Monday, January 2, 2012

What I Read on My Winter Vacation: Unfinished Business

If you read the rules, you saw that I wasn't going to finish anything I didn't want to.

Books I did not finish included:

  • Atwood, Margaret. The Tent. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006. Print. Got to p. 15. I love Margaret Atwood, but couldn't get into this collection of essays that's been on my shelf for a few years now. I'll try again another time.
  • Renault, Mary. The King Must Die. New York: Bantam, 1984. Print. Got to p. 9. It just felt like it was trying too hard, or something. I don't even know where this book came from; someone probably gave it to me in high school. It's the kind of thing other people would have thought I would have liked in high school; that is how pretentious I was.
  • Evans, Howard Ensign. Wasp Farm. Garden City, NY: Published for the American Museum of Natural History [by] the Natural History, 1963. Print. Got to p. 13. I found this one on my parents' bookshelf, and can therefore be forgiven for thinking it was about WASPs, rather than wasps. But it is in fact about insects, and the two or three new things I learned from the first 13 pages were not enough to sustain my interest.
  • Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values. New York: HarperTorch, 2006. Print. This one, borrowed from a friend, I'm actually still reading; it's only on this list because I didn't get to finish it. If you want to claim this as a book you haven't finished yet, may I suggest saying that you're really enjoying the narrative style, but so far you're not sure you can agree with Pirsig's premise, and wonder if that's a sign of the shifting times and the changing nature of the relationship between technology and art (or function and aesthetic) since 1974, when the book was written. Of course, you may be a little off-base, since you're only 150 pages in.

5 comments:

Joe said...

I don't have anything constructive to add. . .except that I laughed very hard about the "wasp" mix-up.

bzzzzgrrrl said...

Joe-
Every comment is constructive. Except spam. And I'm glad you laughed. The cover looks like this, so you can understand my confusion.

Joe said...

OK, I'll buy that. At first glance, you could argue that it's a biopic of some WASP-y family living in that farm house on the cover.
By the way, what DID you learn about the insects?

bzzzzgrrrl said...

Off the top of my head, I learned that only the females sting, and that for most wasps, even the females only sting prey — it allows them to paralyze prey (without killing it) to keep it fresh but immobile for the babies. Most wasps are apparently not especially community-minded. The wasps that sting people are also females, but they generally ARE of the more community-minded varieties, and sting to protect the community from us.

Joe said...

I'd say that's a fair return on a 13-page investment. Good work!