And I am once again reminded that most of the time lit-fic is just not my thing. Willa Cather is good with words, but I just don’t get her writing.
I chose this book as part of the Western challenge for Read Harder, and because I’ve owned it for years and years and years. It was a quick read, only 150 pages, and I read through it in a night. But I didn’t get very much out of it.
A Lost Lady is about a woman who is idolized by our narrator, and as she grows older, the bloom begins to come off the rose, so to speak. Cather parallels the decline of said lady and her pioneer husband, who is crippled in a horse-riding accident, with the decline of the frontier, and the commercialization of the western US. It’s very much elegiac in tone, but I honestly could not care less. It sort of honestly irks me that a lady writer keeps writing all these books about ladies that are idolized (wrongly) by men, and the ladies then “fall”, only for the men to realize oh hey, women are only people. She did it in My Antonia as well.
I would like to hear opinions from someone who likes Cather as an author, as I think this really might be a case of wrong book and author for me, not that Cather isn’t talented.
Anyway, I read this, so I have officially completed the 2018 Read Harder Challenge, unlike last year’s, at which I failed abysmally.
Read Harder Challenge 2018: A western.
Did you read Study in Scarlet for your Holmes reading? Doesn’t half of that take place in Utah?
Yeah, but I felt weird counting that, as it was written by a Brit. I feel like for it to be an actual Western, an American has to write it. Especially since that bit of the novel is full of historical inaccuracy and exoticising of Mormons.