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missroseroseHello, book friends! Last Friday I announced my intention to pursue music again and bought a piano, despite my historic ambivalence on the musical/performing front. And then while writing about that ambivalence here on DW, I hit a serious patch of Feels. Like, angry, ugly-crying, wanting-to-punch-something capital-F Feels. I don't get angry that often! It was disconcerting. Still, I had a good cry on Brian's shoulder and talked to a friend and wrote a lot of pages in my paper journal and felt better. I don't expect the path ahead to be smooth, but I'm hoping there'll be less resistance now, if that makes sense. Although I doubt that entry is going to ever see the light of day, haha.
Anyway, time for books!
What I've just finished reading
Nothing new this week - I'm working on finishing the good-size books I have going.
What I'm currently reading
The Hummingbird's Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea. I'm 80% through this tome, and some things have finally happened! Teresita has died and returned to life, is being venerated as a saint, and is preaching revolution to the Mexicans! These large-scale events are all interesting, but continue to be sketched entirely through small interpersonal vignettes that often seem to obfuscate as much as they illuminate (what exactly was Don Tomás' motivation in acknowledging her as his illegitimate daughter, pre-death? How is the rancho dealing with the sudden descent of thousands of pilgrims, and presumably the associated loss of much of their income? What precisely is it that the revolutionaries don't like about the current administration?). It feels more than a little bit like observing history through a single window - you see particular scenes in great and vivid detail, but any kind of broad-scale analysis is difficult if you don't already have the background knowledge of the time to give context. Which, given that I undertook this novel in the hopes of gaining some of that knowledge, is slightly frustrating. Still, the individual vignettes continue to be engaging; I particularly like how Teresita's relationship with her father (who's not previously been known for his respect for female intelligence) is evolving.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin. "The Lottery" might have put Jackson on the map as a storyteller, but with Life Among the Savages, her gently humorous account of domestic tribulations, she's become a bona fide bestseller - and not soon enough, given her large family's precarious financial and housing situation. While she anticipates this cushion giving her relief from her husband's constant henpecking about her work habits, I suspect his ambivalence in their relationship - enjoying and appreciating her financial success while feeling stymied and overshadowed in his own career, a particularly toxic combination for the mindset of the typically-socialized 1950s man - will only grow.
Ambivalence is definitely a theme in both their lives; Jackson enjoys cultivating an unusual and even outré image (decades before the Goth movement, she marketed herself as "the only currently publishing author who is also a practicing witch"), but the social penance she pays for her image is not small, especially in the tight-knit New England towns where she's already marked as an outsider. Having spent much of my school years in that same "I don't want to be part of your dumb ol' club anyway! (but it still hurts that I'm not)" space, I really feel her; we all have social needs, but what do you do when your immediate social environment is so hostile to your personal values? Perhaps it's not at all surprising that so many of her stories focus on socially alienated families in large houses, or that she and Stanley regularly hosted all-night parties with their New York writer friends (which only further aroused the curiousity and suspicions of their neighbors, in, the literary historian in me notes, a century-and-a-half-later echo of the suspicions of the local villagers of Byron and his crew). Perhaps Jackson's later somewhat infamous descent into agoraphobia is unsurprising, given the circumstances.
What I plan to read next
I'm determined to knock The Hummingbird's Daughter off this week, so I suspect that'll be a good chunk of my reading time. After that...hm. I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology metanarrative from my neighborhood bookstore that I'm looking forward to. We'll see!
Anyway, time for books!
What I've just finished reading
Nothing new this week - I'm working on finishing the good-size books I have going.
What I'm currently reading
The Hummingbird's Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea. I'm 80% through this tome, and some things have finally happened! Teresita has died and returned to life, is being venerated as a saint, and is preaching revolution to the Mexicans! These large-scale events are all interesting, but continue to be sketched entirely through small interpersonal vignettes that often seem to obfuscate as much as they illuminate (what exactly was Don Tomás' motivation in acknowledging her as his illegitimate daughter, pre-death? How is the rancho dealing with the sudden descent of thousands of pilgrims, and presumably the associated loss of much of their income? What precisely is it that the revolutionaries don't like about the current administration?). It feels more than a little bit like observing history through a single window - you see particular scenes in great and vivid detail, but any kind of broad-scale analysis is difficult if you don't already have the background knowledge of the time to give context. Which, given that I undertook this novel in the hopes of gaining some of that knowledge, is slightly frustrating. Still, the individual vignettes continue to be engaging; I particularly like how Teresita's relationship with her father (who's not previously been known for his respect for female intelligence) is evolving.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin. "The Lottery" might have put Jackson on the map as a storyteller, but with Life Among the Savages, her gently humorous account of domestic tribulations, she's become a bona fide bestseller - and not soon enough, given her large family's precarious financial and housing situation. While she anticipates this cushion giving her relief from her husband's constant henpecking about her work habits, I suspect his ambivalence in their relationship - enjoying and appreciating her financial success while feeling stymied and overshadowed in his own career, a particularly toxic combination for the mindset of the typically-socialized 1950s man - will only grow.
Ambivalence is definitely a theme in both their lives; Jackson enjoys cultivating an unusual and even outré image (decades before the Goth movement, she marketed herself as "the only currently publishing author who is also a practicing witch"), but the social penance she pays for her image is not small, especially in the tight-knit New England towns where she's already marked as an outsider. Having spent much of my school years in that same "I don't want to be part of your dumb ol' club anyway! (but it still hurts that I'm not)" space, I really feel her; we all have social needs, but what do you do when your immediate social environment is so hostile to your personal values? Perhaps it's not at all surprising that so many of her stories focus on socially alienated families in large houses, or that she and Stanley regularly hosted all-night parties with their New York writer friends (which only further aroused the curiousity and suspicions of their neighbors, in, the literary historian in me notes, a century-and-a-half-later echo of the suspicions of the local villagers of Byron and his crew). Perhaps Jackson's later somewhat infamous descent into agoraphobia is unsurprising, given the circumstances.
What I plan to read next
I'm determined to knock The Hummingbird's Daughter off this week, so I suspect that'll be a good chunk of my reading time. After that...hm. I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology metanarrative from my neighborhood bookstore that I'm looking forward to. We'll see!
