A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

I Don’t Get It: 7 Classics That Leave Me Cold

When you think of yourself as a Reader, you want to read all the “important” works of literature. Or maybe that’s just me being pretentious. Some of my effort to read the classics has gone well…Moby-Dick is better than you think it’ll be and surprisingly modern in structure, I loved Anna Karenina with my whole heart, and getting into Jane Austen has been a joy. Some of it has gone…less well. Here (in no particular order) are seven classics that I have read and completely failed to understand why I’m supposed to care

  • The Catcher In The Rye: I think I read this at entirely the wrong time in my life. I read this when I was 23, during my second year of law school. This is really a book that should be read around 16, or whatever age you are when you start deriding everyone who isn’t exactly what they appear to be on the surface as “fake”. Because that’s basically what it’s about: the disillusionment of realizing that the world isn’t always what it seems to be, and a longing to go back to a time when it was. If you’ve emotionally progressed past this stage, this is probably going to be more irritating than anything else, but if you’re right in the middle of it, you probably will love it for the rest of your life. I’m in the former camp.
  • Don Quixote: I feel like this is probably a weird comparison, but Don Quixote reminds me of what I liked least about “The Office” on TV. Don Quixote is basically Michael Scott, all cripplingly awkward delusion. Which makes Sancho Panza the Dwight figure, which works surprisingly well, but I digress. What I’m trying to say is that this is a book that consists essentially entirely of awkward humor, which is my least favorite kind of humor. It was really long and I just wanted it to be over
  • The Grapes of Wrath: Either this or Of Mice and Men could have gone here, honestly, but I hated Grapes more. Just heavy-handed metaphors about misery and despair, and then long passages about misery and despair. I will rewrite the book in one sentence: the Dust Bowl and Great Depression super sucked for everyone, but especially Great Plains farmers. The end.
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: I read this in either 11th or 12th grade English in high school and I can remember very little about it except an overwhelming feeling of “do not want” whenever I opened the book. I remember that Huck and Jim go down the river together, but I can’t recall a single other thing that happens. The fact that I don’t have the slightest recall of the plot tells you I just completely didn’t connect with it, because that’s really unusual. I don’t remember this being bad, per se, just that I found the exercise of reading it to be, well, exercise rather than enjoyment.
  • Love In The Time of Cholera: A sprawling epic about the power of true love to last a lifetime…or a five alarm snorefest? I’m in the latter camp. Dude falls in love with lady, lady ultimately rejects him, and he bangs everything in sight while thinking about how much he loves the lady that rejected him. Meanwhile, lady marries someone else and they stay married, more or less happily, until he dies. Dude comes back in the picture (this is when everyone is old) and he and the lady finally rekindle their romance. I found the plot ridiculous and the language excessively flowery. I’d heard great things about it and was really disappointed a
  • The Sun Also Rises: This could have been any Hemingway that I’ve read (besides the short story The Snows of Kilamanjaro, which I actually rather like), but this one was my least favorite of his. Bullfighting and humans fighting and drinking and thwarted, doomed love affairs and precious few adjectives. Reading Hemingway, to me, feels like watching Scorcese. Stories about men and violence and the women in their lives who aren’t people, really, but objects and symbols. While I can appreciate Scorcese movies (even though I usually don’t like them), I can’t get there with Hemingway. He’s just the worst.
  • Crime and Punishment: I’m normally not one to pitch a fit about books where nothing happens. The Virgin Suicides is my favorite book of all time and not much happens in that one. But this one? White dude thinks he’s better than everyone else and could get away with murder without feeling guilty. He commits murder. He feels guilty. That is essentially the entire plot, and it goes on for eons.

Tell me, blog friends…what classics didn’t do it for you?

Book 7: Primitive Mythology

“Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.” 

Dates read: October 27-November 9, 2015

Rating: 4/10

I’m actually glad I have a little distance from this book when reviewing it. If I was reviewing it immediately after reading it, I would likely give it an even lower rating than I have here. But having read the succeeding three books in the series, I can understand why this book is written the way it is: it serves as a foundation.

