Tough & Cool Inner Bookworm: Sizing up Bybee's Feeble Attempts at Reading Resolutions

Bybee has gone off to work after a morning of lallygagging. Exactly how many applications of shampoo does she really need for those few short thin strands on her head? But never mind that. I've got plenty of other things on my mind.

Another year down the reading drain! Poor Bybee; she has these flashes of brilliance then long stretches of murkiness. Her intentions are good, but her follow-through...do you think she's got a touch of adult ADD? Examining her faults and foibles always gives me a headache like someone whopped me upside the head with a volume of the OED, but I shall not flinch from the task set before me.

1. Read for charity. This resolution is still a little half-baked. For every book I read, I'm going to award myself 1,000 won, roughly the equivalent of 1.00 USD.

Bybee ended up tweaking this goal a little bit -- she changed it to a penny a page instead of 1.00 for each book. Good move. As a result, approximately $270-something dollars is going to an orphanage in Siem Reap. If she'd taken my advice and read some lovely Victorian chunksters, the Cambodians would be getting so much more.

2. Read 100+ books.

She read 106 books. Hmf. The Plump Pig, indeed.

3. Complete all my challenges:

100+ Books Challenge

See above comment.

Support Your Local Library Challenge (50 books this time)

She clumsily scratched her way to 17 books, then went a-wandering off God-knows-where.

2010 Canadian Book Challenge

Fail. 5 books out of 13. Bad Bybee! No poutine for you!

Read The Book, See The Movie Challenge.

So many wonderful pre-1900 novels have been made into movies. I'm just saying.

The Pulitzer Project.

She read another 4 this year. Like I care. The Pulitzers didn't come along until well into the 20th century. Yawn.

4. Read more books published before 1900. You see, Tuffi? I care.

"Tuffi" indeed! 7 books out of 106? I have to admit though that when she read The Rule of St. Benedict (published in 530) I felt a little funny in the head with hope and joy. Alas, in no time at all, she was back bumbling around in the modern...stuff.

5. Read internationally.

Only 32% of her reading was international this year. I wish I knew a number of different languages. How would "Susan, you suck" sound in Tagalog or Ukrainian?

6. Get caught up on my book reviews.

She got caught up all right, but she's straggling again with December's reviews.

.

So there you have it. How does she get herself dressed in the mornings? I wish I could quit her and find myself a true bookworm that shares my genteel sensibilities, but I'm yoked to Bybee. She is what she is and she is my fate. I'm bound to be sitting on my little pincushion of despair for yet another year, but you'll never hear me complain. Ouch.

"I'm Going To Slap You So Hard, Your Cousin Will Fall Down!": Characters That REALLY Bug Me!!!

Thanks to Chris from Book-A-Rama! I was inspired to write this post while reading her review of Tess Of The d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. She was discussing that loser Angel Clare, and it brought back vivid memories of shouting and turning the air blue when I read the novel many years ago. This doesn't happen to me a lot, but when I meet a character that irritates, annoys or enrages me, I never get over it. As a result, I have quite a gallery of fictional characters that I'd like to line up for anything ranging from a contemptuous thump on the forehead to a full-force punch in the nose.

In no particular order:

John Reed and Mrs. Reed from Jane Eyre. I first became acquainted with Jane Eyre when I was eight or nine, about the same age Jane is when the novel opens. I didn't read the whole book at that time, losing interest after she grew up and left Lowood. But for several years, I was riveted to those first few chapters. Jane Eyre stands out as the first time I had a strong visceral reaction to literature. I remember throwing the book down and crying with rage and frustration because I couldn't jump into the novel and beat the crap out of John Reed.

Miss Minchin from Sara Crewe. How dare she make Sara live in the attic and wear rags and smack her around and do menial labor and nearly starve her? More than 30 years after first reading this novel, I'm still ready to fight! Let her try that cruel shit on a 20th-century girl!

Fee Cleary, Frank Cleary, Luke O'Neill, Justine O'Neill and especially Meggie Cleary and Father Ralph from The Thorn Birds. The Cleary clan has the distinction of being annoying across several countries and a couple of continents. If Father Ralph came back through the line for seconds, I wouldn't mind.

Angel Clare from Tess Of The d'Urbervilles. I don't want to slap him. I just want to stand around on his neck for a while. I can't think about Angel Clare too long; I start grinding my teeth. It's hard to remember that I love having tooth enamel more than I hate him. Him and his stupid name.

Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Things didn't work out so well for Cathy, but she was a huge pill before she checked out.

