the idiot

March 2, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters Whose Jobs I’d Love To Have

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about characters with jobs we would want to have. I don’t read a lot of books that take place in the workplace, but here is what I came up with!

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): Who doesn’t want to be handsome, clever, and rich…and bored enough because you don’t need to do anything productive that you start playing matchmaker with your friends?

Margo Manning (Death Prefers Blondes): I mean, I don’t know that I would have ever come up with “ringleader of a group of drag queen catburglars” as a job description, but now that I know it’s out there I want it.

Daisy Jones (Daisy Jones and the Six): A beautiful, talented singer developing a slow burn attraction to a hot, talented musician? There are worse jobs to have!

Selin (The Idiot): I sometimes wish I had the chance to go back to college and do it over, I feel like I would pick more interesting classes! Being a college student again, especially at Harvard, would be so interesting.

Georgie McCool (Landline): I don’t know that I think I would be any good at it, but working as a TV comedy writer sounds like fun!

Maud Bailey (Possession): There’s a part of me that always wishes I’d gone into academia, which may be one of the reasons I think longingly about being a college student again. Honestly, the idea of getting to research my interests all day every day is the dream!

Tess Durbeyfield (Tess of the D’Urbervilles): It’s not so much that I think I have any natural gift or even longing for outdoor work, but the book makes Tess’s experience as a shepherdess feel so idyllic that I want to give it a try.

Vianne Rocher (Chocolat): I don’t actually have any particular fondness for eating chocolate, though I do love the smell, so I think I might make a good chocolatier. At least I wouldn’t be tempted to eat my wares!

Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo): Being a genius hacker helping solve mysteries and take down hateful people wouldn’t suck.

Clarice Starling (The Silence of the Lambs): Doing criminal profiling for the FBI was at one point very much my dream job!

March 14, 2019

Book 172: The Idiot

“I wrote her phone number on my hand, while she wrote mine in her daily planner. Already I was the impetuous one — the one who cared less about personal safety and tradition, while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and inherited systems, and wrote things in the designated spaces. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.”

Dates read: August 23-29, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Sometimes I feel like I’m learning in reverse: when I was a teenager, I was sure I know pretty much everything, and the older I get, the less I feel certain of. I think many other teenagers are the same way…at least, the ones I’ve known. Sometimes I almost miss that blazing moral clarity, the certainty that I was right and someone else was wrong. But letting it go (for the most part) has made me an easier person to get along with, and a better one overall.

Selin, the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, has the opposite problem. She’s a freshman at Harvard, and she’s overwhelmed by all she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where her life is going, really, she doesn’t know what classes she wants to take, she’s not sure how to help the students she’s been assigned as a part of her volunteer work doing adult education. She can’t even figure out how to fall asleep regularly, adding exhaustion on top of her confusion. She kind of drifts along, and one of the places she drifts is into a beginner Russian class, where she meets two people that change her life.

One is Svetlana, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, who decides she’s going to become Selin’s friend and does so with aplomb, quickly becoming the dominant force in Selin’s social life. The other is Ivan, a senior from Hungary, who becomes Selin’s conversation partner for Russian class, and correspondence partner over the then-new medium of email outside of class in English. Their conversation gradually turns into them spending time together, and Selin develops an intense crush on him. Even after she learns he has a girlfriend (and while he’s giving her very mixed signals), she takes up an opportunity to teach English in Hungary over the summer in the hopes of getting to spend time with him.

This book, like last week’s Stoner, has a very passive central figure. Selin’s unsureness about virtually everything means that she mostly reacts to the world around her instead of being proactive. This makes her simultaneously very relatable (who hasn’t felt paralyzed with indecision, especially in a new situation?) and quite frustrating. If you’ve ever lived through the experience of having feelings for someone who wasn’t quite sure what they wanted, you find yourself wanting to reach through the pages and shake her by the shoulders while telling her that this isn’t going to end well. But you also know there’s no way to learn that lesson except living through it, because you probably ignored the person who shook you by the shoulders and tried to warn you off.

Batuman is an incredible writer…I highlighted so many things on my Kindle that she wrote that just seemed to perfectly capture the essence of being young and lost and desperately self-conscious. And she creates a very real, sympathetic-even-as-she’s-irritating character in Selin. The plot structure, though, could have used some work. While she’s at school, the book meanders along slowly and had a hard time holding my interest despite the lovely prose. Once she gets to Hungary, however, and starts interacting with host families and students, the book gets much livelier and there were several moments that were actually laugh-out-loud funny. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the portion of the book that takes place at Harvard, but I enjoyed the last quarter-or-so so much more. I wish Batuman had figured out a way to disperse some of that levity more equally throughout the book, because it’s like 3/4 a good book and 1/4 a really good book. As is, though, I’d recommend this book, to recent-ish college grads in particular (I feel like if I were too much older than I am now, I’d be too annoyed by Selin to really enjoy what it had to offer).