All of the books in the Masks of God series are dense. They read like textbooks, rather than the kind of non-fiction novels in the In Cold Blood style that it seems like more “modern” nonfiction is written in. There is a ton of information here, and Campbell is presenting his research rather than telling us a story. This first volume focuses on what we know about the religious/mythological beliefs of (mostly) prehistorical cultures. Since many of them didn’t leave written text behind, it’s a lot of interpretation of artifacts and paintings, etc.

Which makes this volume a little problematic. While it does lay a lot of ground for the future volumes in terms of tracking social change from cultures that worship a female diety with primarily female priestesess, focused on honoring the Mother Earth and the cycle of life (often taken very literally with human sacrifice) to societies that worship a male diety with male priests, it also was written over 50 years ago based on the state of archaeology at the time. There has been a lot of progress made, not in the least not referring to tribal societies (whose belief systems form a part of this book) as “primitive”, but also in archaeology itself. Also, like Joseph Campbell’s most well-known work, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, there’s a heavy influence from what was de rigeur psychology at the time: Freudianism and psychoanalysis. While I personally believe that the pendulum has swung a little too far away from these kinds of theories (which is a whole different topic), there’s no denying that they’ve fallen far out of favor because of their lack of scientifically provable reliability. To read a book (and series) premised on psychoanalysis as the appropriate lens through which to view the world is a little jarring.  

If you’re a big mythology nerd who thinks you might want to read this series, pick up The Hero With A Thousand Faces and read it first. Campbell’s writing style can be dry and pedantic, but if it holds your interest, then ask yourself if you really really want to read over 2000 pages of world mythology. While I found reading The Masks of God to be ultimately rewarding, it was also a slog at times (especially in this first volume) and you need to be prepared to watch your normal reading pace slow considerably.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think Freud has merit or is a cigar just a cigar?

Book 6: The Nazi Officer’s Wife

“You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.” 

Dates read: October 25-27, 2015

Rating: 10/10

An Austrian Jewish woman survives the Holocaust by marrying a member of the Nazi party. When she meets him, he is initially a high-ranking factory official, but by the end of the war, when everyone is pressed into active duty, he is an officer within the party. And the kicker? He knows she’s Jewish. Totally made up, right? Wrong. That is the actual story of Edith Hahn Beer.

The Shoah has, understandably, sparked a lot of significant literature. The Diary of Anne Frank. Night. Sophie’s Choice. Why this incredible memoir hasn’t been included in the canon is beyond me, honestly. It was (like almost all of my Kindle books) a sale selection, the title promising a fascinating tale although memoirs aren’t an especial favorite of mine. And it’s been one of the few books I’ve read recently that I literally couldn’t put down.

One of the upsides of the Kindle is its portability. And I have the Kindle app on my phone, although I hardly use it usually. Not here. I was reading on my eight-minute walk to work. I was reading in the bathroom. I was reading every spare second I could grab. Beer’s writing voice feels like a story your aunt or grandma is telling you…it’s immediate, it grabs you and doesn’t let you go. From the moment that she’s sent to her first work camp assignment, missing her mother’s departure for the ghetto, to her friend’s bravery in giving Edith her identification documents (which the friend then reported as “missing”) so that Edith, unable to draw rations on her false ID, will at least be able to try to find work, to her first meeting with her future husband Werner, to her refusal to have any pain medication during the birth of their child so that she won’t spill her desperate secret, all of it is incredibly compelling and although we know she survives her experience because she wrote a book about it, we can’t help but eagerly turn pages to see how it plays out. Basically I was completely swept away and never wanted it to end and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-told story.

Tell me, blog friends…do you like memoirs or am I the weirdo that finds them very skippable?

