Title: Prairie Silence: A Rural Expatriate’s Journey to Reconcile Home, Love, and Faith
Author: Melanie Hoffert
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2013
Publisher: Beacon Press
Acquired: Book Expo America
Rating:

Review: Melanie Hoffert grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota, a town of around 500 people on the edge of the prairie. Like many young people in rural America, Hoffert became part of a growing pattern of out-migration, moving to the Twin Cities to pursue her career and escape the pressured silence that surrounded her deepest secret:

Over the last 10 years I have been trying to resolve a seemingly simple dilemma: how to tell the state of North Dakota that I am gay. This might sound crazy, but if you are from the heart of the country you might understand that you are part of a world that is more connected than any social networking phenomenon of the digital age. Your personal profile is peeked at, commented on, and updated at every hometown shower, funeral, wedding, pig roast, street dance, and Sunday morning church service – even if you don’t live in the small town anymore.

Living in the city I’ve learned that it is possible to retreat from the world and become anonymous. The more people, the more control I have over my identity – even to the point of erasing it. Yet I can never escape the world where I am from. … I no longer live with these people, but they will live with me. I will never be anonymous, and yet – I will never be known either.

In this part of the world, if you have a secret, it does not necessarily belong to you or your family or even God. It belongs to the place you are from, because eventually to resolve everything, to truly find peace, you must come to terms with the place your inner soul calls home. In my case, this place is the North Dakota prairie.

In Prairie Silence, Hoffert chronicles her journey home to North Dakota to help her family with the harvest and her process of coming to terms with the veil of silence she and her community, together, pulled over her identity. To tell this story, Hoffert also looks back to her teenage exploration of her sexuality and her faith, and how those formative experiences affected her decisions to leave home and return again.

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I promise, I promise, this is the last of the “business-y” posts I’m going to do before getting back to writing about books. It feels like I haven’t written a full book review in forever (although a look back at my archive says it’s only been about three weeks). But before I can do that, I have to do this little retrospective and look forward at my reading goals.

At the beginning of last year, I made up a list of six resolutions I was going to work on in 2012. And, looking back at them, I had pretty mixed results.

FAILS: Complete my Essay a Day Project | Complete the 2012 TBR Challenge | Re-read the rest of Harry Potter

Looking back, I think it’s interesting that the goals I COMPLETELY failed on were goals about reading very specific things — a genre, and a predetermined challenge list, and a well-loved series. I think I am more interested in following my interests when I read, which makes specific reading projects hard for me to complete.

IN THE MIDDLE: Write reviews within two weeks of finishing a book.

I was definitely better about writing reviews in a timely manner this year, but still let many of them languish (I finished Ex Libris, which I just wrote about in my 2012 catch up post, in April, for example). But, I did find a format for writing mini-reviews that I really like, which helped keep me semi-caught up. I will be continuing that in 2013.

WINS: Balance review, library, and personal reading | Give myself a break

I cannot tell you how absolutely thrilled I am that I was able to successfully balance review copies and other books this year; I came out almost exactly at the ratio I was hoping for. I’m not quite sure how it happened, other than I did work hard to be more selective about the review copies I accepted and brought home fewer books from BEA. And, I’ve just gotten better, in general, about giving myself a break in most aspects of my life. I feel good about that too.

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I’ll be honest, I’m never sure if sharing a post of reading statistics is interesting to anyone but me. But since I find them endlessly fascinating, and this is my blog, you’ll have to indulge me for this post!

One of the reasons I like doing statistics posts like this one is that I often find that my impressions of my reading — what kinds of books I read, what types of books I was reading — are often very different than what I actually read. I often overestimate the amount of fiction I read and while underestimating the number of review copies, for example. It’s interesting for me to look closely at all of the information I gather about the books I’ve read and see what it can tell me about my reading life.

The Basics

• 110 books read (109 in 2011)
• 34,883 pages read (34,127 in 2011)
• 93.5 hours listened (58 in 2011)
• 671 pages per week (656 in 2011)
• 96 pages per day (93.5 in 2011)

Longest Book: A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin (873 pages). Interestingly, my longest book of 2011 was also by Martin (A Game of Thrones). Will my longest book of 2013 be another Martin book, A Storm of Swords (1,008 pages)?

Shortest Book: The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone (181 pages)

Most Common Book Length: 288 pages (8 books)

Oldest Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Books Published in 2012: 52 of 110 (47 percent)

Most Frequent Publisher: Crown (9 books)

Author Gender: 56 female authors, 51 male authors

Books by Genre

And now my favorite part of any book stats post, the charts! This first one shows a breakdown of my fiction versus nonfiction reading. Of the 110 books I read this year, 62 were nonfiction (56 percent) and 48 were fiction (44 percent).

In 2011, I read 64 percent nonfiction and 36 percent fiction, so it looks like this year my amount of nonfiction went down just a little bit. I think, perhaps, that is because I had quicker access to more popular fiction from my local library, so I read more of the big fiction books from the year.

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I like to start out each new reading year with a clean slate, so I decided to do some mini-reviews of all the books that, for whatever reason, I ended up not writing about more fully this year. It’s a mixed bag — there are a few books I just didn’t have much to say about, and there are others that I had many thoughts but never got around to writing them down. There are several that I just felt “meh” about, and several others that I loved.

If you have more questions about any of these, feel free to leave them in the comments!

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman – Ex Libris is a lovely, must read collection of essays by one of my favorite authors. In the brief book, Fadiman writes about her lifelong love of books, tackling the questions that vex most readers – if and how to combine libraries with your spouse, the odd bookshelves for idiosyncratic passions, and the proper treatment of books. This is a lovely book that I highly recommend.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – I got really excited when the first trailer for Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby came out, so I decided to re-read the book. Fitzgerald’s writing is even more lovely than I remember – sparse but evocative and rich – but the plot still doesn’t do much for me. I am, however, even more excited to see it on the big screen. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is going to be a wonderful Gatsby.

Bossypants by Tin Fey (audio book) – I was prepared to fall in love with Bossypants, but for whatever reason it just didn’t grab me. I really enjoyed many of Fey’s stories, particularly those near the end that talk about her career and challenges as a woman writer, but on the whole this one wasn’t so great that I felt compelled to write or talk about it much… trust me, I’m super bummed about that!

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