Philip Carey from Of Human Bondage. He knows Mildred's a monster, even noting her greenish-tinged skin right from the get-go, but still he persists!

Ashley Wilkes from Gone With The Wind. Scarlett's pretty clueless, but Ashley could've set her straight WAY before he got engaged to Melanie, and at several points after that. I like it that he's a big reader with a big library (at least, before the war) but in this case, bypassing the bookstore and going out and buying himself a pair would have been infinitely more helpful all around.

Mark from Heartburn. And a mini-slap to Rachel for wasting a perfectly good key lime pie.

The mother from My Sister's Keeper. I know she has a name, but I despise her so much that I don't care enough to go back and look it up.

Sheriff Lester Burdon from The House Of Sand And Fog. Although a good whack to the head is not going to cure stupidity.

Everyone from The Fountainhead. Even the most minor characters.

Dean Moriarty from On The Road. Although it wouldn't do any good; he'd probably think it was foreplay or a strange trip.

Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove. Gus tried to reason with him about Newt, and Clara gave him a good tongue-lashing. Gotta take that next step.

Probably everyone from Atlas Shrugged. I'm not sure, because I didn't finish it. This is also a case where I'd like to give Ayn Rand a good-sized clip on the ear.

Sam Pollit from The Man Who Loved Children. Extra thumps for constantly breaking into that horrible folksy dialect. It's the eye equivalent of nails on the chalkboard.

Everyone from Letty Fox: Her Luck, especially the title character. Dubious props to Christina Stead for flawlessly turning out such annoying characters in her novels. That takes a strong stomach.

Athena/Sherine from The Witch Of Portobello. Probably a waste of time. She's scarcely more than a cardboard character. Still, she's annoying in all her New-Agey-ness.

Possibly everyone in the Piper family from Fall On Your Knees. I'm not sure about this because I haven't finished the book yet. But my palm fairly itches to go upside James' and Frances' heads. And Mercedes' as well, for loving that dreadful poem, "Don't Whine". [Edited to add: I'm finished with this novel now, and don't want to smack Frances or Mercedes anymore. James, though...what I feel about him goes far beyond a sock in the nose.]
Are there any fictional characters you'd like to sort out personally?

"The sides of the wet stones cannot console me..."

Book lust is for me, a way of life, but for the past couple of days, I've been stunned out of it, gasping for air, praying for release.

I started reading the pukiest, most abysmal novel I've ever read. I couldn't stay with it because it *stank* so much, and I had to put it down. I only wish that I could use that term in the way that it's used for a sick animal, because that's how I feel about ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand. I'd like to put it out of its misery. This reading experience has been so harrowing, it's got me thinking fondly of book-burning!

The premise of the novel seemed good. The storyline was intruiging. But as far as delivery goes, it's bad news. Ayn Rand wasn't interested in novel writing or entertaining her readers. She only wanted a pulpit upon which to pound her philosophy over and over and over to the point of the readers' pain and nausea.

I'm really baffled. Why did she choose to use the novel as her vehicle for communication? Why didn't she just write it up as straight philosophy? I think I know the answer to that one: There wasn't as much potential money in a volume of philosophy as there was in a novel, even a novel such as hers in which the characters and the storyline are handled with ham-handed heaviness. (That's an understatement, by the way.)

Also, how did this book escape an editor? At 1100 pages, it could be so much better if it were 250-300 pages. I've been soothing myself by entertaining fantasies of Maxwell Perkins coming to the rescue and holding Ayn Rand down and forcing her to rework her creaky, overwritten dialogue, her cardboard characterization and her..oh fuck it...her EVERYTHING! Then after she's finished reworking it, he sends her away for a few weeks while he's editing the bejesus out of the whole mess!

I'm really reeling from the apparent extreme contempt for her reading public. Ayn Rand sized us up coolly, past and future readers, obviously thinking, "The fools will read anything if I give lovely descriptions of the women's fashions and throw in a couple of sex scenes." (By the way, the sex scenes were so far from sensual and sexual that even the word "wooden" seems too generous a description.)

ATLAS SHRUGGED was such an awful reading experience for me that I've become perversely attracted to learning more about Ayn Rand. Now I want to find that biography about her, and read it and find out why she pepetuated such a fraud on the reading public, and did so humorlessly and without style. Furthermore, I'm wondering about the 1957 reading public, the year ATLAS SHRUGGED was published. What the hell happened to create so many fissures in the readers' collective literary taste?