Finally Free From Freedom

Why My Reading Time Is Scattered
Photo by Amy Brandon

"All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off.  Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli."

 Walter Berglund in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

After two months of back and forth reading, I finally finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.   I struggle with books like these because it seems like I spend most of my life needing an escape from reality, rather than an inundation of it. I'm not arguing the brillance of Jonathan Franzen, but I'm not sure passively and reactively shedding light on the ills of our society is necessarily the most productive way to improve it.  Almost every aspect of this book microscopically picks apart the general malaise and some of the more specific sicknesses of the modern American family.  If you're looking for an escape hatch in your reading, don't pick up this one. 

Last week, I attempted to read Swamplandia by Karen Russell.  It became one of the few books I did not finish.  I could find no redeeming qualities to compel me to waste any more time that a few days on it. 

This week, I've started Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed and The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner.  We'll see if I have any better luck with these.

Various and Sundries

Windows in Paris
photo by Amy Brandon

I've read three books and made headway in three others since I last blogged.  I don't find that I am able or willing to write an entire post about every book I read.  Number one, this would take away too much reading time, and number two, not every book deserves a post.  I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley because I liked the title and because I'd seen other bloggers reading it last year.  Almost the entire time I was reading it, I was trying to figure out when the story was actually going to begin, even at the end.  Not one of my favorites.  I followed that up with The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin, which I so thoroughly enjoyed that I ordered the sequel from Amazon as soon as I read the last (infuriating!) paragraph.  During the weekend that I was reading The Winter Queen, I watched North Carolina Bookwatch with DG Martin and caught his interview with Sheila Turnage, so I ordered her new book, Three Times Lucky.  It's marketed for kids, and it's definitely an easy read, but it's worth any adult's time who needs an afternoon's entertainment.

For the last several months, I've been picking up and putting down and plowing my way slowly through Les Miserable.  I first started the book on Kindle because of its physical size and the difficulty of holding up the novel, but I found that I had trouble getting swept up in the digital form, so I ordered the beautiful Penguin cloth-covered hardback classic and am now reading it.  Since I've switched, I've discovered that part of the problem with the Kindle version I had was the clunky, unappealing translation.  The Penguin, while causing carpal tunnel, is much more appealing all the way around.  The shocking news is that I am a 45 year old literature major who loves musicals, and I DO NOT know the plot of Les Mis at all!  I know, I know... where have I been?  It's fun to read it for the first time at this age, though.

I am also reading Natasha's Dance:  A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes, in preparation for some more Russian reading, which I am loving, and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, to which I am having a mixed reaction.  Franzen can definitely write, and Freedom grabs you on page one and doesn't want to let go, but I get overwhelmed and impatient with whiny, self-absorbed navel-gazers in my every day life, so I have to take this one, which seems full of these people,  in small doses.  It feels a lot like reading the thoughts of too many people I know and don't like.  Franzen does have that uncanny ability of good novelists to suck you into his time and culture, which unfortunately is also my time and culture.   As I said, his writing is really the star of this one.

So, with all that covered, back to Les Mis and the Battle of Waterloo.  Reading time, finally. Yay!