Book 5: Through The Language Glass

“The cultural significance of blue, on the other hand, is very limited. As noted earlier, blue is extremely rare as a color of materials in nature, and blue dyes are exceedingly difficult to produce. People in simple cultures might spend a lifetime without seeing objects that are truly blue. Of course, blue is the color of the sky (and, for some of us, the sea). But in the absence of blue materials with any practical significance, the need to find a special name for this great stretch of nothingness is particularly non-pressing.” 

Dates read: October 20-25, 2015

Rating: 9/10

Of all the classes that I took while an undergrad at the University of Michigan, there are a handful that really stick out. LING 211, Introduction to Linguistics, was one of those classes. I actually dallied with the idea of making linguistics my minor because I enjoyed the class so much. Although upper-level linguistics pretty quickly disabused me of that notion, I still retain a real interest in linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics.

The Sapir-Whorf theory of sociolinguistics was trendy almost 100 years ago: it suggested that the language we use controls the way that we think. It’s an initially intriguing hypothesis with a lot of instinctual appeal. If a language doesn’t have a word for a particular phenomenon, or lacks a particular tense, why wouldn’t speakers of that language have a hard time conceiving of that phenomenon or that kind of world? Until you realize that some languages, like the Italian I studied as an undergrad, have an entire tense for the remote past, passato remoto, while the English language doesn’t. Does that mean English speakers can’t conceive of events very far in the past? Of course not. Does that mean that we don’t understand implicitly terms like saudade, a melancholy longing for things that are gone and will never come back? Again, of course not, but for a while educated people would have thought so.

Deutscher reinvigorates the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis among a very few limited lines: primarily, he focuses on the idea that our languages impact how we think about color, along with how we process geolocation, and objects in gendered languages. As speakers of a neuter language, we don’t think about objects as inherently gendered things. But if you speak a language that thinks of bridges as masculine, like Spanish, bridges are strong and sturdy. If you speak a language that thinks of bridges as feminine, like German, however, you’re much more likely to implicitly think of bridges as beautiful and delicate. And color! There’s an incredible explanation of the Homeric description of the sea as “wine-dark” that I can’t possibly condense, but if you’re into this kind of thing, you’ll be enraptured.

Fascinating stuff, for a person who has a real interest in psychology and language. If not, probably not a text for you. Since I’m the former rather than the latter, I loved this book and found it incredibly compelling.

Tell me, blog friends…what kind of oddball things do you get nerdy about? 

Book 4: Gilded

“We are given moments, and we must choose what to do with them. This is your moment.”

Dates read: October 18-20, 2015

Rating: 2/10

I’m a sucker for young adult lit, and young adult fantasy in particular has a soft spot in my heart (Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic books, for example, are such favorites of mine that I recently replaced my long-lost childhood copies). So when I was shopping through the Kindle sale section and saw Gilded, I thought it seemed like a great fit for my tastes.

And it promised to be based in mythology! I’m a big mythology nerd and have been since I was a kid (my mom got me this book called Greek Myths for Young Children and it was my favorite thing and I still remember it fondly to this day), but I’ve never been exposed to the Korean mythology background indicated as a basis for the story, so I thought it would be a good chance to learn about that too.

As the rating shows, though, it was a huge disappointment. The book follows the story of teenage Jae Hwa, a Korean girl raised for most of her life in the United States and recently returned to Korea after the death of her mother. Her grandfather is very unhappy to see her, which she assumes to be because he doesn’t like his Americanized granddaughter, but turns out to be because as a female born into her father’s family, she will be ruthlessly pursued by a demigod until he can pull her into his dimension and imprison her for all eternity.

There’s good stuff to work with her: grief for her mother, being torn between cultures, an exciting adventure in another world…and that’s on top of the usual high-school plotlines (first love, friendships, coming of age, etc ) that have driven plenty of YA novels for ages. But nothing really works. The loss of her mother and her dual cultural identities are referenced often, but without any real exploration of them…she just notes that she’s sad, or that she’s confused, and it completely vanishes until she sees fit to mention it again. Her love interest has two identifying traits: he’s cute, and he’s really smart/education/good at everything. Of course he likes her too, so their only stumbling block is that she’s constantly shoving him away because she wants to protect him from getting caught up in her destiny. Which is noble enough the first time, but gets tiresome long before the end of the book. As do her constant interactions with her divine pursuer, who keeps pulling her into his world to remind her he’s going to do so permanently…and then she escapes. Again. And again. I was relieved when I got to the end. The book feels like a first draft of something better.

