18. On Books We Love... and Books We Hate
KIM: Hi everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode.
AMY: Today, we’re going to have a lively (and maybe a slightly controversial) discussion about our favorite (or not so favorite books). And we’re hoping that maybe some of you guys reach out to us and let us know your own thoughts on this subject. This idea came to us thanks to one of our listeners named Ruth, who confessed the following to us on Facebook. She said: “I am not a fan of Jane Austen. There, I’ve said it. I don’t care if anyone agrees with me or not. You’re welcome.”
KIM: Uh oh, them’s fightin’ words, as they used to say! Just kidding. We consider this podcast a completely safe place to air out any and all book opinions. So we don’t have any judgment, Ruth. Jane’s not your jam, and that’s A-OKAY with us.
AMY: I think we all have our own example of books that the rest of the world seems to love and admire yet, try as we might, for whatever reason we just don’t connect with, you know? What are those books that everyone you know goes wild about but you either weren’t able to finish? Or they just made you go “Meh. I don’t get it. It’s not my thing.” For example, I’m going to go out on a limb, and maybe this is going to tick people off, but there’s a book that I tried reading — I want to say I tried reading this book three different times. I gave it a good, solid go on three occasions in the last few years, and every single time, I could not get more than a fourth of the way through the book. That book was… Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend trilogy. And I’m so sorry. I’m not even going to apologize because there are so many people who love this book. She (or whatever her name is, we don’t actually know if that’s the author’s actual name) she’s going to be fine with me saying I didn’t love it. She’s wildly successful and has made a fortune off of these books, and people love them. I’m the weirdo here. There’s something wrong with me, I fully believe that I couldn’t get into these books, but I just couldn’t connect with it at all.
KIM: Okay, Amy, hold on a second. That’s my book, too!
AMY: No! Is it?
KIM: Yes! Oh my god! Literally everyone else in the world loves this book, and I want to love it because I feel like I’m missing out on an entire series of books that are supposed to be life-changing and wonderful and literary, but also a guilty pleasure at the same time. Somehow, I’ve tried, and I just never get past the first few chapters!
AMY: I’m actually surprised to hear you say that because one of the times that I tried to read this book was when I was subletting your house. Okay, so listeners, there was a point in time where my house was being renovated and I “borrowed” Kim’s house, so I got the treasure trove of her bookshelves for about four months, which was amazing, and I read so many awesome books off your bookshelf and there, staring at me scornfully, shining like it had a halo around it the whole time, was My Brilliant Friend, and I was like, “Well, Kim obviously loves it. I’m going to give it the old college try one more time.” And I sat there on your couch and I tried to read it, and I just couldn’t do it! It’s an HBO series now!
KIM: I know! And I don’t even want to watch it!
AMY: Same.
KIM: I still have the book on my bookshelf, by the way. I haven’t managed to get rid of it because I feel like there’s something wrong with me and that one day I’ll just wake up and like it. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, but good luck to everyone that loves it, and I’m happy for them, but nope. And that’s why we’re best friends and also podcasters together.
AMY: I know. We have a mind-meld thing happening there.
KIM: Yep.
AMY: Okay, now on the flip side of that, is there any classic book that you put off reading or avoided for a long time because you didn’t think you’d like it, only to eventually discover that you totally love it? Kim, I’ll let you go first.
KIM: Okay, yes I do have a book exactly like that, except that it’s a modern classic. So I carried around through my many moves (I’ve moved a lot) for years, Infinite Jest. And then when I first met Eric, who is now my husband, we had similar favorite authors that we both loved, and so the fact that he liked this book made me want to give it another try. And so I had his copy. It actually had his notation in it, and I thought it was fantastic and funny this time around. And we even read it out loud to each other, which sounds really cheesy, but we did, and it was great. We did a fundraiser bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles the next year after this, and we actually called our two person team “The Howling Fantods,” which is, if you’ve read the book, it’s an expression used in the book. The thing is, apparently David Foster Wallace was kind of a jerk in real life, but I didn’t know that when I read the book. So, anyway. How about you, Amy, do you have a book like that also?
AMY: Well, I want to say, first of all, about David Foster Wallace being a jerk, that reminds me of Charles Dickens and do you like an author even though their personal life is questionable sort of thing? How does that change how you think about them? But that’s another episode. I’ve never read Infinite Jest, because it’s giant. It’s the size of a cinder block, basically, and I just cannot. I can’t. But that book, for me, which is also pretty ginormous, is The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have never read it. All the movies came out. I did watch the movies, and I loved them, but I had never actually read it. I remember as a kid, my brother had a copy of The Hobbit, and I have this memory of sitting in my brothers’ bedroom and trying to start The Hobbit, and I don’t know if you know Tolkien very well, but he goes into these genealogies of the characters, where it’s like, “Gloin, son of Ioan… who descended from the house of Yorl!” And it goes on and on and on for like 13 pages of that before story happens again. I was very young and I just was like, “Nope. Can’t do it.” And I was turned off from Tolkien forevermore. However, my son was gifted a copy of The Hobbit for like his fifth or sixth birthday, so we read The Hobbit and we loved it so much that I decided we've got to move on. We’ve got to do the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. We are just about finished with The Two Towers. It is so good! Yes, he still does that genealogy stuff, and it’s ridiculous, and he sometimes is way too descriptive geologically for me. He’s always like “The river bent north-north-east…” But I loved the story, and I had so much fun reading the book, and I’m glad I actually got back around to it.
