In the past I’ve done a feature called It’s Not You It’s Me to indicate books I didn’t enjoy but that I believe other readers might like. Today is a bit different because in those cases I finished the books. With these three books I stalled out, set the book down and never came back to it. This is likely due to my personal circumstances—namely moving across country with a lot of variables in play.
In short, my brain is fried and I need a particular type of reading, one I can’t easily verbalize, but, like porn, I’ll know it when I see it. These books started out strong, but then just slowed to the point where I was able to set them down and not pick them up again. Which means any one of them might be great for another reader!
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
Published by Knopf
Publication date: May 14, 2019
Bookshop
Disappearing Earth opens with two young girls being abducted from a small town on a remote peninsula in Russia. It’s June and from there the novel breaks into months for the next year. Each new month introduces an entirely new set of female characters living in the region. From this point on, there will only be vague references to Sophia and Alyona—their names flickering in and out of conversations either in sadness or as a cautionary tale.
The novel is fascinating for its representation of a people who deal with the same issues people do the world over—skin color, urban versus rural, the old ways of life disappearing. It’s interesting because skin color as a source of status is not something I associated with Russia—especially in its northern most region. Each of these women lives in a vague state of resignation or resentment for lives that didn’t turn out as expected. They all get married when very young and almost immediately start having children. While these aspects surprised me, after about the third story, the point that being a woman in this part of the world is inherently unsafe. It covers the novel in a dense gray pall.
I knew Disappearing Earth was going to be a novel of women, but I did not think the sisters would be so ancillary to the plot. Their thread is too fine, too tenuous to hold the novel together. They are truly lost. If you like short stories, this will be tempting reading. For me, it was the first time I realized I don’t like novels about little girls disappearing without any sort of resolution—even if that is the case in the real world.
Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane
Published by Penguin Press
Publication date: May 14, 2019
This book was disappointing because I was really looking forward a novel about a middle-aged woman re-evaluating her life through her friendships with other women. May is 40 and has been given a sabbatical from work. She decides to use the time to go visit old friends and this, I hoped, would provide the foundation for a lovely novel about self-discovery and female friendships.
In the beginning, there’s a musing nature to the story that is charming, as May shares information about her neighbors, her father, and the town where they live, but without momentum, the charm grows stale. I was looking for introspection and relatable reflection on the questions of midlife, but by 66% of the way through got entropy. However, this is one that could be a right-book-wrong-time so I’ll revisit it later in the year when I’m more settled.
I Miss You When I Blink: Essays by Mary Laura Philpott
Published by Atria Books
Publication date: April 2, 2019
Bookshop
There has been a tremendous amount of hype around Mary Laura Philpott’s book of essays I Miss You When I Blink. In her first essay she explains the book’s title:
I miss you when I blink. I have felt it so many times in my life, at points where I didn’t really know who I was anymore, where I felt that when I closed my eyes, I could feel myself gone.
What’s not to love about that? It’s a sentiment that most of us have felt at least once in our lives. I agreed with public sentiment all through the first half of the book. After which I set it down and when I picked it up again Philpott had reached the pregnancy and motherhood stage of life—subjects that really don’t interest me, which means I set the book back down again and didn’t pick it up again. I may have missed out on life-changing wisdom in the remaining 15 chapters, but my relationship with nonfiction is such that if I lose interest it’s almost impossible to get back.
Having said that, Philpott is a hoot. I may have only read half of the book, but I highlighted a disproportionate number of sentences that made me not only laugh, but think Philpott was in my head. If you have a bit of patience and are ready for life experiences different than your own (in my fiction yes, but not in real life right now), then I Miss You When I Blink will be a favorite.
How is your summer reading going so far? Any books that you’ve stalled out on, but think others might enjoy?
I think you saw my review for Rules for Visiting earlier this year, but I think you were right to put it down. I’m not sure it’s worth picking up again (though maybe I missed something? All those positive reviews…). I feel like she abandoned the deeper exploration of friendships in favor of the random musings. I found it really unsatisfying.