Tell me, blog friends…what did you read recently that was disappointing?

Favorite Books, From A-Z (Almost)

Welcome to Monthly Monday! 500 Books is supposed to be a fun side project for me, so while I toyed with the idea of doing a weekly Tuesday post to go with my Thursday reviews, I decided that I’ll do one extra post each month. To give you a little better idea of who I am as a reader, I thought I’d go through from A to Z, and highlight one of my favorite books starting with each letter!

(A)ngus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging
(B)lindness
(C)hocolat
(D)escendants, The
(E)mma
(F)ellowship of the Rings, The
(G)olden Compass, The
(H)ot Zone, The
(I)s Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
(J)itterbug Perfume
(K)ite Runner, The
(L)olita

(M)an Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The
(N)ever Let Me Go
(O)ther Boleyn Girl, The
(P)icture of Dorian Gray, The
(Q)…
(R)ed Tent, The
(S)ecret History, The


(T)hree and Out
(U)nder The Banner of Heaven
(V)irgin Suicides, The
(W)hite Oleander
(X)…
(Y)…
(Z)…

I did actually have a book I’ve read for every letter except X, but not ones that I would consider “favorites” per se. I wanted to touch on lots of different genres (young adult, sports, psychology, historical fiction, classics, contemporary fiction…) and not repeat authors, so these aren’t necessarily my absolute favorites, but they’re all books I love and have re-read.

Tell me, blog friends…have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? What are your favorite books?

Book 3: Reservation Road

“There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been.” 

Dates read: October 15-18, 2015

Rating: 3/10

So along with my unquenchable appetite for books, I’m also a voracious movie-watcher. I remember seeing a trailer for the movie version of Reservation Road at some point, deciding it looked sad but interesting, and throwing it on my Netflix queue (where it lingered for a long time because I was constantly pushing up more interesting-looking things). And then when I came across a cheap used copy of the book, I bought it and figured that I might as well read it, because the book is always better, right?

Well, after reading the book, the movie has come off my Netflix queue entirely. Because if the book is better, I can’t take the movie. I knew it was going to be depressing going in based on what I knew about the plot: a young boy is killed in a hit-and-run car accident, and that accident has powerful reverberations on everyone involved. Obviously anything dealing with child death is going to be difficult material, but I used to read those Lurlene McDaniel books about teenagers with cancer on the regular, so surely I could handle it.

Turns out, not really. Not because it was too emotionally charged, but because it was boring and uncentered. The story is told in rotating chapters, varying perspective between Dwight (the driver that hits and kills ten year-old Josh), Ethan (Josh’s father), and Grace (Josh’s mother). The novel doesn’t spend enough sustained time with any of the characters to really dig into them more than on a surface level: Dwight feels guilty, but not enough so to jeopardize his relationship with his own ten year-old son by turning himself in; Ethan feels impotent rage at his powerlessness in the situation, and Grace just withdraws from everything. I did find myself wondering why Grace was written in the third person while the men were written in the first person. Did Schwartz not feel comfortable writing first-person perspective for a woman? Is it supposed to be symbolic of her emotional deadening with grief, that she doesn’t even have the willpower to view herself as the center of her own story anymore? I’m honestly not sure. None of the characters grows or changes, everyone just stays stuck in their patterns. Which is probably realistic, I can’t even imagine what the process of mourning the loss of a child would be like and hope I never have to know. But it doesn’t make for enjoyable or even very interesting reading.

Tell me, blog friends…what books that you enjoy are kind of depressing? Are there any subjects you won’t read about it because they’re too much?

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