On Being a Girl......

As a female, I really like having groups of close female friends.  Women are wonderful (which I can safely say now as I finally married in my mid-30s and my marry-extremely-early family can stop wondering if I am a lesbian--not that there's anything wrong with that........), and I actually feel sorry for American men that they just don't form the close friendship bonds that women do.  Only this week I met a girlfriend for coffee and it hasn't exactly been a great year for either of us, but just knowing that and still being able to pause for a bit to relax together makes it easier.  Another girlfriend and I were recently talking about the "yeah, whatever" approach to the holidays so many of us have had to take this year.  We each normally host Christmas parties, but this year she had surgery and I'm having back problems, so we each scrapped them.  The funny thing is we both have the reputation of "dropping" people from parties, so we were joking about ways to let people know that they had not been dropped and that there just wasn't a party without hurting the feelings of those who HAD been dropped but weren't aware of the fact.  Life has so many ups and downs, but when you have people to ride them with, it's much easier to just hang on.

My closest girlfriends locally are sort of in circles.  The oldest circle is my book club--because as a female I'm almost obligated to be IN a book club--and it's a lovely group of women and I enjoy it every time we're together.  The problem is: 

I do not have enough estrogen for chick-lit books.

In fact, I hate them.  So much so in fact that I will no longer borrow library books from unknown female authors unless I know that they've been dead at LEAST since before Bridget Jones was published.  Men can still be lousy authors, but mercifully they don't generally write about 30-somethings recently divorced, trying to put their lives back together, probably with a close group of friends--one of whom is almost certainly to be struck down by cancer.   Not that chick-lit is bad--it's just past my "girl" line.

With every circle of girlfriends I have, I always know there's a line where we don't connect--which we've sort of dubbed the Touchy-Feely line.  It's probably this line that one needs to cross in order to want children, or to have played with baby dolls as a child.  It's definitely the line one needs to cross for yoga.  I have tried it, but when everyone else is getting "in touch" with their center or whatever it's supposed to be, I am planning knitting projects or my mind decides to smack me with something hideous like a continual loop of "Copacabana" or the Gilligan's Island theme song.  If that is truly my "center," we're better off staying out of touch.  

So I am trying to figure out a way to remain in the book club without having to read any more chick-lit books AND without hurting anyone's feeling because I can't stand their book choices.  The back problems have sort of helped as I ended up being too sore to even attend last month and was saved from discussing a book I couldn't even stand to listen to, but it's not a long-term solution I like to contemplate.  I suppose it's too late to claim latent illiteracy problems...................

Books

As you might have noticed if you watch the book tally on the side or are connected to me on Goodreads, I have been plowing through books pretty quickly lately.  This is largely due to the fact that I have fallen behind on my 100-books-a-year goal and have been reading and listening to some very short books.  With a few exceptions, I would lump them all into the "short, shallow, summer-read" category.  Lots of mysteries, some humor, and currently very little nonfiction.

I recently broke down and listened to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which everyone was reading about 2 years ago.  Generally, I haven't enjoyed books that "everyone" is reading, so I only committed to listening to it as an audio book.  I'm rather glad I did choose the audio version, as I would never have figured out how to pronounce all the Swedish names, AND--this is my favorite part--the reader used different voices for each character and one of them sounded exactly like the Dracula characterizations I've seen.  Even The Count from Sesame Street talks in the same accent.  I kept expecting the character to count and laugh as thunder clapped, or else to hear him finally say "I vant to drink your blood......"  Seriously, I think more Hollywood monsters should read stories.  It just gives an entirely new twist to the book.

I currently have two audio books in progress--something by Jeffrey Deaver and one by Ian Rankin.  They're both parts of serials about ongoing characters, and since I'm usually listening to books while doing something like gardening or canning or cleaning, having at least slightly formulaic books means I don't have to pay attention 100% of the time, so if I have just set the potholder on fire while taking the granola out of the oven--just an example--I don't have to rewind.  Just perhaps soak the potholder.

This is all good, and I enjoy being told stories while I am working, but maybe it's because I'm listening to two rather similar books that this idea has struck me, but I find myself wondering why it is that so many main characters of books--and this may be more predominate in mysteries than other genres--are dysfunctional, anti-social people with few or no friends.  Has anyone else noticed this?  The "brilliant but misunderstood" genius, or the "prickly woman with no friends but a big heart" motif is starting to get on my nerves.  What's so wonderful about not being able to get along with others?  I know people like this in real life--we call them "jerks."  So why are they attractive in books?  Is it because it's hard for some of us to be social, or is it because authors tend to be introverts without social skills, or is it because those of us who have jerks somehow permanently lodged in our lives want to believe that underneath it there's something better?  Or something else entirely?

