Dune

As I started reading this book, literally one of my first thoughts was Why has no one ever recommended this book to me? I was sucked in from the first chapter. I had been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to finish the 800+ page novel in the course of a month but found instead that I couldn’t put it down.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not usually a science fiction fan. I don’t enjoy books full of futuristic battle scenes, evil alien overlords, or intergalactic romance with badly written female characters. I do, however, enjoy engaging action, multi-faced characters, and the dynamics of relationships, all of which Frank Herbert’s Dune has. I’m a firm believer that excellent literature can come in any genre, and this book was a great example. It touched on a variety of topics, including politics, addiction, loyalty, environmentalism, religion, racism, gluttony, marginalization, self-fulfilling prophecies, parental love, nepotism, and the idea of the common good, just to name a few.

I kept having to remind myself that this book was written almost fifty years ago. The technologies described seemed so believable that the suspension of disbelief usually needed for stories set on other planets in the distant future was hardly needed. The characters felt contemporary and the issues – such as mining for spice resources and the extreme water shortage  - caricatures of our own current problems. I also have to give credit to authors who can weave such intricate stories and back stories as to need to include appendices and glossaries in the back of their own novel.

I really enjoyed the shifts in the point of view, giving insight into many of the different characters in the story. It was fascinating to watch the protagonist, Paul, evolve from a sheltered teenager from a royal household to a highly-revered messianic leader of a rebellion, and to follow his mother, Jessica, as she struggles between understanding the grandiose destinies of her family and fostering maternal feelings and instincts.

Despite my apprehensions about reading a brick-sized scifi novel, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. Even if you don’t usually read science fiction.

Anya’s Ghost

I was excited to include a graphic novel on my reading list this year, and specifically planned to read Anya’s Ghost, the story of a teenager who falls down a well and becomes friends with a ghost, in October for its spooky Halloween qualities. I’ve been reading a lot of creepy books lately – first the vampire novel The Historian, followed by the zombie love story Warm Bodies and the supernatural Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I’m not quite sure where all of this weird sci-fi/supernatural/other-worldly stuff is coming from, but as next month I’m reading the science fiction classic Dune I’m expecting it to just get weirder. Tina Fey’s Bossypants in December is going to come as a well-deserved respite from the land of speculative fiction.

Anyway, I read Anya’s Ghost in about an hour and a half or so – it’s over 200 pages but as it’s a graphic novel it goes rather quickly, and felt like watching a short film. As I said, it’s a story about a girl who befriends a ghost (not at all like Casper, if that’s what you’re thinking), but more than that it’s about a Russian girl growing up in America and trying to deal with her family, high school, and dreaded runs in gym class. Over the course of the story she learns her lessons – that people aren’t always what they seem, that family is important, that maybe you shouldn’t walk around with a person’s bone around your neck on a string so you have your own pet ghost to help you cheat on exams. Although that last one seemed like a no-brainer to me, but to each his own.

I enjoyed this book, which reminded me a lot of Persepolis, in both it’s leading character and it’s simply drawn grayscale artwork. It’s a lovely ghost story for October, equal parts charming and creepy.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

I finished this book ages ago, and have read multiple things since then, so this is going to be another abbreviated blog post.

I added this book to my 2012 reading list for a couple of reasons: 1, it’s a classic I had never read, and 2, I was fascinated by the character of Captain Nemo in the film version of the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. In the movie, fictional characters including Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, and Dr.Jekyll/Mr. Hyde go on adventures together aboard the Nautilus with Nemo himself, and the portrayal of both the man and the boat were intriguing. It’s modern technology designed in the Victorian era, a veritable steam-punk visual interpretation.

So upon reading the book, I expected maritime adventures, which I got plenty of. There were plenty of descriptions of deep sea aquatic life, beautiful scenery and of course, the lost city of Atlantis. The basic plot of the book is this: Boats traveling the ocean have been reporting a massive animal, possibly a whale or a narwhal, menacingly lurking in the waters. An academic, his butler, and a whaler board a boat to help track it, and after a confrontation with the creature they discover that it is not an animal but a submarine, controlled by the Captain Nemo, who takes them on as prisoners. When he learns that the one man is an academic, he treats him nearly as an equal, but explains that the men will never be able to leave the ship as no one can know that he (Nemo) is alive and controlling the machine.  The three men stay on board for a while – enough to travel the length of twenty thousand leagues while under the sea – but eventually escape, after Nemo attacks a boat from his homeland, killing all on board, in retaliation for something done to his family.

In the end, I had lots of questions. What happened to Nemo and his family that caused him to exile himself to the bottom of the seas, and kill innocent people as retribution? What happens to the Nautilus and its crew after they hit the maelstrom? