Behind on Reading

I am desperately behind on my reading goal for the year.   According to Goodreads, I am precisely 18 books behind.

Lately, when I try to read at night, I pass out before I make it through the first page.  I'm tired.  There's nothing like propping yourself up on the couch to read, passing out, and taking a book to the face. I may have to switch to all paperbacks.

The most frustrating thing that could happen right now is finding a book that straddles the fence.  And just that happened this week.

I had started it before but got a book in at work that other people were waiting for and, thus, put it aside.  One day I went back to it because I left the other book at work.  (Also frustrating as hell.  I was so angry that I almost made the 20 mile drive to get the damn thing.)  That one day hooked me and when I finished Jeneration X, I could not wait to get started on it.

The book was All the Way Home by David Giffels.  I was enchanted mostly because I thought we would relate to one another.  Giffels's book is a memoir about buying a falling down mansion and restoring it while his family is growing. 

The day I looked at the house I bought, I went to look at my Dream House.  It was a 3500 sq ft farm house on 10 acres that had been built in 1881.  I fell in love with it when I was 9.  My best friend at the time's grandparents lived around the corner and until graduation I got to look out Sara's bedroom window and see the Dream House in all its ruinous beauty.  When I went to look at it, it was everything I dreamed.  The kitchen would have to be completely gutted.  In fact, they had built a small addition onto the kitchen for a refrigerator and covered an outside door from the formal dinning room.  There was a black potbelly stove.  The woodwork in the house was all original, dark and thick molding, massive doors, floors that had expensive woods along the outside and pine in the middle where a rug would cover the cheaper wood.  There was a formal dinning room and a parlor and two staircases.  One staircase was the "family" staircase.  It went up to the second story bedrooms from the dining room.  The second staircase was the formal staircase and went from the front parlor to the BALLROOM.  A BALLROOM.  A ballroom with plaster falling off the ceiling and a charred wall where another stove used to be.  A ballroom covered in dust and dirt, fallen ceiling, and books.  The thing about old houses like that out here is that they have usually been in a family long enough to have strange updates.  A basketball court, for instance, or guest quarters built onto the back.  It may have been strange and old and ugly on the inside but every last thing in that house was STRAIGHT and SOLID and completely workable.

The clencher was the photo on the fireplace of the house as it was when it was built.

I loved that house.  I still love that house.  If ever I were to win the lottery, it would be mine and the asbestos siding would go down and real wood siding would go up.  There would be a front porch again and the ceiling would be repaired.  What would I do with a ballroom?  Fuck if I know but, dammit, I want one.  I want a front parlor and I want a kitchen that will have to be completely gutted and made into the kitchen of my dreams.  The difference is that I could I house for a third of the cost that needed a lot less work.  It wasn't a compromise.  The moment I pulled into my driveway, I knew it was MY driveway, that this was where I belonged.

So, what was the problem with Giffels work?  Quite frankly, it was Giffel.  He tells us that he has a degree in creative writing and that is all fine and good but I can guarantee that he didn't write like that in college.  He was too pompous a lot of the time, bragging about his abilities while trying to make it sound like he was making fun of himself even when he wasn't.  I was stuck on one paragraph for a day, unable to go beyond it, simply because he said Heineken is a beer for men who think they are of a certain distinction.  (Boyfriend is a beer snob. Heineken is mostly for tools who don't know that green bottles make beer skunky.  Thank God for Michigan, the beer state, and microbreweries.)  We hear repeatedly about how classy his wife is, how beautiful, how out of his league.  Sometimes the writing was too embellished, too whimsical.  But mostly it was slow and somehow grating.

I'm disappointed.  The book was published in 2008 and that's when it went on my list.  It was soooo close to the top that I was constantly excited for the day I finally got to it.  Then I could barely read a chapter at a time.

So, about a week lost to this one before I gave up just 70-some pages in.  Bummer.