‘Waiting’ for a good book

Having just finished Waiting by Ha Jin, I have one question:

How the fuck did this win the National Book Award?

Here’s the story:

A young man marries a woman his parents want him to marry.  However, he’s ashamed of her because she isn’t pretty and has unfashionably bound feet.  So he lives far away at the hospital he works at and comes to visit his wife and daughter once a year.  Then he meets a nurse at the hospital and decides he wants to marry her.  But he can’t seem to manage it each year for 18 years.  Meanwhile his wife remains devoted to him.  Finally he gets his divorce, marries the nurse (who’s become a psycho-shrew in the meantime) who has twin boys and turns out has a serious soon-to-be-fatal heart condition.  In the end, he tells his ex-wife that his new wife will be dying soon, and asks if she’ll help him raise the twins.  And she agrees.

Riiiiiiight.

I just don’t know where to start in describing my extreme dislike of this book.  Maybe it’s my complete lack of respect for the main character–the doctor.  He’s a spineless pathetic weasel who’s so wrapped up in his own world that he doesn’t even concern himself with playing any role in raising his daughter or supporting his wife beyond the money he brings home once a year.  And yet two women are so in love with this loser?  The only people in the book who seemed remotely interesting and likable were his long-suffering first wife and their daughter.

Overall, the book just didn’t seem particularly well written.  While I have to say it was slightly better Dough (although what wouldn’t be?), I really didn’t enjoy it at all.

So…2 stinkers in a row I’m afraid.  I think I may have to add another wildcard selection to my pile, so I can be sure of a winner.  It could be time for …..my man Murakami!!!!

Samara gets some religion (in the mail)

So I’m still working on “Waiting” and frankly I’m still not lovin’ it.  Which is really affecting my ability to get the damn thing READ.  Yet I persevere, solely for the sake of the blizzard.  In the meantime, I’ve started my ‘wildcard’ book:  For the Love of Animals:  The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement by Kathryn Shevelow.  I haven’t gotten too far but I fear that tears may be shed as I delve into this one.  Actually, I fear that tears may be shed if I don’t hurry up and finish Waiting also.

In other developments, I received my copy of Left Behind:  A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins from Bookmooch (gasp, only 146 copies available!!)  This is a novelization of the Biblical book of revelation, and the first book in a series popular amongst the Christian folk of this country.  The person I mooched it from kindly offered to send additional books from the series – I politely declined.  This will fulfil the ‘controversial’ book requirement for the blizzard.  Once I finish it, I’ll let you know my take on why it’s so controversial.

I’m really quite curious to find out how it ends.  I mean, do all of us non-believers really burn in the eternal fires of hell?  Get out o’ here!  And how do Catholics and Mormons fit into this whole deal?  Not to mention the Hindus and the Buddhists and Tom Cruise?  And how much does that little Jesus fish on your car help your chances of eternal salvation?   Because that might be a sacrifice I’m willing to make….

I’m Waiting!

So my first book of the new challenge is Waiting by Ha Jin.  I was going to read this for the summer challenge but for some reason it kept getting bumped.  I just started it, but the plot is this:  a Chinese doctor is trapped in a loveless marriage, living apart from his wife and daughter and in love with a nurse at the hospital he works at.  Every year he goes home to his village to divorce his wife so he can marry the nurse but every year she decides she doesn’t want a divorce.

I’m going to try not to be too judgmental until I finish this book or at least get more into it, but right now I’m primarily feeling sympathy towards the wife.  It seems to me that mainly her husband is more ashamed of her (she’s not pretty and she has bound feet – the story begins in the 1960s amid the Cultural Revolution) than not ‘in love’ with her.  He wants a wife that he can bring to the hospital and not be embarrassed.  Meanwhile, this woman has taken care of his dying mother and then his father, raised their daughter pretty much alone, as well as managed the household on her own, with no complaints about her absent husband.

Oh wow, what a bitch!  I would totally want to divorce her too.

Yeah, so like I said, we’ll see what happens in the rest of the book.  I mean, it’s definitely better than (must I speak its name??) Dough….

Samara