2016 Reading Challenge: A book that was published this year

Since Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been out for less than 24 hours, I promise you that there will be NO SPOILERS in this post.  This post is just my general reaction to the book as a whole, and to keep with the continuity of how I've been doing this challenge.

At first, I was happy that this is a script instead of a novel because everything moves faster in a script.  No descriptive paragraphs, no pages of a character's internal struggle or confusion.  Everything  just happens.  But as I finished Part One in under three hours, I realized that a novel would last longer.  After all, it took me at least two full days of binge-reading to get through Deathly Hallows.  I finished Cursed Child within 13 hours of owning it, and that's including breaks for 7 hours of sleep, two meals, and doing a load of laundry.

Still - and obviously -  I loved every second.  I absolutely devoured it.  I considered forcing myself to stop for the day, to preserve the length, but really, there was never a chance of that happening.  Rowling's fast-paced style and tendency to end a chapter (or in this case, a scene) on a very intense moment if not an outright cliffhanger were not marred by the presence of the other two authors.  So it was pretty painful to put it down for five minutes to go put the laundry in the dryer.

For years, I've been wishing that I could temporarily delete everything that I know about the Harry Potter series, just so I can experience it for the first time again.  The suspense, the thrill, the wonder and joy, the twists and reveals.  I finally got to experience all of that again, and as an adult at that.  Of course, it happened all too quickly and once again I'll be cursed with the knowledge of what happens, unable to feel surprise because I knew what was coming at every turn.  It's a blessing and a curse.

One more thing, because I fear that if I keep going on I'll reveal too much: I WANT TO SEE THIS PLAY.  The stage directions in the script must be beautiful.  Of course I can picture them in my head, what's happening, as it would in a movie or as I would picture a book happening... but some of these things seem so impossible to happen on stage without the use of CGI!  Some of the stage directions actually gave me goosebumps as I tried to imagine how incredibly magical they would look when enacted on stage.  It makes me hope that Cursed Child will wind up like Phantom of the Opera - it'll have its home base theater for at least 30 years, and there will be occasional tours so that people outside of London can see it, and maybe after about 18 years they'll turn it into a movie.  (I hope it takes way less than 18 years.)  The effects should be as well-known as Phantom's falling chandelier, but I don't think that would take the magic away because everyone still adores the falling chandelier, even after 30 years.

Okay, that's enough out of me.  Maybe, probably, I'll write an entirely spoiler-riddled post that anyone who hasn't read the book yet will know to avoid so I can share my reactions to specific points.

I only have four books left for this challenge!  Once I finish them, I'll officially have out-challenged myself.  Hoorah!  I'm so glad to have gotten back in to reading.  I didn't realize how much I'd missed it. <3

2016 Reading challenge: A book that has been banned at some point (update: I'm finished!)

For this challenge, I decided to go with another book that my 11th grade English teacher often talked about: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  I honestly don't remember when or why be brought it up - I just remember scribbling the name in my quote book (an amazing part of my life in which I wrote down hilarious moments from the day and occasional random notes).  For all these years, I've had the book on my read-eventually-maybe list but never gotten around to it.  I'm not entirely sure I was aware that Lolita had been banned, as I wasn't at first sure what to read for this challenge.  But while I was perusing a random list of banned books, I saw the title and I immediately decided on it.

I have one word to describe this book so far (I'm about halfway through the book at the time of writing): Ugh.

Let's ignore for a moment the content of the book and focus on Nabokov's writing style.  I like to call it "fancypants smartybutt."  There are lots of random big words that sound like a high schooler used a thesaurus to impress his English teacher.  (I realize that I've kind of been pooping on high school English teachers while writing this series; I do apologize to any teachers reading this and want to stress that it's nothing personal.  I actually really liked four of six of my high school English teachers (I had three in one year thanks to maternity leave and a semester switch), but you know... high school English classes are obnoxious.  I don't think it's entirely the teacher's fault 100% of the time.)  And, UGH, why are there so many French words, phrases, occasionally sentences?  Okay, the narrator is from France.  But the author is from Russia and he wrote the book in English while living in America.  There shouldn't be so much French in a book that takes place in America.  It's annoying and it sounds pretentious and, again, makes it sound like either the narrator or the author was trying to prove himself as a fancypants smartybutt.

Why do I say "either the narrator or the author"?  Because of the format of the book.  It's written in the first person, past tense, and presented as Humbert (the narrator)'s memoirs that he wrote while in jail awaiting his trial.  And it's obvious that Humbert thinks very highly of himself.  So I do understand that he, as a character, would want to use big words and French sentences to sound smarter to the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or to the "dear reader."  Buuuuuut I also kinda feel like there's a way for the author (Nabokov) to do that without grinding on the reader's (me) very last damn nerve with all those French and fancy words that need to either be looked up (ain't nobody got time for that) or skipped over and not understood.  Or, I guess, there's the third possibility that Nabokov really was such a fancypants smartybutt that he assumed that everyone who read his book would be equally as smart and fancy and know all of those French and fancy words.  (Or that he only wanted fellow fancypants smartybutts to really understand his book.  hmm.)

