Impatient With Desire?

"You shouldn't have to work so hard to read a book.", my friend told me, when I told her about my frustration in reading Impatient With Desire.

Ms Burton seemed to be trying to get SO much information in this novel that it made it a muddle to try and read.

The journal entries themselves were hard to follow. Many entries seemed to be talking about several different periods of time within the same entry and it wasn't always clear (to me) when. There were many lists of people, far too many to keep track of in this fairly slim volume. While I was reading I repeatedly referred back to previous entries, trying to figure out who was who and when something was happening or had happened.

Ms. Burton's goal was to help readers have a better understanding of pioneers, as well as get a glimpse into one woman's heroic journey. In this she (at least partially) succeeded. There were some exquisite and evocative passages in the book, describing their lives in Illinois before leaving for California, Tamsen's fierce longing to travel and be part of the western migration, her love for her husband and children, as well as of the horrors they endured during those four and half months in the mountains.

I loved some of the individual passages in this book. Reader friendly? Not so much.

Impatient With Desire

I just read Gabrielle Burton's comment on the blog (!), author of Impatient With Desire, one of the books I have been planning to read. I'm delighted that she wrote, and for her (and your) information, I did choose to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao first, only because it just seemed more appealing at the moment I was choosing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just a timing thing.

(Perhaps GB's book title is apt...might she be impatient with desire for people to read her book?)

I am about halfway through Oscar, and it did take me a little bit to get into it. The style is unusual, though I like it, told sort of from a friend's point of view of looking in on Oscar and his family. My sad (and very distant) two years of high school Spanish isn't near enough for me to understand all of the sprinklings of Spanish in the book, which is a bit of a drawback for me as a reader. I look up the Spanish words I don't know when I'm near a computer, but so often I am reading on the train or somewhere my computer isn't, so miss some of the meaning. Diaz also uses lots of footnotes, mostly telling more detail about the political situation in the Dominican Republic, which is helpful, though sometimes they are rather dense. I am reading most of them.