Personally, I don't have a lot of sympathy with the chronically friendless.  I'm 40, and I firmly believe that if you have reached this stage in life and don't have a lot of friends, it's because you either just moved to a new location, you haven't made the effort, or there is something fundamentally wrong with how you treat people.  I've heard people state how they have "trouble trusting" or people are "too touchy," but so far I've only heard that from people who treat others in such a way that they drive them away or are utterly offensive even to strangers.  Have you ever noticed that if you're out somewhere in public and you smile at someone--the cashier, the waiter, the person behind you in line--they almost always smile back?  I think most people are pretty nice when given a chance, and there's an opportunity for making new friends almost anywhere.  It just takes some effort.  I understand that there are cases like Asperger's Syndrome and other personality disorders that create issues with social relationships, but that's a different thing altogether.  My point is about people who seem to have no such issues and STILL behave badly.  And I prefer to be around people who get being friends--I'm fortunate enough to have a good friend who dates all the way back to kindergarten, so perhaps I'm a bit spoiled in my expectations--but if I don't want to be around people who can't have friends, why are they the main characters of so many books?  Is there something we actually are drawn to in jerks?  Or do we really only want to read about people who have less in life than we do?  Or should I just go back to reading my nice little history books because summer fiction is getting to me??????

3 More Books In 33 Days

So, there I was cruising along on my goal to read 100 books by the end of the year, and now with only 3 books left to go and over a month in which to finish them, I'm really stalling.  I'm not sure if I've lost my drive or have just taken some detours into some tough books.

As always, I'm reading more than one book at a time.  Andy laughs at this, but some days I feel like humor, some it's history, and at other times I want a murder mystery with lots of bodies but not too much blood, guts, or gore.  So I need lot of options around at all times.  And this system usually works for me, but right now I'm floundering just a bit.  I can't decide if it's me or the books.  After all, is it possible to be reading 3 different books and not that "into" any of them?

Problem book number 1:  Two For The Road by Jan & Michael Stern.  While the Sterns are funny, charming, and a sheer delight, their tale of when they were reviewing diners across America in order to write their first book, Roadfood, just really revolts me.  It isn't the food that they're eating (although I can't say I share their love affair with deep frying and/or fat), it's the amount they eat that keeps forcing me to put down the book because I am literally nauseated.  Eating 12 meals a day, and not in a "sampling" sort of way--they clean their plates.  It turns out that hearing about someone eating so much food is almost as repulsive as seeing someone eat that much.  I'm not sure if the charm of their wit and writing is enough to get me through this thing.

Problem book number 2:  No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting.  History AND knitting--what else could I ask for?  Well, maybe less tedious detail.  Right now I'm bogged down in how early American education was knitting & other "domestic arts" for girls and anything resembling intellectual subjects was left mostly for boys--which sums up several pages of the book without losing much.  Still, this has gotten very high reviews on Amazon, so I am determined to slog through this thing....and really hoping that it becomes more interesting somewhere along the lines.

Problem book number 3:  52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and The Perfect Crust.  Another title might be "How to take something basic that people have been doing for thousands of years and make it really fussy and difficult."  The premise is that the author sets out to recreate the "perfect" peasant bread that he tasted once in a restaurant.  Not that I wouldn't applaud such a quest, but it seems to fit into a recent trend that really gets on my nerves:  take something that people have done for a long time and tell them that it's really very difficult and that it needs lots and lots of specialty products/techniques that--Oh my!  How very shocking!--will be yours  if you ONLY buy the author's book/product/whatever.  I have seen this over & over with knitting, riding horses, sewing, cooking, gardening, and obviously baking.  It gets on my nerves.  Seriously, I'm supposed to believe that someone who is doing something as a HOBBY knows more about something that others in the past did day in & day out for a living?????  This book is--in case you hadn't guessed--the one that is most likely to be jettisoned.  Today I did read about an interesting trip to a yeast factory, and the author made me laugh several times in the introduction, but I sincerely hope no one ever reads this book without having first baked bread and realized that it isn't even CLOSE to as difficult as this author makes it out to be.

I am SO CLOSE!  I need 3 more books, and I am reading 3 books now.  This could be so easy!!!!