Six Standouts from Six Months

I'm probably the last blogger posting a 2012 reading wrap-up post, but I felt the need to post something. Actually, this isn't a wrap-up for the whole year. Since I posted Monthly Reading Roundup reviews for the first half of the year, these are some standouts from the last six months when I wasn't blogging.

Best Reread of an Old Favorite

Jane Eyre, of course. I've reread it every year since first discovering it at age 14, but rereading it at age 18 - the age Jane is through most of the novel - was a special experience. I filled up my copy (the one above, with the beautiful Millais painting, edited by Stevie Davies) with dozens of post-it-notes. I'm sure I'll do the same next year too; each rereading opens to me new themes, new lessons to be learned, new complexities to be explored. 

Best Feminist Work

Perhaps I should list Wide Sargasso Sea, but it really wasn't my thing. Instead I'll go with a book from an Adventist press (i.e., something less worrisome to my mom than dangerous worldly novels) 

She Said No by Kay D. Rizzo

 

This book illustrates the important point that “nice guys” rape. Even “good guys” - like the ministerial student in this story - can commit rape when they think a woman owes them something. No matter what a woman has done - with that man or any other - the moment she says No and he continues, it is rape. But the hard thing about acknowledging this fact is accepting that, while rape is a crime of violence that tragically effects the victim and their loved ones for the rest of their lives, rape is not so different a sin from the ones we all commit regularly. Any man (and, yes, women rape, but on a significantly smaller scale) who allows himself to listen to the dominant rape culture - which tells him women owe him something or that a woman's “slutty” behavior entitles him to a "sample" - may commit rape. This realization leads to some disturbing questions: Can we ever fully trust any man? Should we extend the same Christian grace to former rapists as to those who have committed other sins? 

 

Christians cannot afford to accept the excuses for rape offered us by rape culture. But does the Christian message of forgiveness of the vilest sins mean we should forget and accept unconditionally? I don't think so, but where do you think the line is drawn? 

Book Which Evoked Most Audible Exclaimations

The Price of Freedom by Simon Ivascu & Wesley Pop (CoAuthor: Bev Ellen Clarke) 

The true story of two young men who escaped communist Romania in a shipping container, in order to remain true to their faith. It made me exclaim aloud frequently for several reasons. 1. It was just that dramatic and harrowing. I kept saying, "They are going to die. They just couldn't have survived, even though their pictures are on the back cover!" 2. My exclamations made my best friend attempt to steal the book from me, provoking "World War III". 3. The co-author is a distant relative of my family, but her use (or misuse) of em-dashes and italics left my editor's soul thoroughly frustrated.

Best Play

Richard II by William Shakespeare. Frankly, my obsession with this play (and indeed, the whole Henriad) is due more to the recent BBC "Hollow Crown" production, than just to reading. However, my feelings for "poor Richard" himself align with my frequent sympathy for anti-heroes, or failed characters. Although Richard starts out as an unsympathetic character, I confess that I identify with him. Like myself, he's good at words, not actions and decisions. Politically and personally he's a tragedy, poetically he's unrivaled.  (Except by Henry V, who is annoyingly good at all aspects of kingship, if one can put aside our modern peevishness at massacre and autos da fe in a "glorious" cause.) Basically, I tend to think "Richard II c'est moi"; that is not a very cheerful view of myself, but is in itself rather Richard-like, isn't it?

 Best General Fiction

 

One Day by David Nicholls

An almost perfect book, in its sphere. Because it is set in just one day (St Swithin's Day) of each year of an almost-twenty year relationship, there are “scenes” missing, questions left unanswered. But in leading us on a journey through two lives it is utterly real and fully engaging. Maybe more so because much of the time "hero" Dexter is bordering on despicable, and even generally-likeable "heroine" Emma descends below pathetic. But somehow, without obviously showing it, Nicholls makes them both redeemable. For me it's the moment Dexter is at his lowest, crying to an indifferent stripper. And as the final pang comes the revelation that when he drunkenly thought her bowed head indicated she was praying for him, in reality “while he has been talking about Emma, she has had her mobile phone in her lap and is writing a text.”

What makes Dex and Em's friendship beautiful and bigger than their romance is that for some reason she was the one person who loved him unconditionally.

Strangely, though written by Nicholls himself, the movie lacks the emotional engagement of the film. It's not just the destined-to-failure task of condensing each day into a couple minutes. It's also the removal of the complicated and ugly things about the characters. (Like Emma's affair with the married headmaster of the school where she teaches. Or the beautiful not-quite-love-letter that Dexter writes but never sends.)

P.S. The film also made me more afraid to start riding my bike in town. Ugh.

 Best Memoir

 

Ten Thousand Sorrows by Elizabeth Kim

Watching her mother hung by her relatives for having a child with an American soldier was just the beginning of this Korean war orphan's "ten thousand sorrows". Adopted by a fundamentalist evangelical couple, she was abused and stifled, finding her only comfort in the discovery that "literature could connect [her] with something larger than [her] own life..." With its connection to literature, its brutal honesty, and its ultimate recognition of the ten thousand joys that also enter every life, this is... it would be vulgar to say a "favorite" book of the year... rather it was a heart-wrenching unfolding of the paradoxical delicacy and resiliency of the human spirit.

Book I Fell Madly In Love With, Without Actually Reading This Year

Middlemarch  by George Eliot. The last time I read it through was the end of 2011. But it's a book I slowly fall more and more deeply in love with each time I revisit even a few sentences. If Jane Eyre is the emotional love of my life, then Middlemarch is the intellectual and moral one. I've started a George Eliot Tumblr, but it's on my own personal tumblr that I rant about my feelings for my "hometown". 

I'm hoping in 2013 to read more, and allow myself to be distracted by internet reading - even book blogs - less. I probably won't sign up for any challenges, since I don't seem to stick to them anyways. I do have self-set goals to read Dorothy Sayers mysteries, C.S. Lewis' works on Christianity, more George Eliot, and try to keep up with the bloggers reading through the novel list in The Well Educated Mind.

"Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path." 
-- Nick Hornby