Dawn's Reading Blog

The Beautiful Cigar Girl was given to me to read by a friend, but I hadn’t gotten around to it when I signed up for a class on Creative Fiction and found it on the reading list. I moved it up to the top of the pile and I’m glad I did. It’s an interesting read. The author had a great concept and executed it well.

The book focuses on Edgar Allen Poe’s connection to the real life murder of Mary Rogers which he eventually fictionalized as “The Murder of Marie Roget.” The book was entertaining throughout and I learned a lot about Poe, Mary Rogers’ murder, and the general state of New York City at the time.

Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love is primarily about Assia Weville who’s probably the least interesting of the three people in this triangle. Ted Hughes, who drove them both to suicide, certainly comes off as a scrungy character. I wouldn’t want to be him. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t have access to his side of things so you only know that Assia was miserable, not particularly what he did to cause it.

The evidence presented doesn’t amount to much. He slept with her for a while, maybe fathered a child (the assumption is that Shura is his but there’s no evidence presented for that either), and later lost interest. Sounds like he cheated on her repeatedly, but since she got him while he was cheating on his wife, that shouldn’t have surprised her.

All in all, I couldn’t feel sorry for Assia. She didn’t seem to have any redeeming qualities despite thinking a lot of herself. She should have dumped Ted, grown up, and found a reason to be proud of herself that didn’t require a man.

Girls of Tender Age is about the author growing up in Hartford in the 40s and 50s and about the murder of one of the author’s schoolmates by a violent pedophile. It was interesting to read about Hartford, near where I live, because it was both so different (because it was so long ago) and so familiar. To read street and town and building names that I hear and say all the time was a different experience. Hartford isn’t often where books are set.

The memoir itself was quite good. The author’s brother was autistic, a diagnosis not known at the time, and I found his character extremely interesting as I’ve always been into books about autism for some reason. Overall the writing was fun and quick and catchy. I always wonder about people who remember so much about being a child. I sure don’t. One device she used a lot was that of the unknown word that the child thinks means something completely different – like in Rug Rats. Do children really think like that? I can’t remember thinking like that. I suppose when I didn’t know a word I either figured it out from context or asked or classified it as unknown. I don’t think I automatically assigned the meaning from a similar sounding word to it.

The murder seemed to put an abrupt end to the book which hadn’t been so much about the murder up to that point. She says she repressed the next two years. Seems like an extreme reaction to the death of someone you knew but not well, but I guess I wasn’t ever in that situation. Or if I was, I repressed it.

So this woman decides to place a personal ad (in the New York Book Review – a far cry from Craig’s List) saying she wants to have sex and A Round-Heeled Woman is the result. It doesn’t go so well. I could have told her that. Although it goes better for her than it did for me. Perhaps that’s the advantage of reaching a New York Book Review kind of audience.

It was an entertaining book and you couldn’t help but feel for her, even while appreciating her journey and hoping she meets her goal and knowing she won’t. I do wish there’d been more of that story and less of her backstory. I found her life in general less interesting than her current mission.

The Places in Between was named one of the best books of the year by someone or other. It didn’t do that much for me. Although I’m sure it was an impressive journey – walking across post-Taliban Afghanistan and through snow-covered passes – it’s not an impressive book. There’s no common theme or dramatic impact. It’s the worst of travel writing, where you find out too much about what specifically happened and not enough about something more universally applicable.

It does do a good job of making the point that most Afghanistans having very little knowledge about what’s going on with world politics and they certainly aren’t participating. These people barely know what’s going on in the next town over and they’re too busy fighting, or being afraid of, each other to bother with us.

The Measure of My Days is quite an interesting little book. It’s something like a journal, written by a woman eighty years old, still sharp but feeling it physically. She has a lot of good insights. I found myself jotting down quotations every several pages. Occasionally she gets on an uninteresting tangent for a while, but most of it is either entertaining or thought-provoking. I passed my copy on to my Grandmother who’s also a sharp eighty year old woman. She’s also enjoying it.

Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft was just too dry for me. I don’t know these people well enough to care that much for them and the writing didn’t make me know them or care for them. There were too many deviations into the lives of people she knew and their minor scandals or confusions. The chapters devoted to the silver ship, for instance. Who cares about the silver ship? That she went to Scandanavia is relevent, I guess, since she wrote a book there, but do we need to know every detail of why she went and what she learned about this stupid silver ship? No, we do not.

On top of that, it’s hard to see that Wollstonecraft made any lasting difference. She was ahead of her time in certain thoughts to be sure, but her influence appears to have been very narrow and easily forgotten. And the people she had obvious influence on – the girls whose lives are detailed in the last chapters – all turned out rather badly. So although her principles appear to have been sound, their practicality, at least at that point in history, is debatable.

I was glad to be done with this one.

I picked up I Know You’re Out There: Private Longings, Public Humiliations, and Other Tales from the Personals on the spur of the moment. I was between blind dates and had time to kill – what better time to read a book about personal ads?

The blurb on the back gives you the idea that the book covers the author’s own attempt to find love through personal ads but that’s not the case. He was the editor of the personals at a newspaper and is relaying other people’s stories, although he does delve into his own ongoing relationship and its eventual failure.

It’s odd to read about print ads in this era. Who is still doing this through the newspaper? Beaumier is certainly aware that the print ad is dying and mentions it throughout the book, but I guess they’re still going stronger than I realized. Not everyone has a computer.

The book is funny but not helpful. If you’re looking for entertainment, I Know You’re Out There provides it. If you’re looking for insight into the online dating scene, this isn’t it.

The Pleasure’s All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive is a lot less titillating than you’d expect. No steamy sex scenes here. In fact the BDSM scene is a lot sexier in stories on the internet than it apparently is in real life. People have some very strange fetishes. Joan writes well and it’s an interesting, though not arousing, read.

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women was written by an American woman about her travels in Islamic countries. The narrative is somewhat disjointed with each chapter taking place in a different country and time but her experiences were varied and interesting.