Task 2: Roses are the official flower of Flemington Race Track; write your own “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue” poem for one of your favorite or most hated books of all time.

 

 

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

My worst school assignment

Was definitely you.

Task 1:  Burn a book in effigy.  Not that anyone of us would do such a thing, but if you HAD to, which book would be the one you’d sacrifice to the flames (gleefully or not)?

 

 

I read the first 3 books of the Rabbit series by John Updike as part of a group project in high school. There was serious talk about holding a celebratory book burning of our books once the project was done because we hated them so much. We didn't end up burning them, but we all agreed they were the worst books we'd ever read for school. If I had to burn a book, I'd throw Rabbit, Run in without a second thought. And then I'd toss in the second and third books with it.

 

 

I thought I'd try something by Mr. Updike that wasn't Rabbit Angstrom-y.

 

This is the single worst writing from women's point of view that I've ever encountered. These women are the least believable I've ever encountered, and I've read some really bad books. I understand these witches are fantasy, but I can't believe witches would be so ridiculous. Nor can I imagine grown women who complain about getting their periods for a full five (5) days! Or women who think the way these "women" do about their bodies. Men, apparently, believe women are nothing but our bodies and our relationships to men. He gives them interesting professions, then he reduces them to insipid caricatures. 

 

Dear Male Writers - Woman Have Breasts and Vaginas. I'm going to write a book where the man's balls are all I talk about if I run into this again. Shockingly, our bodies and fear of aging are not the only thing we ever think about.

 

Argh. I'm very tempted to stop reading this. It's making me irritable. 

 

However, now the man has entered the picture, so I may try to continue, since I'm almost a third of a way through. But not tonight. I need some female comedy -- on to Netflix!

DNF about 50 pages in. I just can't with all this BS. Less than 5 pages in, I knew I was probably not going to like it. It is very, very obviously written by a man. Some men do ok with writing women. This is not one of those cases. I have so many problems with this book from just these 50ish pages, I don't even know where to begin.

Let's see... Honestly, if I could just C&P the entire book so far, I would, but I'll try to narrow this down to a few examples.

There's the obsession each of the women seems to have with the other two and their bodies. They're constantly being compared in great detail. At one point, Alexandra's thoughts are something about her "...wish to stroke that long flat stretch from the other woman's breasts to below her waist, the way one longs to dart out a hand and stroke the belly a cat on its back..."

Then there's the trope (or at least I think it's a trope because I'm pretty sure I've seen it a lot, but mostly from men writing women) of how liberated/empowered/feminist women all want to fuck any man who'll sit still. These women are having sex with literally any man, including the husbands of the other two.

Then there's this gem:

"Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover’s testicles in her hand. She recognized as she labored in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce to be ladled upon the white spaghetti. the fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old?"

A bit later, there's more menstrual musing, some racism thrown in for good measure, and so much misogyny I feel like the Orange Menace could have written it. Actually, yeah, the writing in this really reminds me of things he's said either in interviews or on twitter. Only Updike seemed to be trying to show how much he "loves" and "respects" women, but ended up showcasing just how true the opposite is.

There's more, but I don't feel like getting up to retrieve the book from where it landed when I threw it a few minutes ago.

I might have enjoyed this, had I read it when I was much younger. I'm so, so glad it was never in any of the libraries I visited, though. I hate that I wasted $3 on this, instead of spending it on something better, but I'm also glad I didn't read it when I was younger and less aware. I'm finding that the older I get, the less patience I have for BS, especially from men directed at/about women.

I tried, I really did. I loved this movie and for me the movie was much better than this book. It was over-written (is that a thing?) because that's how it felt to me. I just wanted to read about these three women who are witches living in Eastwick. Instead Updike spends so much time on a lot of minutiae that I just didn't care to finish this.

I have talked to three other people and one had a reaction similar to mine (though she finished, and is still mad she didn't just put it away) one who was meh to the book and the third person who loved it and kept screeching they couldn't believe that I didn't like this since I am such a big reader. Yeah I like to read, not torture myself, this book was feeling mighty painful til I threw up the white flag of surrender.

Besides knowing that the three women are called Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie. I had some True Blood flashbacks cause of the name (same pronunciation, different spelling) and that's about it.

Updike spends so much time overly describing these three women and how their marriages ended (or didn't end, I still don't know) that my eyes started to glaze. I think one of them is a mat? I refuse to go back and read this book again. One of my friends told me that Updike was writing symbolically and that the one husband wasn't turned into anything and my response was I refuse to care about this and they started laughing. So there's that at least.

And I don't even know what to call this writing, purple prose on acid maybe. Cause everything was just too much. I at one point was all can you just get to the point?! The point!

There are just huge blocks of text staring at you because Updike doesn't seem to know how to end thoughts/paragraphs. And then you will have characters having three to five different inner thoughts and you want to scream because once again you just want to say get to the point.

I have never read an Updike before this one and I doubt that I will read any in the future.