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Reading Wednesday
Mar. 4th, 2020 06:43 pmRecently read
I retract what I said last week about not liking The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, with the disclaimer that this is a change of opinion mostly in retrospect. Like, the more I think about it, the more impressed I am by the story the author wanted to tell and how she told it - especially as an all-too-relevant reflection on political and religious tensions in India - but I found it super stressful to actually read. The main character's privilege and naivety made her a ticking time bomb in the other characters' lives and she had no idea, but the narrative did, and made sure you knew it, too.
Read The Third Rainbow Girl: the Long life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which is - as it says on the tin - a true crime book about the 1980 murder of two young women who had hitchhiked from Arizona to West Virginia to attend a sort of annual hippie convention called the Rainbow Gathering. At the same time, it's also about the history of West Virginia and how it - and Appalachia in general - has been perceived by the rest of the U.S., and a memoir of Eisenberg's own experiences living in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, where the murders took place. It's not a typical true crime narrative, but I found that to be a positive rather than a negative thing.
Read a couple more Agatha Christie novels:
Elephants Can Remember was interesting to read immediately after The Third Rainbow Girl, since both focused/touched on the fallibility of memories and the narratives we construct to make sense of the senseless. It had the rather unusual premise of being a murder mystery novel in which no one seems particularly interested in solving the murder in question, which was not as annoying as it sounds. It does eventually get solved, of course - after much but should we really go digging up the past?-ing - and I actually figured out who the murderer was like halfway through, which NEVER happens! It was also the third novel of hers I've read in a row to feature adoption, and specifically, unsympathetic characterizations of adoptive mothers. (Too controlling and/or needy in their relationship with adopted children, who almost all reject them as "not their real mom"/hate being adopted, etc.) I'm not sure if this was a broader cultural stereotype of the 1950s-70s, or just the particular hill Christie decided she was going to die on? Either way, it's a super weird opinion to encounter now.
The other one, Dumb Witness, was a good old-fashioned manor house murder mystery, and very fun to read. Poirot is clearly having a great time going "undercover" to interrogate the various players in this particular drama; Hastings is just super pumped he gets to pet a dog.
Currently reading
I'm halfway through Oval by Elvia Wilk, which I am SUPER into, and would have made a good back-to-back companion read with Jenny Offill's Weather.
I'm also, like, a chapter and a half into Code Girls by Liza Mundy, a non-fiction book about American women who worked as codebreakers during WWII.
To read next
Hopefully The Cutting Season by Attica Locke - Libby says it should be available "in the next few days," which could mean anything, tbh - but after that, I think I should detox from stories about murder for a bit??
I retract what I said last week about not liking The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, with the disclaimer that this is a change of opinion mostly in retrospect. Like, the more I think about it, the more impressed I am by the story the author wanted to tell and how she told it - especially as an all-too-relevant reflection on political and religious tensions in India - but I found it super stressful to actually read. The main character's privilege and naivety made her a ticking time bomb in the other characters' lives and she had no idea, but the narrative did, and made sure you knew it, too.
Read The Third Rainbow Girl: the Long life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which is - as it says on the tin - a true crime book about the 1980 murder of two young women who had hitchhiked from Arizona to West Virginia to attend a sort of annual hippie convention called the Rainbow Gathering. At the same time, it's also about the history of West Virginia and how it - and Appalachia in general - has been perceived by the rest of the U.S., and a memoir of Eisenberg's own experiences living in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, where the murders took place. It's not a typical true crime narrative, but I found that to be a positive rather than a negative thing.
Read a couple more Agatha Christie novels:
Elephants Can Remember was interesting to read immediately after The Third Rainbow Girl, since both focused/touched on the fallibility of memories and the narratives we construct to make sense of the senseless. It had the rather unusual premise of being a murder mystery novel in which no one seems particularly interested in solving the murder in question, which was not as annoying as it sounds. It does eventually get solved, of course - after much but should we really go digging up the past?-ing - and I actually figured out who the murderer was like halfway through, which NEVER happens! It was also the third novel of hers I've read in a row to feature adoption, and specifically, unsympathetic characterizations of adoptive mothers. (Too controlling and/or needy in their relationship with adopted children, who almost all reject them as "not their real mom"/hate being adopted, etc.) I'm not sure if this was a broader cultural stereotype of the 1950s-70s, or just the particular hill Christie decided she was going to die on? Either way, it's a super weird opinion to encounter now.
The other one, Dumb Witness, was a good old-fashioned manor house murder mystery, and very fun to read. Poirot is clearly having a great time going "undercover" to interrogate the various players in this particular drama; Hastings is just super pumped he gets to pet a dog.
Currently reading
I'm halfway through Oval by Elvia Wilk, which I am SUPER into, and would have made a good back-to-back companion read with Jenny Offill's Weather.
I'm also, like, a chapter and a half into Code Girls by Liza Mundy, a non-fiction book about American women who worked as codebreakers during WWII.
To read next
Hopefully The Cutting Season by Attica Locke - Libby says it should be available "in the next few days," which could mean anything, tbh - but after that, I think I should detox from stories about murder for a bit??
