{"id":232,"date":"2011-05-11T18:34:35","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T01:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/eatreadandbeharried\/?p=232"},"modified":"2011-05-11T18:34:35","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T01:34:35","slug":"an-admission-of-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/an-admission-of-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"An admission of fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to apologize. I asserted a week or so ago that I had an uncanny knack<\/a> for choosing my reading and finding that the books had an unexpected relationship to each other. The next two books I read have proved my statement a lie. At least this time.<\/p>\n

I read The Uncoupling<\/em><\/a> after reading several positive reviews. Author Meg Wolitzer afflicts the women of her book with a sudden lack of desire. The sexual aspect of their being disappears and wreaks havoc on the town. The book was light, funny. I expected something deeper, frankly. Wolitzer touches on the reasons why each woman is affected by the spell — a new mother feeling her body is no longer her own or a long-time wife wondering if her sexual relationship with her husband is just another kind of rut. And the fact that it’s an other-worldly curse that causes the sex strike seemed contrived.<\/p>\n

The next book I picked up was What is Left The Daughter<\/a> <\/em>by Howard Norman. The language is as spare as the Maritime Canada landscape in which it takes place. Written as a letter by a father to his daughter, it moves from tragedy through war, to tragedy and then on to some unknown future that will probably be less bleak. I liked the book enough to seek out other works by Norman that I look forward to reading.<\/p>\n

But where is the link between them? I have been up at night trying to come up with one. I could reach really hard and say that both books have as a central figure a daughter who, although central, appears little in the pages of the books. But really, is that a link?<\/p>\n

So maybe I don’t have some weird supernatural ability to choose books that relate to each other in some way. Then again, the next batch seems promising. I started with Bucolic Plague<\/em>, moved on to Tina Fey’s Bossypants<\/em> and am now reading Jennimae and James. <\/em>All three are memoirs; two involve humorous looks at how determined people achieved their dreams. I think figuring out how the last book fits with the first two will be another stretch. But give me a week of late nights and I’ll come up with something that my old English teachers would give a strong C+. Maybe even a B-.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have to apologize. I asserted a week or so ago that I had an uncanny knack for choosing my reading and finding that the books had an unexpected relationship to each other. The next two books I read have proved my statement a lie. At least this time. I read The Uncoupling after reading…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[57,60,135,198,203,205],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-bossypants","tag-bucolic-plauge","tag-meg-wolitzer","tag-tina-fey","tag-uncoupling","tag-what-is-left-the-daughter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}