Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.
No one is a criminal.
No one is an addict.
No one is a failure.

Thus begins E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. With an introduction like that, you just know that the Sinclair family has to be a mess.

This has to be one of the saddest books I've read all year - maybe even THE saddest book I've read all year. The book works by peeling off layers of misinformation and misunderstanding until the heroine, Cadence, finally learns the truth, so it's impossible to explain without spoiling everything. I thought the journey was worth it in the end, but my God, it is really fucking sad.

And not even the Code Name Verity kind of sad, where this experience was terrible for everyone but they're all resilient people and have each other's support and will clearly be okay in the long run. I'm not sure Cadence will be okay. I'm not sure what okay would even look like for Cadence.

Also Charles Finch’s An East End Murder, a short story in the Charles Lenox detective series. I didn’t realize how very short it would be before I read it, and was left feeling rather disappointed, because there wasn’t enough time to really develop the mystery - or, more importantly, for any of the secondary characters to appear.

It’s really the web of relationships between Charles Lenox and Lady Jane and Thomas and Toto and John Dallington and all the other secondary characters that make the series so good. I would have far preferred a short story about them all getting together for a dinner party to discuss the Franco-Prussian War or the latest installment of Middlemarch or whatever, rather than a half-baked mystery about Lenox on his own.

What I’m Reading Now

Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, a perfectly charming book about four Englishwomen who rent a castle in Italy together for the month of April. There’s a movie, which is beautiful, visually speaking, (how could a movie set in Italy in April be anything but beautiful?) but rather lacking otherwise; so far I’m much preferring the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

Marie Brennan’s The Tropic of Serpents, the sequel to A Natural History of Dragons.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

We Were Liars sounds like something I would like to read, and possibly then regret reading because it crushed my heart. But maybe it's good for me to get crushed a little every now and then.

I would have far preferred a short story about them all getting together for a dinner party to discuss the Franco-Prussian War or the latest installment of Middlemarch or whatever, rather than a half-baked mystery about Lenox on his own.

This is how I tend to feel about mysteries in general, I think. I'm interested in what the solution turns out to be, but so far at least, I've been more interested in following some characters around, with solving the mystery as a pretext.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to say I recommend We Were Liars, because it is so crushing, but if you ever find yourself in a mood to be crushed, I do think it does it absolutely fairly - it's not at all emotionally manipulative.

I think one of the strengths of a mystery series is that it can follow a group of characters as they grow and develop without that growth having to provide the plot for every novel: because the mystery is providing the A-plot, the character's personal lives can develop quite gradually in the background. If character growth has to provide the A-plot, I think there's a tendency for series to grow soap operatic as they go on.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

That's a really good point about A-plots and character growth! I mean, as far as I can tell so far.

I'm reading Died in the Wool right now, by the way, and it's really interesting! Everyone's just sitting around recounting the last days of Flossie Rubrick by firelight in the middle of this isolated mountain range.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I've read some fairly critical reviews of We Were Liars, though some of the criticism has been rather meta ("Oh, another story of the sadness and pain of privileged people"). I guess from some of those reviews I got the sense that it might be hard to empathize with the narrator So I'm very interested to find that it worked for you. (I haven't read it, myself.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I guess I can see how some reviewers would be tired of reading about privileged people full stop, but for goodness sake, it's not like being rich saves people from all the misery of life. Cadence and company are not suffering because they're privileged (in a "Oh woe is me, it's so hard feeling guilty about having so much stuff" kind of way, which would be annoying). They're suffering because privilege, despite the Sinclairs' (and apparently the reviewers') devout belief otherwise, can't protect anyone from pain and death and failure, because those things are an inherent part of the human condition.

It is hard to empathize with Cadence sometimes (I certainly had moments where I wanted to shake her). She's in a lot of pain, both mentally and physically, and it makes her very self-absorbed, so she either doesn't notice that other people are hurting or dismisses it (much the way that reviewers dismiss her, it occurs to me) because, after all, they're so privileged. What do they know about real pain?

It's part of the reason the book is so sad: she's cut herself off from people so thoroughly that it includes even the reader.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

And you make a really good point here about people's failures of empathy. Isn't suffering always sad? But people seem happy to find a reason to harden their hearts...

I confess; I found myself going, "yeah, YEAH!" when I was reading those reviews, and yet why? Is empathy such a precious resource that we can't give it out to everyone?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think it's compassion fatigue. There's just so much suffering in the world, it seems impossible to feel compassion for everyone, and making categories of people who don't deserve compassion makes it easier to compartmentalize.

And I think it's easier to say "Such-and-such group doesn't deserve compassion" than to say "I only have so much compassion and I would rather direct it at this group, even if this other group has a legitimate claim too."