The Eating Instinct by Virginia Sole-Smith

Discusses all the different ways eating can sometimes be anything other than a simple, pleasurable, nourishing experience. The impetus for the book was the author’s baby born with a congenital heart defect, which required surgery and for her to be put on a feeding tube as an infant; Violet then refused to eat for many months, even after the tube should no longer have been needed. It was an arduous journey getting Violet to eat. This drove the author to examine other ways and reasons humans may not or can not do such a simple act as eating; she discusses babies with adverse reactions to milk, anorexics, severely “picky” adult eaters, people too poor to eat properly, and of course just plain women born and bred to this diet-crazy, thin-obsessed culture. It was absorbing. I’m not usually into “kid stuff,” but she told Violet’s story and the other baby/kid/parent stories in such a way that made even me interested. ( )

Mansfield Park: an Annotated Edition

by Jane Austen, annotated by Harvard University Press

Even with the annotations, I was soon reminded why this is my least favorite Austen. Fanny is a pretty insipid character to spend this amount of time with. Book I is so great, though – the young people getting carried away with their theatricals, the Bertram sisters withering in their jealous vying for Crawford’s attentions, Rushworth just so wonderfully stupid and clueless, and all of it culminating with Sir Bertram’s unexpected return literally in the middle of all the ranting and strutting upon the stage. Ha! If only the rest of the book were as fun. After that climax, it would have been better if it had ended much more quickly. And all I can say about the Mary-Edmund romance is she must have had one damn fine pair of ****- the way she disparaged his chosen profession, her crassness, her obvious lack of any of the fine virtues he purports to hold so highly – it was very hard on the page to accept him being so smitten with her.

The annotations in these Harvard editions are great – not overly intrusive, as in other annotated classics I’ve read where they feel the need to define every other word. They occasionally veered off well into “who cares” territory, so I skipped some of them. I like when annotations shed direct light on the culture and customs that lie behind the brief or antiquated words of the author. ( )

Milkman by Anna Burns

I was very glad to see this book end.

It’s dense, first-person, and rather stream-of-consciousness. One paragraph will frequently span a page. And the subject matter is tough – life in a Northern Ireland city under the IRA, or “renouncers” as they are strictly called here. As tough as the renouncers themselves are, the entire community serves as a kind of character itself, enforcing rules and behaviors on what seems every aspect of people’s existence. It was absolutely vicariously stultifying to read. While nobody is allowed to give their baby the wrong name, or be seen with the wrong person or live in the wrong district, the town seems perfectly willing to tolerate lunatics and murderers in their midst – not only the renouncers, but garden-variety nutjobs, too.

An extremely obtrusive gimmick of the story is that absolutely nobody is named by name. Everyone is referred to by shorthand nicknames, relationships, and birth order. This intensifies the feeling of the unimportance of the individual in the midst of a community where conformity is all-consuming.

There is plot, and there is character, so as a novel it was not as much of a slog as some modernist tomes. And there is catharsis – but what was perhaps most annoying, towards the end as the plot is winding down, you finally want to start breathing freely like the narrator; and suddenly, we zip back in time a couple of weeks with a pretty silly subplot. That just put me over the edge of dislike; I haven’t been so happy to finally reach the end of a book in some time.

And silly subplots there are, but it was usually hard to laugh at the humor, couched as it was in the middle of difficult subject matter, and a narrator having a nervous breakdown most of the time. ( )