The Outfit Substitution Affair

I stayed home from work today, continuing to recover from my oral surgery yesterday afternoon.  The pain is now manageable with Tylenol and I mostly feel that the gum is very tender, occasionally sore.  The best part about staying home was recovering some of my lost sleep from last night, when my painkillers kept me awake for hours during the night.  I woke up for breakfast and couldn't fall asleep again this morning, but after lunch, I climbed into bed, turned on the electric blanket (because I was bizarrely freezing) and slept for 2.5 to 3 hours.

Even though I didn't go to work, I did end up wearing my planned work outfit because it seemed pretty comfortable to me.  I guess in some sense it was as comfortable as pajamas because I had no difficulty taking that long nap in it.

"A Pop of White Rabbit"--Wednesday, 9/14/16

I liked this combination of floral top, solid cardigan, and grey bottoms.  I could do something very similar to this but decided to make it a little bit dressier for work.

From shealennon.com

Although her top and cardigan matched nicely, I decided to throw in a pop of color into an otherwise neutral outfit with my red cardigan.  I liked how it turned out...however, wearing these items was a smidge uncomfortable.  That extremely body-hugging pencil skirt has to be unzipped and effortfully re-zipped multiple times per day, and the blouse has a tendency to gape at the bustline (and is made of fabric with zero give). 

So I purged those two items during the great Closet Rebuilding last week and did a last minute substitution of a floral t-shirt in the same colors and a black space dye (i.e., flecked with white) knit skirt, which looked very similar in the end but is a lot more comfortable to wear.
 

Beige/black/grey floral top (thrifted, Kohls), $1.00/wear
Black space dye skirt (Old Navy), $1.43/wear
Red cardigan (JNY), $4.33/wear
Grey leopard wedges by Cole Haan, $8.25/wear
White Rabbit pocket watch pendant (Zad), $2.69/wear

Outfit total: $17.70/wear

I could say that I wore my White Rabbit necklace because the red ties in with the red cardigan, and that wouldn't be wrong exactly--

But we know that the White Rabbit goes with everything!

A white rabbit looks great in an ensemble with red and grey.

I have four cardigans tied for MVP #4 from the Work the Wardrobe Challenge with four wears, including this red cardigan.

In other news...Another half-assed book review: the super-long edition!

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker

Let us be clear from the outset:  Contrary to the assertion from a Spanish view on the back cover, this book is NOT "the great thriller that everyone has been waiting for since the Millennium Trilogy of Stieg Larsson."  It's just not.  However, it does have some (superficial) similarities to the Millennium Trilogy and is likely to appeal to fans of that series.

So, the similarities.  There is a cold case involving the death of a teenage girl.  There is a writer investigating the death.  There are plot twists within plot twists, eventually building up an unstoppable momentum that keeps you reading despite the book's many flaws.

For me, the primary flaw was that the writing was bad.  I do not mean that it did not live up to some arbitrary standard of Good Writing or that it merely contrasted against the excellent writing in Her Fearful Symmetry.  I mean it was bad, full-stop.  Not 100% terrible all the time--it definitely rises to mediocre at times--but taken as a whole, bad.  To be fair, though, despite the New England setting, the author is Swiss and wrote the book in French, and I read an English translation.  So how much the amateurish writing was due to the author and how much was due to the translator, I can't say.  But the bad writing was problematic on two levels.

First, it kept undermining my enjoyment of the story.  One particularly egregious problem was stretches of dialogue between the protagonist (the young writer) and the primary police character.  Was the cop supposed to sound like a hard-boiled American detective of yore?  Because he just sounded like a clown much of the time.  To call him a cardboard cut-out of a character is disrespectful to actual cardboard cut-outs that manage to convey some of the compelling qualities of the person on which it is based.  Here's some representative dialogue:  "You're out of control, writer. Out of control!" / "I don't like the direction this investigation is taking, writer." / "Are you insane, writer?"/ "Shut it, writer." / "I don't know what to tell you, writer." (Because the cop invariably addresses the protagonist as "writer.")  Oh, and did I mention that this cop, despite resenting the hell out of "writer," actually encourages him to continue his own sideline investigation?  It's not just bad writing, it makes no sense.  Maybe this was intentional, so cool European readers can laugh at Americans as presented in this caricature?  I don't know. 

