What If This Were Enough?

By -
Looks beige, is in fact a bit sparkly
What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky

Heather Havrilesky writes this kind of oddball advice column, Ask Polly, for the Cut.  At least, I've never read any advice columnist like that before!  I like it a lot, so when she put out a book of essays recently, I picked it up.

I'm kind of mixed on the essays.  Several of them are critiques of pop-culture things -- TV shows and such -- that I have never seen, so it's kind of hard to care about them.  On the other hand, never having seen The Sopranos was not a big barrier to understanding the critique, which was excellent.  And she's usually drawing pointers about the larger American culture, which I do live in, so it's not like they're totally irrelevant...but still, I don't know anything about most current TV shows (by which I mean virtually any TV of the last 15+ years) and I don't feel like I need to.*

When Havrilesky is not writing about TV, which is over half the time, I'm pretty enchanted by her sharp insights and sincere pleas for more sanity in the world.  Her writing is fantastic, and kind of unusual; get used to her voice, and you can spot it anywhere. There's an incredible essay on Shirley Jackson called "Haunted," several on family themes, and just a bunch of neat stuff.

Worth a read, enjoyable, especially if you watch TV.



____________________
*I've been known to watch modern TV.  I finally got to Stranger Things and am now waiting for season 3 just like everybody else, even though I nearly quit seven minutes in to the first episode.  And we're currently watching the second season of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the books but is certainly interesting.  

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more