Voice of Dissent: The Hours

By Heather F.


Every year there is that book. You know. ‘That’ book, the one everyone and their dentist and your cousins’ sisters’ niece is reading and you just have to (have to!) read it as well. I am not usually one who likes to be left out of anything (a gross understatement), so the year The Hours by Michael Cunningham was ‘that’ book, I read it too.

I read it pretty quickly. It is not that hard of a read. And then I sat back and watched all of my reading groups cheer and proclaim to the heavens what an excellent book it was. And I shook my poor, confused head. Did we read the same book? Did I miss something? What was so great about that book?

Everyone talked of how well written it was. I found it to be stilted and pretentious. I thought it lacked style and felt the language was too clipped and abrupt.

Everyone talked of how well Cunningham wrote in the voice of a woman. I found it to be contrived and pompous.

Everyone talked of how well Cunningham captured Virginia Woolf’s voice. Albeit I’ve only read one book by Woolf, but I found the comparison to be lacking. I just could not see Woolf’s genius shining out at me through Cunningham’s words.

I am a firm believer that one can read a book at the wrong time in life and that the mood, maturity and disposition of said reader can affect their reaction to a book. Perhaps the timing was all wrong. Perhaps it was overly hyped. It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last, that a book was recommended to me by many, many people and I was the lone voice of dissent. Possibly I was too immature a reader to read The Hours when I did. I was in my early twenties.

Who knows? Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, I might enjoy it. There is only one problem. The mere thought of picking it up for a reread makes me cringe.

Voice of Dissent: The Book Thief

By Melissa

I have a lousy track record with the sort of fiction books that get buzz. (Blogging has changed the buzz business, of course, but there are still some big, reliable sources: The New York Times Book Review, Oprah, the morning news shows, NPR, etc.) I feel like I should be reading them; the implied message is that these are the sort of books that every intelligent person should be reading. I'm intelligent, or at least I want to be, and so I respond to the buzz. But the problem is I invariably end up disliking the book. And so I have become cynical, cringing at the hype surrounding these books: nothing, I think, can be that good.

But there is one thing these books have all had in common: they are all written for an adult audience. So, when I finally picked up The Book Thief -- two years after the publication date, one year after it won a Printz Honor Award -- I was hopeful that I would like it, even with the hype surrounding it, precisely because it was not an adult fiction book.

It's because I'm one of those people, one who reads YA fiction for fun. (And not just YA fiction, middle grade fiction, too. Sometimes even picture books.) I have no job excuse: I'm not a children's librarian or a children's writer. I don't even have any aspirations to become either a writer or a librarian. I could claim that I'm pre-reading for my children, but I don't because it's not true. I read YA fiction because I love it.

I'm sure I could come up with a long list of reasons why I like YA better than adult fiction -- things like the writing is tighter, better edited, and usually more direct -- but I think the real reason is that I like the stories. I’ve found that what makes or breaks a book for me is an well-told story with sympathetic, engaging characters, stories with a strong beginning and a fitting end. I think it’s because my life is mostly chaos, and I have very little control, ultimately, over what my husband and children do in the course of a day. Life is open-ended, challenging, confusing and -- as my mother would often say -- most of all, it's daily. Whereas, for me, a book should be something predictable: having a beginning, middle and end, with a plot line that comes to a satisfying resolution. There is something comfortable in predictability, and YA fiction delivers that predictability more often than buzz-worthy adult fiction.

Back to The Book Thief, though. I was actually surprised I didn't like it. I'd heard nothing but good about it from people I respect and admire, and I was fully expecting to add my voice to the throng of praises. And under my criteria, I should have liked it. It's YA (or at least it has been categorized as one; my library shelves it in the adult section however). It's cleverly written; I thought having Death be the narrator was an innovative way to look at the horrors of Nazi Germany. (I could quibble a bit about whether it was "tight"... I have to admit that I skimmed sections of the book because the narration went on and on and on.) All together it's got an interesting, emotionally charged story that's well-told.

Yet... at first I was flummoxed: why wasn't I totally loving it? I kept reading, hoping that something would click, that the genre, or my blogging friends, wouldn't let me down. Eventually though, I had to come to terms with it: I just didn't like the book. I have come to realize my dislike boils down to three things: I couldn't connect with the characters, the narrator was getting in the way of the story, and the overall theme was overly despairing for my taste.

