Bengfort.com

Note: this post is very, very late.  But, as ever, a good excuse: Jaci got home earlier than expected!  While in the long run this is not positive news (she’s leaving again soon, for longer), it was wonderful to have her home for Ben’s graduation and Christmases in North Dakota and Maryland.

Jaci: For our most recent books, the contrast could not have been more extreme. First, due to my Kindle fat-fingering, we had to skip forward to Blue Angel by Francine Prose (which, oddly enough, got us back on schedule), a two-week read that took me more like six days due to the pairing of addictive writing and a new assignment as the “Ship’s Lady” (i.e. the officer so close to transfer that she has no job to speak of).  Then, for a complete change of pace, we moved on to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, a dense philosophical defense of the ethical grounding of existentialism.  I think.  It turns out that being away from this kind of reading for over two years made it harder than ever it was for me completely to follow the intricate explanations by which she differentiates a humanistic existentialism from a dark, hopeless nihilism.

Ben: I’m more to blame for the delay of this post rather than delay of reading books. I finished all of these books (well, most of Ethics) by the deadline, including Game of Thrones, but was hard pressed to find the time to write this post. And to be honest, these two books inspired such a wide array of emotions and criticism that I may have been subconsciously avoiding the post in my “angst of the now”.

Jaci: I had read one book by Francine Prose earlier–a nonfiction piece about how to read like a writer.  By the end I knew I wanted to read one of her many fictional works, and I always like a good campus novel, so I chose Blue Angel for the bookclub.

Ben: So I heavily resisted adding Blue Angel to the reading list. I imagined that this was a book Jaci was putting on the list to punish me- some sort of pseudo-feminist, anti-man, coming of age story about girl students and their evil male professors. It turned out I was right, but what was unexpected was how much I enjoyed the book- and I flew through it. It’s a credit to Prose that her writing is so fluid and engaging, that even while you’re being beaten by a seriously uncomfortable plot, you just keep hoping that things will end well. (Spoiler: they did not.) And yes, for those of you critiquing my critique, it was a coming of age story — just because the male professor, who was the protagonist (pseudo-feminist), was upper middle aged doesn’t mean it wasn’t coming of age for him.

Jaci: Reading Blue Angel was a strange experience: I wasn’t certain I wanted to know how it would end (the ending is clear from the beginning, and I think she planned it that way).  But despite not really liking or respecting the main character, a has-been novelist working as a writer-in-residence at a small liberal arts college, I found myself in some way on his side.

Ben: I dreaded every paragraph that I devoured- it was like watching a train wreck, fascinating in that you can’t look away, but you desperately hope that superman will show up and pick one of the trains up! I was actually kind of empty at the end, just from shear hope exhaustion. Most of this was because Francine Prose (a woman) managed to tap into a deep-seated male fear and insecurity in such a spectacular way (sorry to reveal secrets) that it became less about the surrounding characters in the book, and really just the reader (of any gender) identifying completely with the protagonist.

Jaci: In short: the tone of the book was fresh despite the well-used subject matter; the writing is addictive; the reader’s emotional response is marvelous.  Read it!

Ben: And then it was time for Mademoiselle de Beauvoir.

Jaci: Ben claims I snuck this book onto the list without his knowledge during the bargaining phase; I claim I added it after he added Heaven so that we would have a nice pair of nonfiction books on the list, and if he didn’t know I had added it, well, then, he needs to pay attention when I’m babbling along!  In the end, though, I think he ended up enjoying it more than I did.

Ben: Luckily I do have some philosophical education, as well as a background in existentialism (like most teenagers), so I was ok with the ideas in the book. It’s just unfortunate that the prose was so dense. As I was reading (on a flight from Seattle to North Dakota), it kept putting me to sleep! I wondered out loud (on the plane) if this was due to the heavy material, or if perhaps there was a better way to communicate these particular ideas (they are mind-bendy), but authors choose to present it a certain way (Descartian drama paragraphs) just to give weight to their ideas.

Jaci: While it was a challenge to hold my greatly-shortened attention span in check, I found that I did learn things from this book.  Reading actual philosophy (as opposed to second-hand descriptions of the positions of a philosophical camp) is always illuminating, and there were some amazing things written.  Most of my notes from this book are simply direct quotes.  And I was glad to find that despite difficulties I could still draw something from a challenging (and long) argument.