Second, the entire story is based on the premise that the protagonist's mentor had written a dazzling first book that was both a best-seller and a critically-acclaimed novel that immediately entered the canon of Great American Fiction.  But every snippet we see of this book (and we do see a fair bit) is pathetic, by turns mawkish, cliched, and wooden.  I mean, god, no, this is not representative of great American writing.  It is not even as good as the typical quality of writing in cheap genre fiction you can buy in the dollar store. It is rare to encounter a "cozy" mystery (in which a woman who runs a yarn shop and is friends-with-the-promise-of-more with the small town police chief manages to solve a series of twee murders with the reluctant help of her unusually intelligent cat while also renovating her once-gorgeous but now somewhat shabby mansion on the money she makes from running a brick-and-mortar yarn shop in the 21st century) with writing or characterization this lousy.

The second major flaw is that I simply could not believe that the mentor character had immediately fallen in love with this 15-year-old girl and continued to love her for decades after.  And I say this as a person who does not categorically deny that possibility at all.  I just did not find it believable in this book.  At all.  This 30-something year old guy acts in a mushy, ludicrous way that even a, well, 15-year-old girl would be embarrassed by.  Every sentiment he (claims to) feel and every statement he makes could be taken from the 9th grade math class notebook of a girl named Traci who dots the last letter of her name with a heart (circa 1985). But he's also an unreliable narrator, so who knows.

Something that stared irking me on page 1 and did not let up for the entire book was that the author seems to have virtually no understanding of life in America.  For example, our protagonist, whose first novel book had been a big hit, was not able to walk down the streets of NYC without being mobbed by fans.  The very first lines of the book are:  "My book was the talk of the town.  I could no longer walk the streets of Manhattan in peace.  I could no longer go jogging without passersby recognizing me and calling out, 'Look, it's Goldman! It's that writer!'"  Even if JK Rowling were to write a book revealing that all the Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy slash fiction was right about the fact that they were secret lovers throughout the series and were to publish it as The Truth About the Harry/Draco Affair, she would not be over-run with fans in the street the way the guy in this book supposedly is.

Another example:  As a high school freshman, the protagonist had to choose a sport.  He was late to register, so football and soccer were filled, so he had to chose between acrobatic dance and volleyball.  "So I trained with a hunger I had never shown before...and was immediately made team captain, and I didn't have to make any great efforts in order to be considered the best volleyball player in the school's history.  I easily beat the record for the number of kills made during the past twenty years--which was absolutely pathetic--and as a reward for this, my name was listed in the school's Order of Merit, something that had never before happened to a freshman....Soon afterward there was a science fair, won by an annoying little nerd named Sally.  I finished sixteenth.  At the awards ceremony, in the school auditorium, I arranged it so that I could give a speech--and made up a spiel about the weekends I had worked as a volunteer helping mentally handicapped people.  This had, I explained, taken value time away from from my science project...Of course everyone was deeply moved by this and I easily eclipsed Sally in the eyes of my teachers and classmates--and even in the eyes of Sally herself, who, having a severely handicapped little brother (something I was completely unaware of), refused her prize and demanded that it be given to me instead."  On the basis of this and beating a record for raffle-sale tickets, "a rumor [started] circulating around the high school: Marcus Goldman was an exceptional human being.  It was this observation that led students and teachers alike to call me Marcus the Magnificent."  I do not think there is a single aspect of that American high school experience that is in the slightest way realistic.  Unless we count fellow students calling this asshat "Marcus the Magnificent" as an ironic nickname, the way they might call a fat dude "Tiny" but with 3000% less respect implied.

Listening to the protagonist talk about himself is a lot like listening to Trump talk about himself, actually.  The difference is that Marcus the Magnificent knows that it's a lie.

All this said, I did enjoy reading the book.  It had a strangely compelling nature.

Also, I do not fully discount the possibility that this book and the prominent favorable comparison to the Millennium Trilogy are not elements of a great conspiracy by the publishing world to so infuriate the ghost of Stieg Larsson that he returns to life to continue writing his outstanding thrillers.