Category Archives: Reading

The Corrections — a dysfunctional family as seen through a Diane Arbus-type lens

Reading,

The Corrections The Corrections has been sitting on our shelf for years. Two people in my family read it and told me I would not like it so I expected it to sit there, unread by me, for many more years.

Then Erika chose to have us read The Corrections for our December/January book. I was not entirely pleased because I assumed, based on what family members told me, I’d not like it. It seemed like a long dull book about a family that I didn’t want to know anything about, despite the fact that the author may be a distant relative of Dean and, therefore, the kids.

I finished The Corrections on Saturday morning and rated it 3 stars on Goodreads from my Kindle (yes, I bought the book on Kindle — and Audible — because I could not find the book and we were in the middle of a basement remodel and I didn’t want to sift through the dozens of boxes of books). Soon after that I changed the rating to 4 and wrote a short review on Goodreads and responded to an online friend about her 1 star rating.

Last night I thought more about the book and discovered that I might like it enough to rate it 5 stars. The book was compelling enough to make me want to read it whenever I picked it up. The characters were very well fleshed out, although they all had many flaws. The story, though very depressing and disturbing, was well thought out and the book, was very well written.

To me, the most disturbing thing about the book is the fact that the family could, possibly, be any family. My family, my husband’s family, your family. Franzen, for the most part, focused on the negative traits of each character and accentuated their really bad decisions. While I didn’t want to identify with any of the characters, I did find myself giving most of my sympathy to Enid and Gary.

The Corrections made me think of the photographer Diane Arbus’ work. I remember looking looking at the photographs in her An Aperture Monograph collection and thinking that she could have photographed many of us in the same settings, with the same lens with the same film settings and we would have looked not much different from the people in the collection. That’s how I felt about how Franzen portrayed his characters and I wondered how Anne Tyler might have approached the Lambert clan — definitely more upbeat and more quirky than disturbing.

I’ve seen reviews calling the novel “Word vomit” and others complaining that they didn’t like the book because they could not sympathize with any of the characters. I disagree with both criticisms. I did sympathize with the characters, except perhaps with Caroline, Gary’s wife — but she was the least fleshed-out character in the book.

I am not a therapist or a psychologist, so I cannot speak to the depression that many of the characters seemed to have been plagued with. I got angry at the fact that everyone in the book made really awful decisions though — which may have been a result of the depression?

My biggest criticism is the ending. The ending was too happy for such a depressing book. Everyone seemed to have finally learned from their mistakes all at the same time which doesn’t seem real.

I did like the many references to Narnia — except naming the drug Aslan. I’ll have to think more on the relationship between the book and the Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe there is no relationship except that the author liked the series as a kid.

A Man Called Ove and one similarly-aged woman’s opinion

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Ove is fifty-nine. So, currently, is Dona.

That’s probably the only similarity between the two. Ove would hate book groups, Ove doesn’t read much, except maybe manuals. Dona loves books and enjoys her book group. Dona also loves electronics. Ove doesn’t trust them. Ove likes cars. And order. And following rules.

A Man Called Ove coverDona really wanted to read A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman so she chose it for book group when it was her time to host. She thought it would be similar to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It wasn’t really. It was readable — very readable. Dona enjoyed reading A Man Called Ove. She liked most of the characters and the situations and the writing style was easy to read. But The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was so much fuller than A Man Called Ove.

But here is what Dona didn’t like about A Man Called Ove. The author (currently thirty-four if you believe Google) seems to have little idea what fifty-nine year old people are like or capable of doing. He’s made Ove seem much older than fifty-nine — maybe somewhere in his seventies. His similarly-aged neighbor Rune is portrayed as being skinny and bent over when he’d been fit enough to scare drug dealers a decade or so before. Granted Rune has dementia, but it doesn’t seem quite right that he’s gone from being strong and large in his forties to being skinny and bent over in his late fifties. Ove doesn’t always act like he is in his seventies — he uses his strength on more than one occasion, but generally, as a fifty-nine year old Dona thinks that the author has written off the older generation as basically useless. The occasions where Ove uses his strength are accompanied with an explanation why he is strong. The only people in the book that are past their forties are either dead, sick, unable to cope or depressed and all but one is retired. Sure, Backman makes some under-forty-year-old folks incompetent (as seen through Ove’s eyes), but he doesn’t make the entire under-forty crowd one-dimensional.

Dona is glad she read the A Man Called Ove (and even saw the film, thanks to connections) but she is annoyed at Mr. Backman for portraying her generation as being far less able than his generation.

 

 

More Reading (Non-RAS)

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So, in addition to my RAS challenge I am also reading things on my Kindle and Nook devices. Some for book group, and some for just because. All of these books are worthwhile reading, so go ahead and enjoy one or all of them.

A few months ago Barnes and Noble emailed me to tell me I had three hours to spend $7.59. The only thing I could do was fire up my Nook and search for a book I wanted to read on it. (I don’t love my new Nook Glowlight — it feels cheap compared to my Kindle Paperwhite). I eventually chose The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. I read it in two nights, staying up late to do so. My book group is now reading it — I am pretty sure they will be critical, but I don’t care. It was a fun read.

Shortly after the the Charleston, NC AME Church shooting a Facebook friend mentioned that she’d heard of the Charleston church and Denmark Vesey in a book by Sue Monk Kidd called The Invention of Wings. I’d read Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees a few years ago, so I knew she was a great writer, so I downloaded The Invention of Wings in Illinois, before we returned to Maryland and began reading it on the drive home. I finished it a couple of nights ago and when I read the author’s note was surprised to discover it was fact based. I knew Denmark Vesey was a real person and the church was real, but I didn’t realize that everything, including the two main characters, Sarah and her sister Nina, were really abolitionists and crusaders for women’s rights. I’m really glad I read this book. It was well written and I learned a lot.

For book group last month we read Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. While reading it I declared to anyone who would listen that it was the most well-written book I’d read in a long while. I still think so — and I am not the only person who does. I was at a dinner party and another guest (a professional writer herself) mentioned the book and said it was so well-written she wanted to go through the book and list all the verbs. All the Light We Cannot See is about a blind French girl and a German boy whose lives are connected and whose paths intersect near the end of World War II.