New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 12

Day 12: A Book You Used to Love But Don't Anymore

Gianna:

I think in order to answer this question in any meaningful way, I would have to re-read some books that I suspect that I may not love as much as I once thought I did. I am much too lazy to do that. It also kind of sounds like a downer of an idea, so why bother?

Having said that, I am sure there are a few books that I read when I was younger that I may not have the same passion for as an adult. I thought I could pick a few titles from different times of my life and we could talk this through together.

To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, or Fahrenheit 451 probably wouldn’t resonate with me like they did twenty years ago, but they probably shouldn’t since they are young adult novels. I went through phases where I read a zillion Bronte novels and plowed through a handful of Hemingway books, and then read a ton of John Irving and Ann Tyler.  I can’t imagine not still loving The Cider House Rules, or The Accidental Tourist. Hemingway is important to read if you’re going to bitch about him, and I will always love the time I spent reading Bronte and Austen. 

The novels that I suspect I would feel very differently about if I read them again would probably include Memoirs of a Geisha and The Da Vinci Code. I don’t know why I loved Memoirs of a Geisha so much, but I really got caught up in it. I was working at a bookstore and just sold the hell out of it.  I can’t imagine loving it the way I did when the book was originally published. Now, The Da Vinci Code, I went totally ape shit about because it was original but mostly because it pissed off the Catholic powers that be. That was a fun time.

I was looking through my books while I was thinking about this question and came across a book that I absolutely adored, which was published about twenty years ago, called Life After God by Douglas Coupland. I thought, “Well here is a book I totally went overboard with, and no way no how will I still find it relevant.” I had dog-eared about fifty pages and after re-reading those pages I’ve decided that I still love this book. Its just the right amount of depressing.

“I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.”  -- from Life After God

Liz:

So, to be clear, Gianna did not actually answer the question for the day.  Also, she liked Memoirs of a Geisha, which I hated.  She's a constant disappointment.

I once again perused the ol' Goodreads archives and discovered that I gave The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen five stars.  Let's go back a decade and remember the excitement surrounding this publication.  Everyone was crazy about this book. It was a sensation--a contemporary family story of dysfunction that was both literary and juicy. Before Oprah, before the National Book Award, Jonathan Franzen was just a geeky chic writer fulfilling his literary promise.  I drank the Kool-Aid.

That was then.

Now...well, I read Freedom, Franzen's most recent novel, and it's basically the same book as The Corrections. And Franzen has proven several times that he can't accept praise graciously, can't debate without name calling, and can't enter a room without bumping his oversized ego on the door frame. His personality has soured me on The Corrections a bit.  As time has passed, I've discovered what great books were nominated but didn't win the National Book Award in 2001.  Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, Among the Missing by our pal Dan Chaon, The Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse by this year's winner Louise Erdrich, and Highwire Moon by underappreciated talent Susan Straight. In hindsight, I would have picked any of the others.  I don't hate The Corrections, but it will never be one of my favorite books anymore.

New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 11

totally terrible. 

Day 11: A Book You Hated

Gianna, who loves to hate:

I wish I could be a truly thoughtful or philosophical person and say that I never really hated a book. However, and to the disbelief of no one, I am not that person and have hated many books.

The Bridges of Madison County was really terrible, and not in a guilty pleasure sort of 50 Shades sort of way, just straight up crappy. 

 A couple of books I’ve left unfinished on airplanes: Forrest Gump (horrible) and Primary Colors (worse than Forrest Gump but not quite as bad as Bridges).

half terrible

mostly terrible 

There are dozens of books that I’ve read that I didn’t like, but only a few that I really thought were terrible, and full disclosure there is one on my hated list that I don’t want to mention out of politeness. Seriously, I can be polite. [I'm laughing so hard at that sentence.] Oh, shut up. 







Liz, who hates to love:

Okay, I just sorted through my Goodreads list of books I rated one star.  I think it's pretty safe to say that I hated all of these.

• A Wrinkle in Time--I tried to read this book about a dozen times when I was a kid. It's awful.
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• The Eyre Affair--This is how you take great books like Jane Eyre and destroy them for the sake of semi-clever plot twists. 
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood--I'm embarrassed for all women everywhere for this trite crap.
• Scarlett--This was the first sequel to Gone With the Wind.  It's straight up terrible romance.
• Riders of the Purple Sage--Yeehaw! Religious persecution! Racism! Cowboys!
• A Confederacy of Dunces--Again, blah.  It's supposed to be funny, but it's not.  Actually, "funny" books usually flop for me.
• The Final Solution--I loved the cover...and little else.

Great cover. Better admired from afar.

Of course, as a career bookseller type, I've managed to sell lots of copies of some of these books.  Not Scarlett, though.  Is it even still in print?  It's basically unreadable.

New Year, New 30 Day Book Challenge, Day 10

Day 10: Favorite Classic Book

Gianna:

Gianna has NOT read this!

Another impossible question, so I will modify it. Instead of choosing a favorite classic, and as everyone knows, mine is Lonesome Dove, I have decided to choose a classic or two that I really love but that I have neglected to write about on this silly little blog. Okay, that’s unfair…this crappy little blog. 

The Ellen and Portia of their day

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (I call her Gerts or Gertie) is the type of book I adore because it puts you on the path to a zillion other things. You can’t read this book, which features a cat fight between Matisse and Picasso, without wanting to know more those clowns, or of course art in general. I hadn’t read Hemingway until I read Alice B., and everyone should read at least one Hemingway novel (although his short stories are remarkable).  [One can't properly hate Hemingway until one reads him.] On the down side, after reading Alice you may think, “Why bother going to Paris now? All the good shit already happened."  And that may be true. 

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1936).  I don’t know if young people read this or not anymore; I hope so. [I'm younger than Gianna and I've read it. That counts, right? I don't know why old people are so resistant to reading Lonesome Dove.] As Roosevelt’s New Deal programs began making their way to the poorest Americans during the height of the depression, Agee and Evans traveled the South on a magazine assignment. They photographed and interviewed white sharecroppers, focusing mainly on three desperately poor families.

As I look at these photographs now, I think of the current conversation of government assistance, and I am reminded of how important not only this book is, but how important journalism can be. I know this book has a bit of controversy surrounding it--the truth being that some of these photographs may have been posed--but for me it hasn’t changed my affection for it at all. 

Liz:

I love Hemingway so much. Like, there's the man and he goes fishing and he fights a marlin and talks endlessly about DiMaggio--and I just love the Yankees too--and then the sharks eat the marlin before the man can bring it to shore, and what the hell happened to the afternoon of my life that I lost reading this book?*

I love Mark Twain so much.  Like, there's a boy with ADHD who plays with the life of a slave while running away from home, and it's supposed to be the greatest book in American literature and really funny, but mostly it's just silly and rather abusive and kinda racist.*

I love Norman Mailer so much.  It's so awesome the way that he makes anal sex sound like so much fun for the woman being raped.  But who wouldn't want to be buggered by a guy who's already murdered his wife?*

Yeah, I'm going with Virginia Woolf for this one.  

*The Old Man and the Sea, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, An American Dream