I did read your review because it made me feel better about setting it aside. It’s just that premise! It’s great territory to mine so I keep thinking if I kept going I’d get to the gold.
I DNFd Disappearing Earth at about 1/3. It was going further and further away from what I thought was the main event. That it was set in Kamchatka was the only attraction, which I came to realize wasn’t enough.
Maybe I’m older than the target audience but I Miss You When I Blink was not in my wheelhouse.
I agree on both books, which is why I didn’t finish either. I did see an audience for them, just not me.
I can see how all the motherhood stuff wasn’t interesting. I was sitting there going “omg, me too!” but I can relate more to that. Especially at the moment – haha!
I’m sure she moved on and I get how it would be wonderfully relatable to women who’d gone through it, but I just gave up…
Huh. Two of these are on my list, I’m actually on the waiting list for the audio version of BLINK. I’ll still listen, since that’s just how I try stuff out that I don’t think I’d otherwise get to, but I’m now not expecting too much. Which can be a good thing. The other on my list is DISAPPEARING EARTH, which I was kind of looking forward to giving a go. Maybe because the author had a cool interview on Shelf Awareness and sometimes those win me over to try the person’s work. Wow, I’ve had a hard kombucha and I’m very chatty at the moment. 🙂
I’ll get chatty right back at you and admit something. I did something I have never done before and I don’t mention it in the review. I went back to Disappearing Earth because I was so aggravated by the sister situation. I read the LAST chapter and almost lost my mind. It is a doozy- which was both awesome and made me furious. She didn’t hold my attention enough to get me through to the end. You are probably in a better space than I am, so give it a go.
I’m just glad to hear you survived the Clif Bar, parking lot incident. I’d be remanded without bail.
Damn it. I am such a contrarian that now I want to read it just to see what made you mad. It gives me even more pause that she couldn’t hold your attention over a 272-page book. But that also helps when I think about giving it a go. If it were over 320 I’d say hell no.
Ha. I did survive, but it felt good to yell. JFC, it’s really NOT as complicated as people make it. Funny enough, I was at BevMo today and I found a bourbon that was “peanut butter bourbon.” I could have skipped the Clif Bar dunked in bourbon and had it premade. I love experimenting, but I didn’t have the guts to buy peanut butter bourbon without checking it out first.
I was happy to pass on the first two, thanks to you’r advice, but in general I liked I Miss You When I Blink. Parts of it like parts in some other nonfiction collections get a sort of “well dah” response from me and I think that’s because I’m a little older than many of the readers and have already figured out some of the “ah ha” moments for myself.
I’m sure if I’d stuck with it she would have gotten past the mommy stage and I would have found more relatable aspects, but It just didn’t hold me.
Just finished The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson. What an amazing story. The Pack Horse Librarians, the blue people of Kentucky, A wonderful read.
That sounds fascinating! I love anything having to do with books and libraries.
I did not finish I Miss You When You Blink either… I read 7 essays and thought they were okay but they just weren’t grabbing me enough to keep going. It just wasn’t the book for me. I always appreciate when readers post about the books that they didn’t finish!
I always hesitate because negative reviews don’t do as well as others, but, at the same, I feel like if all a reviewer does is write about 4-5 star books I’m not going to trust them as much. Same thing with DNFing all the time. I like the middle path!
I just finished and loved Disappearing Earth, but I can’t disagree with any of the things you mentioned about, so you were probably right to not keep with it. Those women and their same stuckness didn’t annoy or depress me (though it was infuriating in that, girl, go get better for yourself way). I came to the book as a lover of loosely connected stories and wary of the missing children element. So I didn’t miss that the novel wasn’t very much about them.
I’m sure I was projecting my own attitudes of ‘why is this all you want from life?’. I also think I had real misperceptions about Russia. That, whatever was wrong with it, it was still a highly educated country, open to birth control, and without rampant sexism. So, all these women finishing high school and getting pregnant blew my mind.