anna genoese

I'm watching Justified. Have y'all ever seen it? It is a really awful show that is nevertheless incredibly enjoyable. I love Timothy Olyphant's teeth, and his walk is, like, the definition of a "loose-hipped gait," isn't it? Like a romance novel hero.

I thought for a moment that my grasp of geography has been getting worse when in the last episode I watched, Timothy Olyphant's teeth and hips tracked a fugitive to the Mexican border. What?! Since when does Kentucky border Mexico? Then I realized that while I was counting my knitting stitches, I somehow missed them heading out to California. Haha. In this episode I'm watching now, Buster Bluth deals in art painted by Hitler! Double haha.

Today I was nosing around the book racks in WalMart, and I couldn't help but notice that two of the four bookshelves were all romance novels. One entire bookshelf was taken up with Harlequin series -- they're putting out Christmas books already! Harlequin, it is only October. You should be selling The Devil's Halloween Baby, not His Christmas Love! The other romance novel bookshelf was entirely contemporary paranormals and contemporary westerns. Now, I am a big fan of paranormals (obviously), and I do have a (not so) secret love of the western romance, full of ranches and Montana and women in cowboy hats. But... a whole bookshelf? And nothing else? That seems pretty excessive.

(If you're interested... Bookshelf #3 was all YA -- Cassandra Clare and Rick Riordan and J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer. Bookshelf #4 was all action/adventure and bestselling hardcover nonfiction.)

Speaking of books! I started reading Dust by Joan Frances Turner. I can see why people are making a big deal of this book, especially since it's told from the POV of a zombie. Cool, right? But I thought it was supposed to be a grim, scary book. I'm about a third of the way through, and so far it's just sort of wandering around the worldbuilding with no real story being told -- and it's gory. It's really gory. I don't think things that are gory are scary or interesting; I think gory tends to be pretty boring. I don't get off in any way on torture porn, written or visual.

I think it would probably really interest thirteen year olds, though.

That's one of the problems with being an adult and reading YA. Were I acquiring YA for a YA audience, I would be reading with a different eye. But I'm an adult reading YA fiction for entertainment. I'm not necessarily looking to completely dump my critical reading skills, but I'm also not looking to replicate my uncomplicated childhood reading experiences, either. So I want a lot more things -- complicated things -- from YA books. And I get that from some authors, I really do. And from others... well, I can see why the target market would enjoy it, but I personally am not.

I'll probably finish the book anyway, especially since the prose is not torturous, but darn it. I was really hoping it would be super dark and super grim and super depressing and more traditionally "post-apocalyptic." Sigh!

Hey, you know what else about books? The first draft of the sequel to Salt and Silver is finished! Two weeks ahead of schedule, too. Now it's time to reread and revise!

Day 08 - A book everyone should read at least once

Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! The dictionary!!!!!!

I try to take some time to read the dictionary every week. I don't always learn words that I didn't already know, but I think it's fascinating to take a look at dictionary definitions of words. It is good for impressive words during Scrabble games, but also I like to know a lot of words so that I can say what I mean more specifically if I have to. Plus: words. What could possibly be bad about words? Words are wonderful! To know them is divine! Etc.!

The dictionary I use right now is Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.

My favorite part is possibly the tiny bit of etymology that one gets in the dictionary, but don't hold me to that.

...if you want a work of fiction that I think everyone should read, well... there I am stuck. Honestly, I don't think it's that important that everyone read the same thing. I don't think Shakespeare is all that amazing, and I don't think the "classics" are really that classic at all. I would never tell someone they had to read, like, Hemingway, or their life isn't complete. Certainly reading certain "classics" felt like a huge time suck to me, with zero practical benefit. I didn't even get the benefit of feeling like I was absorbing some kind of art that would make my inner life more rich. The Scarlet Letter did not make my life more rich -- it just made me really annoyed.

(I was told in high school that I didn't like The Scarlet Letter because I read it when I was nine or ten and therefore too young to understand what was going on -- but I read it around the same time I read The Handmaid's Tale, which I'd understood just fine. I read it again anyway, at age 14, and again at age 20 -- understood it perfectly fine, still did not like it, or think it was at all some kind of amazing work of genius. Yet still sometimes when people find out I didn't like it, I'm asked how old I was when I read it, like it would somehow get better with age. Although I will say that no one ever says that to me who's also self-identified as a feminist/womanist of any stripe. Interesting, right? Just my experience.)

The disappointment I felt when I read On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye -- two books a lot of people insisted were necessary to my reading education -- is almost indescribable. So many adults in my life told me that they couldn't wait until I was old enough to read Catcher that I picked it up when I was 12 or so. Even the local librarian was encouraging when she saw me with a copy of it. I was shocked as hell to read it and realize that it was just about a whiny, pretentious kid with no problems except that he was really annoying.

(Also, I couldn't help but wonder if that was actually what all the adults in my life saw when they looked at me, and didn't trust an adult for many years after that.)

I'm not saying that these books aren't historically important to the way literature is written and the way published fiction "evolved" (for lack of a better word, which I guess is ironic considering my embrace of the dictionary!) -- certainly many books had a huge effect in their time, and continue to affect people to this day.

But I wouldn't say they are necessary reading.

Instead of encouraging me to read Catcher and Shakespeare, someone should have handed me a copy of We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ -- for a 12 yr old kid who read a lot of stuff with science fiction and fantasy elements, that would have been invaluable reading. And I wish I'd read Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing when I was a teenager as well -- I think it would have been invaluable to me at sixteen or seventeen.

Oh, you know what? I guess I think everyone should read Salt and Silver -- talk about a good book! (Haha.) (Actually, it is quite a good book, if I do say so myself.)



So... do you agree? Disagree? As always, feel free to post your own answers to the meme in the comments of this post, or link to your own blog entry.

( Other days of the book meme )