KIM: I am so glad you found it and loved it. That makes me really, really happy because I have a very distinct memory when I was a child. This is so funny, but my parents’ friends had all of the Lord of the Rings books, and every time we would go over to their house, my sister would play with their two daughters, who were younger than me. And I would sit on the floor and I would read the books. I literally read the entire Lord of the Rings series on their living room floor every time we went to their house. I don’t think I ever had them at my house — maybe when I re-read them later. But the first time, it was all on someone else’s living room floor. That’s how much I loved them.
AMY: That’s so you with your nose buried in a book! Baby Kim, nose buried in a book from the minute she was born.
KIM: Yes.
AMY: It’s such a monumental undertaking that you guys must have gone to their house frequently!
KIM: Yes! I have many other similar stories, but I won’t bore you with them. But yeah. It did take me a while, though, but I did finish them.
AMY: Okay. So next book-related question. Has there ever been a book that you really didn’t like the first time you read it, but then you changed your mind about it? Maybe upon a subsequent reading you now have a more favorable opinion of, or even complete affection for?
KIM: Yes, I do. I’m not sure what other people’s take on this is, but the first time I read Romola — I don’t know if I’m saying it exactly correct, but it’s a George Eliot novel — I didn’t love it. It’s a historical novel. It’s set in the 15th century, in Florence, and I thought that it was going to be more like Middlemarch, I guess. I just expected it to be more like her other books, and because it was a historical novel, it somehow didn’t take with me. And I read it all the way through, but I just didn’t love it. And then later, actually fairly recently, I re-read it, and I completely loved it. So I don’t know if it was just expectations, I think, is what happened. I just took it on its own, and I already knew at that point, that it was going to be a historical novel, and since I had already read it before, I had a feeling for what it was, and I think it allowed me space to actually appreciate it.
AMY: I read Romola as part of my assigned reading in college. Being an English major, I remember reading that one and having the same reaction. It’s dry, at times, because of the historic element. However, the professor that taught that book was my all-time favorite professor and maybe even my favorite teacher of all time. Xavier University, Dr. Ernest Fontana — he was so dramatic. He had so much flair. He was an incredible English professor, so I think he helped enliven it a bit, but yeah, it’s definitely not my favorite George Eliot book, by far. It’s kind of like that saying, “You never step in the same river twice,” you know? You never read the same book twice because you’re life experiences and who you are with age change.
KIM: I love that. I think that’s true, because there are books we read over and over again, and it’s because we get something different from them every time. I read A Room With A View over and over, and it’s a short novella, almost, but I notice different things every time and I get something out of it every time.
AMY: Yeah. Okay, so my book that I was lukewarm about the first time I read it and then I came to appreciate it is Harry Potter. So I was in my twenties and there was this Harry Potter craze and I felt like I needed to look into it because everybody was talking about this book. Even though it was a children’s book, I was like, “You know, I’m going to give this a whirl.” And I had no interest in it. I don’t even think I finished book one. I was like, “I get it. I don’t need to go on.” But then having kids changed all that. We sat down and made a big production of reading the entire series, and when you read the entire series (first of all, Book One is not the best book. It’s just sort of the introduction. It gets better. It gets darker. It gets more involved.) There will be Harry Potter in your future, Kim, now that you have a child, so just prepare for it.
KIM: Okay.
AMY: But I will say, I think the difference is, that book came out when we were already adults. But this was an event for children. I’ll never have the experience of reading it as a child.
KIM: Right.
AMY: So I’ll never have that kind of magic associated with it, but seeing it through the eyes of my kids gave me a new appreciation for it, I think.
KIM: I’m excited to read that with Cleo one day. I actually have read I think, if not all of them, at least almost all of them, but to me, my thing is The Chronicles of Narnia, because I passionately loved those as a child, and so I was always comparing the feeling. But I think that’s the thing. It’s when you come to it as a child it’s completely different than coming to it as an adult. The magic of it is different.
AMY: Yeah. Since we’re on the subject of childhood books: Kim, I don’t think we’ve ever actually discussed this, but I’m curious. What was your sort of “gateway” novel? And by that, I sort of mean, what was the book you first read as a young person that sort of ushered you into reading more adult books, even the classics? What was the book that kind of launched you from reading, say, Judy Blume-type books into reading more sophisticated adult novels. Can you remember?
