I have been trying to get back into reading again. It is hard because I have been rather sad and unmotivated lately without school. School stressed me out, but it kept me moving and it brought me alive because it meant that I always had something to think about. I thought it might help if, instead of merely reading, I let myself write about what I read. This time, however, I will not be striving to sound academic. I will be honest. I will say what I really want to say about books. They may not be intelligent observations, but they will be from the heart.
It seems obvious to start with my favourite book, A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. If you know me well, then you have probably heard me mention this book quite a few times. I don't bring it up early as much as I would like to because I don't want to accidently encourage people to read it. I DESPISE suggesting things because I'm always afraid that people will end up hating whatever I suggested and will then get mad at me for a bad suggestion. In this post then, I will show both what I love about the book and what one could possibly dislike so that I can't get blamed for an overly rosy review.
I love this book, though, it means a lot to me and has spoken to me in different ways at different times, although I have actually only read it twice. I'm not a big fan of re-reading books. I read it for the first time when I was 14 and re-read it this year for a class. In this post I will be explaining how my relationship to the story changed the second time I read it.
Quick Summary Sans Spoilers: It is the story of a teenager in a Mennonite community who struggles with romance, family, and her relationship with the local church.
The first time I read it I was 14 years old. I was in the second semester of grade nine. It was my first year in public school after being homeschooled my whole life. I was struggling to make friends and people made fun of me because I was such an ignorant good girl. I found this book on the coffee table in my living room. I picked it up because it had won Canada Reads (which is a literary contest I loved listening to on the radio). I loved it because it had references to sex and drugs, two things that I had been seriously sheltered from, up until then and I thought that reading it meant that I was a more street wise person who would be harder to make fun of. I brought it to school and read it in front of my classmates, hoping they would realise they had been mistaken in their judgment of me. Unfortunately, it made no impact because none of them had heard of it. Reading it now I laugh at my 14 year old self because it is a lot more tame then some of the stuff I had to read for university. I also love how it is realistic in its portrayal of these things. It doesn't make them seem shiny and exciting but, to a degree, pulls the curtain off their cultural hype.
Another reason why I related to this story, back in the day, is because when I was 14 I was already struggling with the question of "what do I believe about God?" and already had accumulated a lot of anger towards church. I could relate to Naomi's frustration with her Mennonite community and her rejection of religion the way it was portrayed in her community. What I didn't catch until the second time I read it was Naomi's love for her community and empathy for even the worst of characters. Now that I am older I am starting to understand that anger is extremely complicated. Often, the people who hurt you are also the people you love and who love you and are also the people you have hurt because often the ones who hurt are also hurting. Reading it the first time I felt like a rebel for reading something that so openly expressed my own frustrations with the church. The second time, I loved it for its beautiful recognition of the complexity of life.
The third reason I love this book is for its poignant portrayal of Naomi's relationship with her dad. When I was four years old I told my mom I wasn't sure if I loved her because I didn't understand what love was, and I have been obsessed with the topic ever since. I loved that this book portrayed a love other than romance and I loved how awkward it was because this shows a sincerity you don't seen much of these days. This is something that means even more to me now that my father has died shattering my picture perfect family and forcing me to learn what it means to love broken people and acknowledge my own brokenness. I was so hung up on this aspect of the book, when I was 14, that I was convinced that this is what the title was about. I ignored the final paragraph and I clung to the better story that Naomi talks about because I wanted her family to be together again as much as she did and I resisted an interpretation of the text that involved forgiving and loving the town. What I would like to say to anyone who feels that the story is hopeless is that it is all up to a) how you interpret the end and b) your definition of hope. Also, I just love that it is realistic. To anyone who complains because nothing happens, I think plenty happens but not in a shiny, shiny, bam, bam kind of way. Think of it as a portrait of humanity. If that's not your thing, then maybe don't bother. This year I was walking down the street with a classmate who had also read this book and knew that I loved it. He didn't like the book because nothing happened in it. He told me that he understood that I loved it, though, because he figured I could relate to the characters better than he could. "I've never really known pain." He told me. That makes sense, I read not to be entertained, but to know that I am not alone struggling through this crazy thing called life and that is why I love this book so much.
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