Dawn's Reading Blog

Ah, fantasy. Ah, heroes. Don’t we all want to be The Hobbit, discovering an untapped ability to be surprisingly brave, surprisingly ingenious. Or Gandalf. Wouldn’t we all like to be indispensably useful, full of magic, all-knowing, all-capable? Or elf-like even. Just to be merry and have plenty and sing about it.

But we’re mostly Thrain, aren’t we? Ponderous, self-important, plodding along towards what we imagine we deserve but forgetting to deserve it along the way, doing right only when it seems more difficult to do wrong, and dying only marginally fulfilled.

This is why we read fantasy. This is why we climb rocks. Sometimes, when you’re rock climbing, you are, just for a moment, fantastic.

You’ve heard of comfort food. I have comfort books. Mind you, the comfort books are often accompanied by some comfort food and some comfort drink, but there’s nothing to soothe the soul and take my mind off my troubles like chocolate, a glass of Chardonnay, and Agatha Christie. Sure, I know the ending to every one of them, some more than others, but maybe that’s part of the healing. For all my love of mystery novels, I’m not really a big fan of suspense.

I read three of hers in three days lately, kind of a submersion. I was tired by the end of the third and only skimmed it to make sure my memory of the denouement was right. So Agatha goes back on the shelf and I go back to facing reality. Still, I thank her. She and I have been down a few roads.

ABC Murders
Crooked House
Hallowe’en Party

I’ve almost given up on popular fiction. Lately, it seems like it’s being written for people with short attention spans. I’m reading a book because I want paragraphs longer than a sound bite and a plot I can’t guess from the first page. If I wanted TV, I’d watch TV.

I was pleasantly surprised by Step on a Crack, which isn’t literature but which filled my need for entertainment without sedation. I wonder how much that had to do with the co-author. My main quibble would be with the title, which has exactly zero to do with anything.

I expected to enjoy this series of essays by Tom Wolfe more than I did. I enjoyed Bonfire of the Vanities and I enjoy “hooking up.” I’m sorry to say that Hooking Up is just ego massaging on the author’s part. There are some good bits and some bits that aren’t about how swell he is, but there aren’t many of either.

I read Tess of the D’ubervilles back in high school. Don’t remember why. I don’t think it was assigned. I was surprised to discover that she has her disastrous affair very early on in the novel. I’d forgotten all the rest of it. But now I’m writing this a few weeks after finishing the book and I’m already a little vague on the rest of it. It’s the story of a woman being ruined and her subsequent redemption, but the ruined is all I can remember. Is that my fault or Hardy’s?

It occurs to me that I complain about a lot of books. I have nothing to complain about with respect to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant except that I won’t remember it six months from now. These aimless, sad books do nothing for me. There’s not enough plot to remember and the sadness drags me down without teaching me anything. You think of Les Miserables or A Tale of Two Cities. Those books are more than sad; they’re “miserables”. But they’re also triumphant. They show human nature at both its worst and its best.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant shows human nature at its average. Talk to anyone in any restaurant and they’ve got a tale about as tragic or as heroic or as illuminating as this one. I guess I need more than “slice of life” out of my literature. Once the slice is on the slide, magnify it somehow. Show me something. Make me remember.

Currently holding the record for longest time spent reading a book I actually finished is The Centaur. You might claim Moby Dick, but that’s a different record because I started Moby Dick, scrapped it completely, and re-visited it years later. At no point did I ever give up on The Centaur. It was always in the “currently being read” roster.

I bought it at a bookstore near work (back when there were still bookstores in Hartford, so that’s dating it) because I recognized the name John Updike and because it was cheap. It also had an emblam on the cover indicating it had won a prize of some sort. The plan was to read it at lunch. Unfortunately, it completely failed to capture my attention and so it sat in a cupboard and was, at widely dispersed and random times when I felt like bettering myself, dragged back out so I could plod through another ten pages.

In this fashion, I eventually arrived at the end. And I can tell you this about it: there’s actually a centaur. I think he’s the schoolteacher character. Who has a kid. Who has eczema and a girlfriend and turns out to be the narrator. There. I hope that was as elucidating to you as it was to me. You’ll have to enjoy the book on your own from here.

Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes?: Bodies, Behavior, and Brains–The Science Behind Sex, Love, and Attraction is the sort of book I normally enjoy: a review of psychological studies linked to corresponding real life experiences. But I didn’t enjoy this one. It’s too depressing to realize that we are that shallow. The author makes a point of it being men vs. women, which contributes to the depressing air of the book, but we’re all human and some of the ways in which women suck are sprinkled in there too.

So men really like big breasts and women really like big bank accounts and maybe there’s nothing we can even do about it because it’s programmed into our genetic code, but I don’t think I need to read about it anymore. Thankfully, we are not all the average. I can find a man who loves my big brain and moderate boobs and can love his short stature and moderate earnings right back.

Also, the book was printed in purple. I could have hated it for this alone.

Mostly stupid.

There’s also a short story called Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, which I’ve read but don’t own and don’t remember. Since I didn’t remember any of Mostly Harmless either, I took that as a bad sign and refused to buy the complete series just to obtain it.

Having finished the last Harry Potter book, I decided to make good on an old vow and read the whole series back to back. It only took about two weeks–which is saying something about how addictive they are–and I was sorry to be finished. I think I became more attached to the series as it went on.

Certainly the series became more adult, and also darker. I was surprised on re-reading the first one to remember how humorous and harmless it was. Rowling has said that her books grew up with her readers. The theme gets progressively more serious as the stakes are raised. In the first book you can hardly believe anyone will ever die; by the last book they’re dropping like flies. Harry grows up while remaining true to his character. His development as a reluctant hero is well planned and executed. The only thing that doesn’t advance much is romance. Seventeen year olds are a little more sexually active than the occasional “snog” but she does move them along the timeline from ick to interest.

I was most interested in seeing how the plot hung together. I’ve heard that Rowling plotted the entire series right from the beginning but that was hard to believe. I was sure I’d spot a lot of holes, but I didn’t. If anything, I discovered more complex ways in which the series of events were linked.

For example, at the end of the last book, Neville kills the snake using the sword of Gryffindor. On my first read, I barely registered that fact. I liked that she’d used Neville but didn’t worry about how he’d come to have the sword. As I started re-reading, enjoying how the Neville character had been developed, I realized that Griphook had the sword by the end of the book. Aha! I thought, a major mistake on her part. It wasn’t until I got back to that spot in the last book again that I realized Neville pulls the sword from the sorting hat (which Voldemort has mockingly caused to be placed on his head), just like Harry pulled it from the hat in the first book. Dumbledore told Harry that only a true Gryffindor could have pulled the sword from the hat. So Neville, whose place in Gryffindor was intially questioned, bravely confronts Voldemort; Voldemort, who doesn’t understand the nobler emotions, gives him the hat; and voila! the sword is there, the snake gets killed by a magical weapon, and it’s not deus ex machina, it’s inevitabile. And hugely satisfying.

So either Rowling intended all along for Neville to kill the final horcrux with Gryffindor’s sword after pulling it from the sorting hat, or she kept really good track of clues and loose ends and pulled them all together at the end in a blazing act of inspiration. Either way, my (sorting) hat’s off to her.