KIM: Okay, so hmm. That’s a great question. As far as Judy Blume, I read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret a million times in sixth grade. I think I had it memorized. But other than that, I really didn’t have a Judy Blume phase or anything like that. I don’t think I even read any of her other books. My mom had a real extensive bookshelf, and it had a lot of classics in it and things she’d read in college. And so after Little Women and Rose in Bloom, I just kind of kept going with everything on her bookshelf. And then I also distinctly remember the first time I read what really was an adult novel. It was in fourth grade, and we were on a flight from Germany to California. And I’m guessing my mom didn’t have anything else to give me and all I wanted to do was read, so the only thing she could do was give me this book. But it was a historical romance. It was set among Native Americans before the arrival of the Europeans. And I’m not sure how I ended up with it, you know, but I still remember the name. It was called Mesa of Flowers. It was definitely not classic literature, by any means, but it made a huge impression on me. I still remember scenes from it today! (And also, that’s because maybe it was a little steamy for a fourth grader.) But as for classics, one of the first ones I remember reading was Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge. Do you know it?
AMY: I’ve never heard of that, no.
KIM: I think it might be considered a classic, but maybe it’s actually a lost classic, so we might end up putting it on our list at some point. I think it was published in the 1940s. Anyway…
AMY: That’s lost to me. I mean, I know Island of the Blue Dolphins?
KIM: Totally different.
AMY: Okay. Okay.
KIM: I don’t know. I’m going to have to look into it a little bit more now that we’re discussing this, because it’s making me think about it. But what was your gateway novel?
AMY: Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned your mom’s bookshelf because I think my mom was sort of instrumental in sort of steering me into these more mature books as well. The story I have to start is, do you remember, like, the Scholastic fliers that would come home from school where you could order books?
KIM: Yes.
AMY: They still have those, by the way.
KIM: That’s great.
AMY: I remember bringing home the flier with the books, and I wanted to buy some books out of it, and my mom… I mean, my mom didn’t really let me buy stuff like that, but she was like, “I will buy you some books if you let me choose.” She chose Little Women and she chose Heidi. And those were sort of “older books” out of the flier. Everything else was kind of like kiddy books, you know? The only reason I got them was because she chose Little Women and Heidi, and I was probably like in the third grade, and they might have been slightly abridged versions for younger children, but they were still thick books, and I remember reading them. I wore them out. I loved them so much. So Little Women: We have that in common, really. I really didn’t know that that was your book, too. But then in eighth grade, my English teacher, his classroom was just a wall of books. Maybe two walls of books, floor-to-ceiling, and he had tests on every single one of those novels. It was a massive library in his classroom. So he had this really long list of the books, and it was our job to pick out which books we wanted to read and do the tests on. So I took this list — it was like an eight-page list of books — and I gave it to my mom and I was like, “I don’t know what to read. I don’t know anything about any of these. Can you just circle the ones that you think I might like if you know any of them?” And she circled Wuthering Heights and she circled Jane Eyre.
KIM: Oh my gosh.
AMY: So those I read in eight grade, and I remember especially with Wuthering Heights, the book that was in Mr. Moning’s English class, it was so old that it was just falling apart at the seams. Clearly nobody ever got this book out. It was the dusty one. It wasn’t the popular book for kids to read. I showed him because the cover ripped off of it while I was reading it, because it was just so dilapidated. And I felt awful, and I took it up to the teacher and I was like, “I’m so sorry but the cover fell off of this.” He just looked at me and he said, “You keep that book. I can get a new one. You keep that version.” I loved it. I was so happy that I got to keep the book. So the Bronte sisters. Little Women and the Bronte sisters, for me.
KIM: Have you told your mom anything about this recently? Does she know the impact that she had?
AMY: No, I don’t think so.
KIM: You should tell her!
AMY: She’s probably listening now, so she knows, but…
KIM: Oh my gosh, I love this. Oh my gosh, this episode is dedicated to Amy’s mom.
AMY: Phyllis!
KIM: Hi, Phyllis!
AMY: And Dianne.
KIM: And my mom.
AMY: We’ll raise a toast to her, too.
KIM: Absolutely. I love that. So, talking about all the books we read when we were younger, it makes me wonder: Did you ever read Harriet the Spy when you were growing up?
AMY: Not when I was young, no. In fact, I just read it for the first time a few weeks ago in order to prepare for our next special guests.
KIM: That’s right, everyone. Next week we’ve got two more guest experts coming our way. We’re going to be talking with literary agent Laura Mazer and biographer Leslie Brody about the fascinating life of Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh.
AMY: What most people don’t realize is that Louise Fitzhugh was quite the renegade, and we’re looking forward to chatting with Laura and Leslie next week about her unexpected life story. So that’s all for today. And listeners, we’d love to hear your feedback on our questions from today’s episode. So hit us up by email or on social media to tell us what your gateway novels were and which books you’ve never quite managed to gel with despite your best efforts to enjoy them.
KIM: I can’t wait to hear some of your responses. So for a full transcript of this episode check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode.
AMY: Do you have ideas for long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know.
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KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes