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Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 24th, 2019 09:15 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Ethel Cook Eliot’s Green Doors is one of those doors which has two stories: the surface story about a man in love with a Mysterious Girl, and the Girl’s story that explains this mystery which is almost inevitably more interesting than the love story on the surface, but we only get bits and pieces of it till the end of the book when the man learns the truth and she is no longer Mysterious.
To give Eliot her due, Green Doors is pretty interesting as it is: Lewis is a psychiatrist who hires young Petra as a secretary after Petra’s stepmother Clare tries to get Lewis to psychoanalyse Petra (Lewis patiently explains that psychiatrists don’t psychoanalyse) in an attempt to add Lewis to her platonic harem of eminent men. The idea is that she’ll discuss the case with him and he’ll be drawn into her social circle through her warmth, wit, and boundless compassion. It’s a bit Munchausen by Proxy.
(One of the more moving subplots of the book was the way that Lewis gradually grows more compassionate toward Clare, without wavering from the belief that Petra really needs to get away from her stepmother.)
But I still would have been more interested in reading a book that centered on Petra ( Spoilers )
I also finished Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which is a wild ride. It chronicles the loosely connected lives of eight young women who roomed together in their final year at Vassar, dipping in and out of their stories for slightly less than a decade after graduation. It’s a sharp portrait of a particular segment of American society at the time - educated, vaguely leftish Vassar graduates clustered around New York City - and I admired it more than liked it, although there is something strangely compelling about it: it sucks you in and you keep going, not so much to find out what happens next (it doesn’t have much of a plot) but to see which girl’s life and character McCarthy will tackle.
What I’m Reading Now
Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse, which begins in classic Sutcliffian fashion with the hero (heroine, in this case) buying a slave after their eyes meet across thearena slave market. Less Sutcliffian is the fact that they are not yet BFFs, but I’m sure that’s coming.
I’ve also begun Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and it’s weird to me how contemporary the book feels in some ways. Not the society it describes - in Friedan’s world, American women are marrying earlier than ever before and popping out babies as fast as they can in order to fulfill their destiny as housewives, while in contemporary America, women are marrying later and delaying childbirth and often focusing on careers.
But the emotional problem she’s describing could come from an article about millennials (male as well as female). The ennui, the free-floating anxiety, the guilt over feeling dissatisfied while living in an earthly paradise (at least as measured in material terms), the sense that this is a personal maladjustment rather than a widespread issue that lots of people share…
Heck, there’s even a passage where Friedan quotes a college president complaining that the college students of the 50s suffered from “an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life,” linked somehow to their overscheduled childhoods and always-present mothers. (The millennial version would change “mothers” to “parents.”) Is this simply a universal human complaint? I know we have complaints from the ancient Greeks that the young are lazy and disrespectful. Have adults always looked at the younger generation as overscheduled, overnurtured, and consequently unable to endure pain or discipline, as well?
What I Plan to Read Next
Did Anton DiSclafani sell her soul in exchange for such beautiful covers? I disliked her earlier book The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (which also had a beautiful cover!) but the cover of her more recent novel The After Party is so gorgeous that I’m tempted to read it anyway. Resist, self! Resist!
Ethel Cook Eliot’s Green Doors is one of those doors which has two stories: the surface story about a man in love with a Mysterious Girl, and the Girl’s story that explains this mystery which is almost inevitably more interesting than the love story on the surface, but we only get bits and pieces of it till the end of the book when the man learns the truth and she is no longer Mysterious.
To give Eliot her due, Green Doors is pretty interesting as it is: Lewis is a psychiatrist who hires young Petra as a secretary after Petra’s stepmother Clare tries to get Lewis to psychoanalyse Petra (Lewis patiently explains that psychiatrists don’t psychoanalyse) in an attempt to add Lewis to her platonic harem of eminent men. The idea is that she’ll discuss the case with him and he’ll be drawn into her social circle through her warmth, wit, and boundless compassion. It’s a bit Munchausen by Proxy.
(One of the more moving subplots of the book was the way that Lewis gradually grows more compassionate toward Clare, without wavering from the belief that Petra really needs to get away from her stepmother.)
But I still would have been more interested in reading a book that centered on Petra ( Spoilers )
I also finished Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which is a wild ride. It chronicles the loosely connected lives of eight young women who roomed together in their final year at Vassar, dipping in and out of their stories for slightly less than a decade after graduation. It’s a sharp portrait of a particular segment of American society at the time - educated, vaguely leftish Vassar graduates clustered around New York City - and I admired it more than liked it, although there is something strangely compelling about it: it sucks you in and you keep going, not so much to find out what happens next (it doesn’t have much of a plot) but to see which girl’s life and character McCarthy will tackle.
What I’m Reading Now
Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse, which begins in classic Sutcliffian fashion with the hero (heroine, in this case) buying a slave after their eyes meet across the
I’ve also begun Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and it’s weird to me how contemporary the book feels in some ways. Not the society it describes - in Friedan’s world, American women are marrying earlier than ever before and popping out babies as fast as they can in order to fulfill their destiny as housewives, while in contemporary America, women are marrying later and delaying childbirth and often focusing on careers.
But the emotional problem she’s describing could come from an article about millennials (male as well as female). The ennui, the free-floating anxiety, the guilt over feeling dissatisfied while living in an earthly paradise (at least as measured in material terms), the sense that this is a personal maladjustment rather than a widespread issue that lots of people share…
Heck, there’s even a passage where Friedan quotes a college president complaining that the college students of the 50s suffered from “an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life,” linked somehow to their overscheduled childhoods and always-present mothers. (The millennial version would change “mothers” to “parents.”) Is this simply a universal human complaint? I know we have complaints from the ancient Greeks that the young are lazy and disrespectful. Have adults always looked at the younger generation as overscheduled, overnurtured, and consequently unable to endure pain or discipline, as well?
What I Plan to Read Next
Did Anton DiSclafani sell her soul in exchange for such beautiful covers? I disliked her earlier book The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (which also had a beautiful cover!) but the cover of her more recent novel The After Party is so gorgeous that I’m tempted to read it anyway. Resist, self! Resist!