Anyway, so the author's writing style makes it hard enough for me to get through the book.  Like Tolkein, Nabokov enjoys writing long-ass run-on sentences that take up an entire paragraph and need to be read about four times before you can really understand what it means.  Or, again, simply skipped over and not understood because at page 179 (halfway, mind you) I am getting real sick of these long-ass sentences and their fancypants smartybutt language, I tell you what.  Ugh.

Okay, so, there's my complaint about the writing.  Now on to the content (obviously, spoilers).

I can definitely understand why this book was banned.  Going in to it, I did know that the book was about an adult male who had a relationship with a minor female, but... wow.  I did not think it would be like this. 

Through the first quarter or so of the book, Humbert presents Lolita as a young girl of twelve who has a crush on him because he looks like an actor that she likes, and because he is an attractive (ugh, he likes to remind us of his looks) European guy.  So, even though that doesn't make it okay, it's still at least consensual in his eyes.  And it would at least maybe be exciting for Lolita, even though I know damn well that she can say "yes" all she wants, but it's still rape because she's only 12.

But... then.... Humbert.... is going to... protect Lolita's purity (ugh)... by drugging her up... and fondling her... while she sleeps.  UGH WHAT.  That's not how it works.  That's not how anything works.  So now I'm totally disgusted.  But then.... after Lolita's mother dies and Humbert goes to pick Lolita up from summer camp to deliver the news.... and he does it bluntly and horribly... he whisks Lolita away and takes her on a year-long tour of America wherein he has to constantly threaten, bribe, or spoil her, or some combination of the three, in order to keep her "satisfied" enough to have sex with him every morning.  UGHHHHHHH.  So now it's not even a real relationship, he's just got her as this sex slave that he's carrying around the country in order to get his creepy rocks off and carry out his pre-teen fantasies.  Ugh.

That's pretty much where I've left off.  He seems to have just signed her up for some school that wants to teach young girls how to succeed in society (this takes place in the early 1940s, by the way) by being good housewives and knowing how to dance and have social etiquette and general not actual education.  Ugh.

And the several chapters in which Humbert describes their year-long trek?  Ugh so boring.  It doesn't read like a novel so much as a really bored guy's notes.  It doesn't even sound like Humbert was enjoying remembering that year as he wrote it down in his notes.  So many long-ass run-on sentences, so few conversations, so few actual scenes, so little imagery and emotion.

All right, well those are pretty much all of my thoughts on Lolita so far.  I might (probably will) write another post when (if?) I finish the book.  Literally the only thing that's keeping me reading this book right now is the knowledge (thanks to the forward, which is actually a part of the fiction) that Humbert dies in prison.  Which means he gets what's coming.  I just hope that poor Lolita doesn't also die or suffer any worse than she already has.

On a happier note, there are precisely 22 days and fifteen minutes until the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child!  I am SO looking forward to being able to complete the challenge of a book that was published this year. <3

PS Are you on Goodreads?  You can follow my progress with this book (and all of the books I read this year, for the challenge or not!) by being my friend!  Here's my profile.

UPDATE  7/28

I finally finished the book!  I put it off for about a week or two because I was so fed up with it.  But I'm not a quitter, so I decided to finish it off before Harry Potter and the Cursed Child releases IN JUST OVER TWO DAYS AHH.

I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that there were about 10 pages of "also by Vladimir Nabokov" stuff and something of an epilogue by Nabokov.  I read a few paragraphs of the epilogue and deemed it unnecessary, so woohoo!

In case you couldn't tell, my opinion of Lolita did not change in the last half of the book.  Yeah, it was cool to see how depressed Humbert was after Lolita left him, but there wasn't anywhere near enough emotion or action involved to truly make it interesting.  After writing the initial part of this blog post, I found myself having to stop and say "You started to read this book, so finish it" quite often.  Pretty much a couple of times per paragraph, because of how many goshdarn run-on sentences there were that had me so confused I had to re-start each sentence about three times before I could finish it.  Why do authors get away with that crap?!  Their editors should say, "listen, I get what you're trying to show here, but the readers are going to be confused because their brains won't be able to follow what's going on.  You've got to make your sentences shorter.  End a thought every now and then before throwing in the next one and then jumping back to the first thought with no transition."

So, yay, I have now read Lolita.  I can check that off on my list of "Books that probably everyone should read because they're written by dead white guys but really aren't all that modern white guys have cracked them up to be."

I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am to get back to some young adult fiction after this!  My next step is, of course, Cursed Child as a book that was published this year.  After that I'll be turning to a book that I previously abandoned - either James Dashner's The Death Cure, which I never started but I did kind of give up on trying to get a hold of it for a while; or Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch.  That's Goblet of Fire translated into German.  My thinking is, I've read the book at LEAST 12 or 13 times in English, so what better way to study up on my German than by reading a book that I know so well?  I've started to give it a try a few times but usually given up and either said "I'll just read it in English yet again" or moved on to something else.