Reading Update (She Gets The Girl | The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter | Law 101)

[jaggedwolf]

She Gets The Girl by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick

Oh look, an f/f romance novel I enjoyed this year. It has a classic tropey setup: girl needs to prove to her girlfriend that woah, wait, I totally can be a good person, so she sets her eyes on a fellow freshman who is desperately shy and desperately crushing on a girl, and decides she will help her figure out how to get the girl.

You can predict what happens instead. The prose is breezy and our mains endearing — they each have a thing holding them back from fully engaging with the world, from imagining more of themselves, and as with any good romance, neither thing is fully resolved by them getting together but it is a little better by virtue of the other’s presence.

And by the presence of some others. I was fond of the supporting cast, and of the setting. I am trying not to keep comparing this book with the f/f romance novel I read earlier this year that I Did Not Care For, but I did end up thinking that Pitt (and Pittsburgh in general) here felt more alive than New York in that other one.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Can you believe I read this because I knew it would make some appearances in Season 2 of Pretty Little Liars? I can, because I have no shame about the paths I take to the media I consume.

Set in 1930s Georgia, the book covers the life of John Singer, a deaf man who has lost his only friend to an asylum, and the four new acquaintances he makes.

I tore through this novel in a single day, beginning on a train ride and finishing it on my couch after dark. A terrible sense of dread permeated my approach of the end. Found myself with a post-book hangover for the next few days, which hadn’t happened for a while. It’s funny. I have my predispositions towards the sort of endings I like, yet all of that flew out of the window here — I really really liked everything about this book.

It could be frustrating to me, that none of our five main characters don’t ever achieve real connection or communication. Not with each other, not with anyone else, and despite their constant visits to Singer, not even to him. They all think of him as “the mute”, not “the deaf”, despite the latter being the physiological truth. They want him to listen. They think he’s listening, even when he is struggling to comprehend them, even when he has little notion of how deeply his words and judgement mean to them.

In turn, Singer was briefly taught to speak but he hated the feeling of it enough that he does not. That too is fitting. His visitors do not attempt to get Singer to share of himself, but even if they did I suspect he would refuse. His whole world is shrunk down to his friend, and the gaps between seeing him, that even the shock of Singer turning his pistol on himself after learning of his friend’s death felt like a shock of oh, of course. And so it is with everyone’s lackluster endings.

Again, I typically abhor an unhappy ending, no matter how logical, but here it fit so well with everything that had been building up that it all worked for me.

Final thought: I normally never look at Goodreads reviews when logging my books but I happened to glance a discussion on one for this book, which presented a disagreement I could not pick a side on: whether Mick’s ending is the least or most depressing of our main characters. I really don’t know.

Law 101 by Jay M. Feinman

An eminently readable introduction to the American legal system. From the constitution to torts to criminal law, it maps out all the big areas of law you’re always hearing about, with deft explanations and illustrative examples.

Very much recommend it to anyone curious about the law.

Comments

[quailfence]

I might have to check Law 101 out - I had an old (1999 I think) book about the Bill of Rights that I read a lot as a kid and enjoyed immensely

[jaggedwolf]

Oh yeah, you might really like the constitutional law sections then.