Tell me, blog friends…did you ever have one of those flirtations with mixed signals?

One year ago, I was reading: Stiff

Two years ago, I was reading: Green Girl

Three years ago, I was reading: To Die For

October 9, 2017

Year 2: An Update (And Giveaway!)

Today is my 32nd birthday! Instead of doing yearly wrap-ups at the end of the year, like most people, since I started the whole “read 500 books in the next decade” thing that is the entire theme of my blog on my 30th, I use my birthday as the beginning and end of my reading years. Without further ado, during the past twelve months:

In Reading

Books read (this year): 84! This is well above my yearly goal of 50, but still below last year’s total of 95. I actually was on pace to come close to last year but the last book I finished before my birthday took longer than expected, and then the book that I’m very close to finishing also has taken me a while, so 84 it is.
Books read (total): 179. This is over three years “worth” of reading, and closing in on four. I don’t know what the future holds, so I’m pretty comfortable having this buffer in place in case I find myself with fewer opportunities to read as much in the coming years. This does mean that my reviews on the blog are lagging significantly behind my actual reading…you’ll notice I’m still posting about books I was reading in 2016! I do write my reviews shortly after I finish the books, though, and I write at least a little bit about what I’m currently reading in my A Month In The Life posts, so while I toyed with the idea of doing more than one review post per week, I decided against it. I like the pattern I’ve got going on here, and hopefully you do too!
Male/Female Authors: 44 women/40 men. Last year was almost exactly equal, and this year is pretty close, too. I don’t make a concerted effort to read in gender balance (I just pick up the books that look interesting to me), but I do like to be conscious of whether I’m reading drastically more of one than the other.
Most Read Genres: This year, I read 56 fiction books (most read subgenres: contemporary fiction and then historical fiction) and 28 non-fiction books (most read subgenres: memoir and history). The pattern I began last year held fairly true this year as well…I tend to read about 2/3 fiction, 1/3 nonfiction, which seems like a good balance to me.
Kindle/Hard Copy: This year, I read 44 books in either hardcover or paperback and 40 on my Kindle. This is much different than last year, when Kindle books made up nearly 2/3 of my reading. I’ve cut back dramatically on ARCs this year because they’re such an inconsistent (in terms of quality) part of my reading experience, and I think I’ve had an overall more enjoyable reading year for it.

In Life

I like to look back on major events of the year and see what I was reading during those times. Books are kind of the soundtrack to my life these days.

Girl’s trip to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter: My annual trip with my best friends to do something fun is probably my most-anticipated event every year. I miss these two girls so much so I really cherish getting to see them. Last year’s trip was Universal Studios in Orlando to visit the Harry Potter stuff, and it was super fun (especially since it was right after the election when I needed a pick-me-up). I was reading: Invisible Man
Beginning of my third legislative session: The two months before session and then the four months of it going on are the busy season for me. The first day is the official beginning of the end of my life outside Carson City until June. I was reading: Flowertown
End of my third legislative session: I never appreciate how much I enjoy not having a commute to work like I do at the end of the time when I have one that’s forty minutes each way. It was a snowy, stressful session, but I did learn a lot, so all’s well that ends well, eh? I was reading: In The Skin of a Lion
First wedding anniversary: One down, forever to go, eh? The first year of being married was honestly not really a big change because our lives are very much like they were before, only I have a different last name. Which I now usually am able to give without having to think about it or starting to say my maiden name first. I was reading: Spoiled
Michigan trip to visit family: This was, I think, the longest I’ve been in Michigan continuously since I left in 2012, a little over a week. We spent four days in my hometown with my mom and saw friends there, and then we drove up to the Upper Peninsula with my dad to visit his hometown of Ontonagon for the annual reunion for that side of the family. It was my husband’s first time in the UP and I’m really glad he got the chance to see it and meet my relatives, who mostly weren’t able to come to the wedding last year. I was reading: Station Eleven
Mom’s trip to Lake Tahoe: This was my mom’s third trip to Reno since I moved out here, and she both spent time with us and family and did a half-mile open water swim in the frigid waters of Lake Tahoe (which were less frigid than usual because of our roasty summer) and it was really fun to have her visit! I was reading: The Idiot

And, in honor of my second year of reading and blogging, I’m giving away a copy my favorite book that I reviewed on the blog over the past year! I read a bunch of fantastic stuff, but one book definitely sticks out as the best one: We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. So here’s how it’s going to work: if you’d like to be entered to win a copy of this book, please use the Rafflecopter below sometime in the next week (through October 16). I’ll randomly select a winner and then reach out to you for your contact info, which I’ll only use to send you your book from Amazon (either paperback or Kindle, depending on your preference). Sorry international friends, this one is US-only. Thanks for reading along this year!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

August 30, 2017

A Month In The Life: August 2017

It’s funny how the school year still feels so relevant even years after graduating from law school and with no kids. Like, there’s no reason that the beginning of September (Friday!) should still have that feeling of anticipation and something new about to start. Of course, these are my own personal rhythms that I still feel the pull of: our local school district started classes about three weeks ago! But having grown up with the post-Labor Day starts, it’s always this time of the year that I find myself thinking about the possibilities of what’s ahead. Anyways, now that I’ve rambled on, here’s what happened in August.

In Books…

Notes on a Scandal: This book features a Mary Kay Letournou-esque affair between a female teacher, Sheba, and her high school student, but that’s only a secondary story. It’s really about the way that an older teacher, Barbara, preys on Sheba in turn in a desperate attempt to ease her own loneliness. It’s well-written and hard to put down.
Butterfly Boy: This memoir was a book club selection, and it was definitely a book I’d never have known about but for it being picked for us to read. Which turned out to be a good thing, because it’s about growing up poor and Latino and gay and although there’s some brutal stuff here, it’s written beautifully. It definitely reminded me that I need to make it more of a point to read intersectionally.
Party Monster: This is kind of a memoir/true crime mash-up, given that it recounts author James St. James’ experience as a part of the Club Kid scene in late 80s/early 90s NYC, and also the brutal murder of a drug dealer that brought it all crashing down. Turns out it’s in large part a book about doing lots of drugs, which isn’t actually all that interesting to read about, but St. James’ voice is catty and witty enough to give it verve.
Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?: This book has been pitched as “imagine that your funny, smart older sister was the Deputy Chief of Staff to Obama and was giving you life lessons” and that is an extremely accurate pitch. It’s charming and smart and insightful and I really enjoyed it.
The Sense of an Ending: I tend to have relatively good luck with Booker Prize winners, and this book was more confirmation of that. A deeply average older English man is forced to look back into an emotionally charged period of his life (a breaking in a college relationship, followed relatively shortly by the suicide of a close friend) when he receives a mysterious bequest. I had issues with how the major female character was written, but the writing was incredible and the story is the kind that makes you want to turn right back to the beginning and start to read it again.
Charity Girl: This book was both interesting and not very good. It follows a young woman in the WWI era who sleeps with a soldier, contracts STDs from him, and then is forced by the government into a kind of detention facility for treatment and indoctrination, where she’s held without charges for months. Her paramour is just treated and goes on with his life. WHICH IS AN ACTUAL THING THAT HAPPENED, which I had no idea about.
Mildred Pierce: I’d seen the Joan Crawford movie a few years ago, but the book is a little different. The major themes, though, are the same. Mildred herself is a great character but the book is kind of meh, to be honest. It’s fine but nothing special.
Stoner: This decades-old book got trendy a few years ago, but it was before I started book blogging so I was only aware of it after the fact. I can see why it has staying power, though…it’s really a well-constructed, tightly edited, beautifully sad story of a deeply ordinary life. It was profoundly moving to me.
The Idiot: This book was exceptionally well-written (I highlighted so many passages!), but I had a hard time getting into it. It follows Selin, a Turkish-American Harvard student during her freshman year as she has tries to figure out who she is, what she wants to do with herself, and how to talk to the senior she has a crush on. That makes it sound light and frivolous but it’s not, there’s a real depth to it. It gets stronger as it goes and by the end I was really invested in it.

In Life…

My mom came out to Nevada: My mom has been doing open water swims since I was in middle or high school, and so she came out to do one at Lake Tahoe last weekend! Living on the other side of the country from your family means not seeing them as much as you would like, but between our trip to Michigan at the end of July and her trip out here I’ve gotten lots of quality Mom time, which has been great. She finished first in her five-year age group and second in her ten-year one, which is pretty awesome if you ask me!

One Thing:

I have always been a been proponent of the “if you find clothing you love, buy it in all the colors” line of thought. Even though it’s still summer and still really really hot, fall/winter are right around the corner. This sweater from LL Bean is amazing…perfect to wear with leggings and cozy and now I own it in all the colors. That’s not an affiliate link and I’ll make no money if you click through, I just love the sweater.

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

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