A couple of underwhelming #ABookADayInMay choices – Days 28 + 29

Coming towards the end of A Book A Day In May, I’ve read a couple of books that weren’t particularly bad, but left me pretty underwhelmed. So let’s race through them.

One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) by Eudora Welty

I’ve only read two of Eudora Welty’s novels – The Optimist’s Daughter, which I thought was brilliant, and Delta Wedding, which I didn’t. Years and years ago I started One Writer’s Beginnings but somehow never finished it – and, considering it’s 102 pages, I should have taken that as a red flag. Well, I started again and now I’ve read it, but it felt very meh.

One Writer’s Beginnings comes from three lectures that Welty gave at Harvard, and I wonder what they made of them there. Really, this is my fault though. I always find the childhood sections of autobiographies the least interesting sections – and One Writer’s Beginnings told me in the title that that’s what it would be. Welty’s three chapters are basically childhood anecdotes and family folklore, and only right at the end do we get anything hinting at her writing career (beyond the odd mention here and there, which presumably reminded Harvard that they’d invited her as a Pulitzer prizewinning author, rather than someone with a diverting childhood).

There’s nothing wrong with her stories, and some of the things her family experienced were heartrending (there is a poignant section where she accidentally learns about the brother who died, and even more poignant that she adds that her parents never mentioned him again). But I found that her novelist’s craft rather deserted her. Even anecdotes that should be interesting in fundamentals come across as curiously uninteresting. I recognise that I’ve not detailed what many of them are, and that’s because I’ve already forgotten almost all of them. I don’t know why One Writer’s Beginnings was so bland to me, but it was. Your mileage may vary.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) by Becky Albertalli

I listened to this young adult novel, having previously watched the film – adaptated under the more crowdpleasing title Love, Simon. It’s about a gay teenager (Simon) who has been emailing another gay teenager – both of them using pseudonyms. The novel is about this e-friendship, wondering who ‘Blue’ might be, and the wider group of Simon’s friends and family.

I’d enjoyed the film, but found the book a bit slow by comparison. I didn’t much care about any of Simon’s friends, and the subplots involving them were a bit of a slog. The book picked up towards the end – and, thank you fading memory, I had misremembered the identity of ‘Blue’ – so that revelation came as a surprise the second time around. I guess either I’m too old for this sort of book, or the makers of the film turned it into something a bit zippier. (As a sidenote, and I’ve found this a few times, listening to an audiobook with lots of emails in it is a mistake, cos you can skim over the email address / time stamp / subject line when you’re reading it, and it is tedious to hear all these read out over and over again in an audiobook.)

So, not the best couple of days, so let’s be optimistic for finishing off May well with my next two choices.