First, the characters. In order for me to truly enjoy a story, I need to be able to connect with the characters on some level; if I don't, then the (predictable, comfortable) ending that the story should come to won't do anything for me. And that means I need to be able to find something elemental in them that I can recognize, respect or admire. As I was reading, I appreciated that Zuzak was writing about everyday Germans, rather than Jews in concentration camps or Nazis or soldiers. I found it interesting to see the war from the point of view of someone who is just trying to survive. But there weren't any characters that I could truly connect to. That's not to say there weren't any -- the father, Hans, comes to mind as I'm writing this -- but I often felt that the despair of the situation, the closed-off nature of the characters themselves, and the distracting cleverness of the narrator, worked against my connection with the characters themselves. I often felt like an outsider looking in, like someone who's clinically analyzing the experiences of others, which makes it difficult to achieve the connection I'm looking for when I read.

Then there was Death. I liked Death, initially, laughing where I was supposed to laugh, and eventually even crying where I was supposed to cry. But I disliked the foreshadowing. Death says that he's not into the buildup and mystery of a normal story, but I am. I wanted to have a relationship with these characters, but on some level refused to do so because I knew that they would eventually die. I find endings where there are deaths to be more powerful if I'm not reminded throughout the book that these people would die, if it comes as a surprise (or if not a surprise, then at least with some buildup). But Death didn't provide any buildup -- on the contrary, his narration constantly defused any buildup, annoying me in the process, because his voice was robbing the story of a satisfying conclusion.

Then there's the overriding theme, which I felt something along the lines of: words can do good as well as harm, some people are good even in a bad situation, and some people survive. That's life. It doesn't inspire me, or even entertain me. (Yes, really, that's all I want out of my books: to learn, to be inspired, or to be entertained.)

In the end, I came to the conclusion that this book is like "The Pianist" or Elie Wiesel's Night: it's an interesting story, possibly an important one, but it's not one I want to cuddle up with, to read and reread, because there's no relationship, no closure, no ending or entertainment or inspiration to be found there. In a sense, it's an English class book: one to be respected and studied and analyzed and possibly imitated, for its language or its cleverness or its perspective. Just not really liked, at least by me. I'm okay with that. After all, the buzz-makers loved it.

Voice of Dissent: An Uncensored Diatribe on The Time Traveler's Wife

By Corinna Carlson


A new voice to Estella's Revenge since its reincarnation as a book 'zine, Corinna Carlson is one of the brave few willing to say, "I didn't like The Time Traveler's Wife!"

So, [insert HUGE *sigh* here] I have finally, and I mean FINALLY, finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. I never manage to read as much as I’d like to; I set myself monthly reading quotas and I’ll meet them for a while and then every now and again a book comes along that I don’t hate per se but is a struggle, and I have to push through it. A book has to be pretty bad for me not to finish it. I ended up reading two books while reading The Time Traveler's Wife, which is essentially unheard of, and I don’t really know what it means.

There's a little background involved in my reading this novel. In fact, I wasn't going to. My dad picked this as a family book club book, but that meeting never happened. My dad loved the book, my mother hated it. Adam got 118 pages in and I kept getting mad at him because he would not stop laughing, and at the time it was still for book club so that sort of behavior was totally unacceptable.

Long story short -- meeting is cancelled, Adam rejoices, I decide not to read it. Months pass, maybe a year, this book was released in 2003 after all, but everywhere from every direction, THE INTERNET itself, my book buddies, Facebook, e-mails, random conversations, somehow some way the book would find me. Mind you, I did only have to look up at my alphabetically organized bookshelves to find it, but the damn thing was obviously calling me in the way books sometimes do.

Thus I begin the five hundred plus page book. The title is a great example of what this book is primarily about; we have the time traveler and we have his wife. The time traveler travels and the wife doesn’t. Life is hard and crazy and they are pulled this way and that way and there are emotions and no such thing as normalcy and the characters have to believe and endure a lot of pain and yearning and it starts out really good. I’ll give it that. For a first go at writing a novel I do have to say I am extremely impressed by the majority of her writing style. But the thing that first got on my nerves was all of her half formed cultural references. For example, the mention of Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, for no apparent reason except to make the reader feel they are inferior to Niffenegger if they don’t catch all the allusions, and trust me, there were MANY. These references are still relevant to the novel, but all they are is dropped like they are hot. Also there is a technique we are all familiar with called foreshadowing. I don’t know if she actually believed that she could take it to an entirely new level of let’s just tell the reader EXACTLY what is going to happen and see if they keep reading, or if her idea of foreshadowing is literally that literal.

I almost couldn’t finish it because I was so disappointed. This book had unlimited potential and parts made me feel like it was a five out of five stars novel, but all of a sudden the wheels fell off and reading it felt like a chore. It got ridiculous, I couldn’t even feign sadness for the characters, but again, for me, this stems from the underdevelopment of the characters. I would have liked to have seen her dig deeper into the traveler’s sexual past and its affect on his wife.


At the end of the day, I didn't like it, but I didn't hate it; therefore, I give it a three.