Ralph Tyler was my mother’s father’s uncle. He owned this book. He had nice handwriting.
To be honest this is rather boring. I just returned from a long trip down the rabbit hole of ancestry — learning about Ralph’s family. I’ll write about that later.
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.
Dona 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.
I just got word that Amazon has shipped my copy of The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins. I’ve not been so excited about a book launch since Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (which sort of proves my own geekiness just by admitting that).
Alexandra Robbins, as you may recall, wrote a book about overachieving high school students and based much of her information on our neighborhood high school, since she went to school there herself. I read it, but was not happy with the message. Clare was a junior at the time and miserable. In fact she has few good memories of high school — mostly because that high school is such a pressure-cooker of a school.
Ms Robbins kindly replied to a Facebook comment I made on her wall (that I’d thrown her earlier book across the room more than once) that her new book is more hopeful. I’m glad. And I’m glad she wrote it.
When Clare was in middle school and lamenting her non-popularity and the loss of her best friend to the popular crowd I told her that, although she doesn’t know it now and may not believe it, she will be the successful one later on. She will be happier than the so-called popular kids when she’s grown. I also told her that she will be the more interesting person too — that the popular kids, for the most part, are two-dimensional and shallow and ultimately boring. That she was none of those things. Of course it didn’t help her then to hear me say that, but it helped me that I believed it — having been in a similar situation high school.
Clare’s a sophomore in college now and so far my prediction is right — at least for her. I don’t follow the popular kids. She’s confident, smart, happy and multi-dimensional. She’s a deep thinker and will do great things in life.
I’m going to get two of these books and one will go to Clare with an inscription from the author for her. (I sort of want it to say, “Your mom was right again!” which is a take off of a line from a Dan Bern song).
Stay tuned — I’ll write more about the book when I’ve actually read it. I’m going to a book reading/signing by Ms Robbins on Saturday. I couldn’t be more excited.
Clutch Cargo Lips 