This month thankfully slowed down after the hectic pace I’d been keeping up since February. I finished my sixth session, and took a little weekend trip, and spent so much time with my favorite little guy!
In Books…
- The Beauty Myth: Naomi Wolf is not a figure without controversy, particularly when it comes to her tendency to play fast and loose with figures and statistics in order to support her arguments. This was her first major work, originally published in 1990, and is generally considered a feminist classic. It posits that as women made increasing gains of economic and political power through the early 20th century, the existing power structure began to increasingly seek to re-assert control over them through narrowly defined and strictly enforced beauty standards. No matter what else we may seek to and actually accomplish, it has become widely understood that being attractive is a fundamental requirement for those accomplishments to have any real meaning. She reviews the ways that beauty standards are enforced in the workplace, the way skincare is marketed, the way pornography has become increasingly accessible and demonstrative of violence against women, and the spread of disordered eating. There’s some interesting stuff in here that rings true as a person who has lived as a woman in the world, spent too much money on moisturizers, lived through a high school bout of anorexia, and wrestled with shame over my post-baby body. But the errors in her numerical citations, particularly around eating disorders, diminish her credibility. As does the extremely cringey portion in which she likens social pressure to be thin with literal starvation in concentration camps, her blinders about race and class, and some of the more spurious arguments she makes that seem like they might be as much to fill out a word count as anything else. There’s just not enough here, or if there is it’s not well-developed enough, for an entire book. This should have been a long-form essay (though I did find it more interesting than not).
- My Husband: I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this novel, translated from French, about a woman desperately in love with her husband. It’s a quick, propulsive read, drawing you into the mind of our unnamed narrator, who is completely consumed with thoughts of her (also unnamed) husband, for one week in their lives. At first it seems like she’s a little extra, but it becomes increasingly obvious that the narrator is less in love with her husband than she is obsessed with him. She spirals for days when he compares her to a clementine fruit. She breaks a floor lamp because it disrupts the ambience of their home’s entryway and she’s terrified that it will lead her husband to no longer want to return home to her and the children. She has a secret copy of the mailbox key made so that she can scan through the mail before her husband gets home to make sure he’s not receiving love letters from other women. And then the obsession itself takes a darker turn. Ventura writes her protagonist as a black hole of need, resenting even her own children for the attention they draw from her husband that isn’t otherwise allocated to her. If you enjoy stories that center an amoral female antihero, this is a great choice!
- Klara and the Sun: I love Kazuo Ishiguro and this is the fourth book of his that I’ve read. This one, his latest, feels closely related to his previous Never Let Me Go and even in some ways his masterpiece The Remains of the Day (I still find The Buried Giant to be out of place among his bibliography). They all wrestle with questions of the construction and formation of identity, as well as service and sacrifice. They reveal their fuller implications only gradually. In this novel, it’s the near future and the titular Klara is an Artificial Friend, carefully taking in the world around her to be best prepared for her eventual role as, well, a robot friend to the teenager whose family will eventually buy her. That teenager turns out to be Josie, a sweet-natured girl with a mysterious serious illness. As a solar powered android, Klara regards the sun as essentially a deity, and seeks out his intervention for Josie. An artificial intelligence could have been a tricky choice for a narrator, but Ishiguro doesn’t make significant changes to his usual writing style to accommodate and his elegant, removed prose proves well-suited to the task. The narrative raises interesting questions about how the self can be defined, especially when there is arguably not a “self” at all and one’s entire purpose is to be useful to others. It does not answer these questions, but presents us with Klara and lets us think for ourselves. The plot unfolds at the typical leisurely pace for an Ishiguro novel, and as usual not much actually “happens”. I found it a pleasingly reflective experience to read. It does definitely tread familiar territory, though, and is not of higher quality than the previous work that it echoes.
- Middlemarch: Most giant novels I read, I end up thinking that they could have used a better editor. This one, though, felt like it earned its 800+ page length in its tale about a provincial town in Georgian England. It primarily follows the course of two marriages: that between intelligent and warm-spirited Dorothea and the much older clergyman, Edward Casaubon, whom she falls in love with, holding out hope to devote her considerable mental energy to a collaboration with him on the scholarly mythological text he’s devoted his life to writing, and then that between Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who arrives in the area to set up a new medical practice with dreams of conducting important research, and Rosamond Vincy, the most beautiful girl in town, who sees the new doctor as her route to the elevated status she craves. While a more romantic novel would have presented these love matches as the end of the story, here they are just the beginning, and we can see how the hope and feelings that were brought into them fail under the weight of reality rather than expectation. It’s often a funny book, tartly acidic about its characters and their foibles, and only seldom a sentimental one. Eliot’s character work is wonderful, everyone feels fully realized and like a person with tendencies both good and bad. It doesn’t move along particularly briskly, but neither does it drag. Its world feels realistic, and is populated with side characters who get lives and sometimes storylines of their own. It was an enjoyable experience to read, but I was definitely glad when it was done and is best for a relatively patient reader.
In Life…
- Session ended: Things adjourned at the very end of the day on June 6th, as they were constitutionally required to do. And then we rolled straight into a special session on a budget bill, which lasted less than two hours. And then rolled straight into a second special session to decide whether Las Vegas would build a stadium to lure the Oakland A’s. We all knew that the first special session was coming, which made the end of things a bit of a letdown because it wasn’t actually the end of things. After dealing with my first-ever legislative session as a mother, though, it was close enough to done for me. I’ve always depended on weekends during session to relax, catch up on sleep, and decompress and it turns out all of those things are essentially impossible when you have a very small child at home! I also saw a lot less of C and it really sucked! I’m glad he’ll be older next time we do one of these. And I’m glad the next one isn’t until 2025.
- Quick trip to Michigan: I spent a weekend back in the mitten for a party for my mom. It was in and out but it was nice to get a little bit of family time in after session! I haven’t been back to Michigan in nearly 2 years and I got to see my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and even my nephew, who I haven’t seen since he was about 8 months old and is now two and a half!