Ben: And she definitely reinforced my postion as a Kierkegaardian existentialist. I had never considered her definition of ambiguity before — (although exactly what was ambiguous led to a rather ambiguous debate between Jaci and I!) — and I was interested to contemplate my current philosophical outlook from this new perspective. I highly recommend this book along with some sort of stimulant!

Jaci: So there it is: morals and ethics, all in the space of three weeks’ reading.  Skipping forward in our own story, I was able to restore Game of Thrones to my Kindle in Rome.  And now, for once, we’re waiting on me to finish a book.  It turns out that a fantasy of this type goes easier for me when I’m someplace I’d really rather not be–reading it during my extended vacation has been difficult.  Once I finish it, we’ll be temporarily closing shop and updating the inventory in preparation for my next long time away.  Until then…

Jaci: Book number two, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is complete!  And early, RIGHT BEN??

Ben: Stieg is an exciting writer–I couldn’t put it down because I kept wanting to see what happened next, so I kind of tore through it in way less than the allotted 3 weeks. Really, three weeks was a lot for this book, but I did pace myself somewhat, because I managed to stretch it to two weeks.

Jaci: I learned from my Kindle complaints during the last book–remembering that it was hard to flip back, the first thing I did was draw out the family tree from the early pages.  The notebook really came in handy.  And I found that I appreciate the anonymity the Kindle provides–when reading a book both wildly popular and gruesomely violent, I was happier not to converse about it with random strangers at the airport during my many hours waiting to board a red-eye to Maryland.

Ben: Jaci had a surprise visit home! But she discovered that my notebook was unused. My excuse is that I’m a reader, not an English major! Speaking of gruesomely violent (like when Jaci discovered the unused notebook…), towards the end of the book, I became less thrilled with the violence. Jaci mentioned that the original title was “Men who Hate Women”, and this is probably an apt description of the book, and while I’m desensitized to a lot of different kinds of violence thanks to TV, Stieg manages to properly shock you, and gives you an apprehension and disgust that takes talent to describe. The book attempts to take the edge off with humor and romance, but some sections were still tough on me.

Jaci: I didn’t make nearly as many notes for this book as I did for the last.  But I did use it as a meditation on translation.  The book isn’t exactly what most people would call “literary,” but I am a professed reading snob (and read like one–can’t help it), and it’s hard to know who to blame for, say, more than one cruise missile metaphor in a single chapter.  (Because someone must be blamed, sayeth the word nerd!)  And I also tended to wonder about cultural references.  The translator seems to have done a good job keeping the book as firmly grounded in Sweden as possible, and yet, at times I ask–when a reference to the Addams Family appears, is it because the Addams Family is culturally significant in Sweden or because the translator translated a cultural reference?  Considering my entire knowledge of Sweden is based on this book (which made Swedish prison sound like a writers’ colony retreat), a photograph of a farmstead at the local Noodles & Company (looks a lot like North Dakota), and some gifts Ben brought me after his Adobe Air Tour trip (tasty jam!  tiny painted horses!) I can honestly say I may be not just a bad but the worst person to judge.

Ben: I have actually been to Sweden! So I was amused at many references; in fact, I would argue that the translation was better than normal, simply because of the things that remained untranslated. For instance, holiday names were all untranslated, and the translator felt no burden with assisting English speakers with place names and Swedish proper names. It almost assumed a familiarity with Sweden that was very enjoyable, and also gave non-Swedish readers an education about Sweden without being overly pretentious about it. Jaci’s right, though, it is no literary masterpiece, but it is a good, quick, entertaining read. Jaci prefers to come out of a book being a better person for having read the book–which I suppose is a good thing. However, I like to be entertained by books more than anything else.

Jaci: I would classify this book as amusing, and I can understand why it was popular.  The real question: will we be reading the entire Millennium series?

Ben: Well, I’m interested and not interested in the rest of the Millennium series; interested because I want to find out more about the main character who is a hacker. She didn’t seem to be developed as well as she could have been in the first book, even though she was the girl with the dragon tattoo. Uninterested, because I don’t really want to put myself through the discomfort of reading descriptions of sexual violence.

Jaci: Next up: Ben’s most dreaded book on the list, Dead Souls by Gogol.  Lucky for him it is short (and we’ll actually be together when we’re reading it due to some scheduling vagaries that worked out in our favor).  It will be interesting to read another translated work, especially since the translation I chose wasn’t really a choice at all–only the Hogarth translation was available for Kindle at the time I put the list together.  Russian absurdist literature?  Given Ben’s affinity for French existential literature, I think he may enjoy it more than he expects.