Reading Wednesday
Jul. 9th, 2014 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Immigrant by Manju Kapur. A novel about an arranged marriage (eh, that's not really the right term, because I'd just call it "an introduction was arranged by an intermediary, the marriage didn't take place until over a year later after dating" but all of the characters insist on calling it arranged, so whatever) between an Indian woman and an Indian man who had previously immigrated to Canada. Ugh, this book was terrible. The marriage (shockingly, because novels about marriages so often focus on happy relationships) doesn't work out, with the difficulties primarily centering around their sex life and the husband's problems with premature ejaculation. There's so much endless angst over this, but because this is a literary novel and therefore never described the sex in any detail, I had trouble figuring out what, specifically, the problem was. Even now, having finished it, I'm still not sure if they were upset because they weren't having sex at all, or upset because they were having non-penetrative sex. (Though I lean toward the no-sex interpretation, based on a scene fairly late in the book when the wife alludes to reading about oral sex in a textbook. In which case, Jesus Christ, characters, get it together and figure out your other options. Though it was set in the 70s, which perhaps makes a difference to the amount of sex education they might have had? I don't know, if I have to spend huge amounts of time trying to discern if your characters even know what cunnilingus is, when it's central to the plot, you have failed as a writer. Also apparently the husband doesn't believe in masturbation, so damn dude, no wonder you have problems).
Anyway, something like 80% of the book is the two main characters separately bemoaning their sex lives, and then abruptly at the end they both have affairs, there's a rape, and someone's mom dies, all coming out of nowhere with almost nothing to do with the previous chapters. Despite the book's conviction that it was about The Immigrant Experience, it never really managed to tie the sex theme into that.
And randomly, there were a ton of typos in my edition. I don't know what's up with that - I didn't read it as an ebook, so it wasn't a scanning problem.
What are you currently reading?
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Mate. Still. This is going very slowly because, well, it's pretty boring. I feel terrible saying that since a great deal of the book is accounts of people's lives (generally involving child abuse, violence, drag addiction, and other awful things), but it's how I feel. Maybe it would read better if there were fewer such accounts, actually - they're all so brief that it's hard to get much of a sense of the people as individuals.
Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. A coming-of-age novel about a gay boy in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and early 80s.
The Immigrant by Manju Kapur. A novel about an arranged marriage (eh, that's not really the right term, because I'd just call it "an introduction was arranged by an intermediary, the marriage didn't take place until over a year later after dating" but all of the characters insist on calling it arranged, so whatever) between an Indian woman and an Indian man who had previously immigrated to Canada. Ugh, this book was terrible. The marriage (shockingly, because novels about marriages so often focus on happy relationships) doesn't work out, with the difficulties primarily centering around their sex life and the husband's problems with premature ejaculation. There's so much endless angst over this, but because this is a literary novel and therefore never described the sex in any detail, I had trouble figuring out what, specifically, the problem was. Even now, having finished it, I'm still not sure if they were upset because they weren't having sex at all, or upset because they were having non-penetrative sex. (Though I lean toward the no-sex interpretation, based on a scene fairly late in the book when the wife alludes to reading about oral sex in a textbook. In which case, Jesus Christ, characters, get it together and figure out your other options. Though it was set in the 70s, which perhaps makes a difference to the amount of sex education they might have had? I don't know, if I have to spend huge amounts of time trying to discern if your characters even know what cunnilingus is, when it's central to the plot, you have failed as a writer. Also apparently the husband doesn't believe in masturbation, so damn dude, no wonder you have problems).
Anyway, something like 80% of the book is the two main characters separately bemoaning their sex lives, and then abruptly at the end they both have affairs, there's a rape, and someone's mom dies, all coming out of nowhere with almost nothing to do with the previous chapters. Despite the book's conviction that it was about The Immigrant Experience, it never really managed to tie the sex theme into that.
And randomly, there were a ton of typos in my edition. I don't know what's up with that - I didn't read it as an ebook, so it wasn't a scanning problem.
What are you currently reading?
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Mate. Still. This is going very slowly because, well, it's pretty boring. I feel terrible saying that since a great deal of the book is accounts of people's lives (generally involving child abuse, violence, drag addiction, and other awful things), but it's how I feel. Maybe it would read better if there were fewer such accounts, actually - they're all so brief that it's hard to get much of a sense of the people as individuals.
Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. A coming-of-age novel about a gay boy in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and early 80s.
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Date: 2014-07-11 12:39 am (UTC)