my task while my daughter went to her Broadway dance class at the local community center. Instead of running errands, working out, or sitting on the big comfortable sofa in the lobby Facebooking for 90 minutes, I read Backlash. And after a few weeks of doing this, I finished it!

Honestly, it's like eating less and moving more and discovering that it actually does make me lose weight.

Anyway, if, like me, you haven't gotten around to watching Game of Thrones reading Backlash, read it. It is so good. I underlined like a boss. I could type entire paragraphs into my many politically-charged Facebook groups and shut the trolls up BAM. I could use passages to troll www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/.

I'm currently sitting in the Admiral's Club awaiting a flight to New York, and I brought two much shorter, and it is to be hoped, quicker reads with me: The Princess Bride (from last year's Read Harder Challenge: Read a romance novel) and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which I believe is also from the Read Harder Challenge--Read a book set in Asia.) Wish me smooth skies and quick reads.

May update—the Plath part

I finished The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. And it took for-fucking-EVER. On GoodReads I had a starting date of January 26th. I hope that marks the day I brought the book home and maybe read the back cover or some such, because four months? For one book? Really? Even if it's 720 pages long, that is a long-ass time to spend reading a single book.

I'd be ashamed, except that the book has very small print. And is non-fiction. And has lots of end notes. And is studded with appendices and I swear, I was dutifully reading my way through all of them ... until I got to Sylvia's working notes about St. Teresa of Avila. I decided that I'm not a Plath scholar and don't need to read every. single. word. I read The Bell Jar and her (then) two published collections of poetry in the 1970s, when I was a young woman with literary aspirations, because that's what you did. But I haven't read them since, because books about mental illness and confessional poetry are not really my thing.

I also finished Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, by Anne Stevenson, which I picked up in April in a used book store in Washington, D.C. I needed some secondary source material to fill in the gaps in the journals, because the gaps are sizable. What Sylvia included: minute descriptions of why a boy she's dating is suitable or not suitable for a husband; self-castigation about procrastinating; discussions of writer's block. What she left out: her breakdown, suicide attempt, marriage to Ted Hughes, and Ted Hughes' affair. 

Unfortunately, Bitter Fame is a not-uncontroversial biography that apparently pissed off Plath's fans big time. This is actually OK with me. I'm not Team Sylvia, so I didn't mind that Sylvia came across as kind of difficult because I have been given to understand that that's one of the hallmarks of being mentally ill, which—newsflash—she was. However, in addition to being the opposite of a hagiography, I found the writing pretty ham-handed, and the discussions of Plath's writing were cursory at best.

I'm not Team Ted, though. No, not at all. In fact, I saw this poem when I did an image search for Sylvia Plath that cracked me up:

So hey—I finally finished one of the Big Leftover Rory books from 2015! Also a biography that I can count towards my Read Harder Challenge. Hooray!

In other news, I also read Little Dorrit, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Angela's Ashes, Let the Dead Lie, and The Winthrop Woman, for a total of seven books this month.

May Day, May Day

It's time for my May update! Yay! Only six books this month. Boo.

Titles from the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge list

R is for Ricochet, Sue Grafton
S is for Silence, Sue Grafton
The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse

Thank God Rory occasionally reads something a little frivolous and doesn't only read Russian novels, gender studies classics, and memoirs by Civil War generals.

Also reads

Mycroft Holmes, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, reviewd here
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, Jennifer Finney Boylan (Read Harder Challenge, Task 12) reviewed here
Bad Country, C. B. McKenzie

Also reading

I'm about to finish Angela's Ashes, which I'm enjoying much more than I thought I would. I think I read an excerpt of it somewhere, and that, combined with the cover art, made me think the book was going to be depressing AF. But it's not.

I'm still working on The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Rory) and even bought Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath because sometimes a solid secondary source fills in background information and adds a note of rationality and objectivity to the adolescent self-center.

I guess I could use that Sylvia Plath biography for my Read Harder Challenge "Read a Biography" task. Although I was planning to read a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt or Colette. But whatEVER, Sylvia, sheesh.

I'm also reading Ironweed (Rory) as well as rereading The Winthrop Woman because I've been asked to facilitate a book club meeting about it. (I suggested the book to the bookclub based on its having been the hot sexy book when I was in seventh grade. Since that was over 40 years ago, can I count this towards my 2016 titles? Does it count as reading when I'm rereading? I honestly remember very little about it. Except for the hot sexy bits, of course.)

Jennifer Kinney Boylan's She's Not There: an audible problem

As I'm still struggling with Sylvia, I decided to pick up another book to work on. I chose an audiobook to listen to while I'm driving, doing laundry, picking up the house, etc.

Sad to say, about two-thirds of the books I've "read" are books I've listened to. Not because don't enjoy sitting around for hours with my head in a book, but because my house will implode if I don't keep moving. Not to mention my frequent time behind the wheel of a car. What with errands, driving back and forth to Chicago, and folding laundry, I can listen to a ten hour-long audiobook start to finish in two days. Easily.

This time I branched out to the BookRiot's 2016 Read Harder Challenge part of my list. This task is "Read a book by or about a person that [sic] identifies as transgender." I picked She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan.

After listening to about half of the book, I've unfortunately realized that I'd like the book much more if I were reading it. It's a sad fact that most of the time, authors don't do particularly well by their own books. Jen Lancaster being a notable exception to the rule that Jennifer Kenney Boylan illustrates beautifully.

First of all, Boylan claims to have an androgynous-sounding voice, but it's more androgynous-lite. When I listen to the audiobook, I never think "I'm listening to a woman," and this undercuts some of the things she says. The power of her prose would be increased if I read all the way through the book, which starts when she's a five year old boy, and heard a woman's voice in my head. Or if she started narrating in a man's voice and then gradually became more feminine-sounding. (OK, it's a bit much to expect audiobooks to contain special effects. They're not movies.)

The thing is, in She's Not There, Boylan discusses her speaking voice and speech patterns. She worked with a vocal coach. She consciously tried to employ the rising inflection (referred to by linguists as "uptalk") that she claims many women adopt. She also mentions how ironic it is that the same rising inflection she criticized as a male English professor is now something she uses herself. In the book, she describes being nonplussed when she catches herself using uptalk. And she does it pretty frequently.

The thing is, when she reads her book aloud, you can't tell whether she realizes she's doing it. Is the uptalk deliberate, and employed for humorous effect, or is Boylan better than I am at sounding like a stereotypical young woman? I became so curious about it that I checked out the text over on Amazon. I couldn't see the whole book, but I caught a couple of examples where Boylan has added a question mark to her text to convey the use of uptalk. But when you hear it, you can't tell whether she knows she's doing it? And it bugs me?

I also find her sloppy S's off-putting.

But worst of all is her habit of separating nouns and verbs with a moment or two of silence, as though she were, adding a comma. That's what it sounds like when she, reads. And it's incredibly, annoying.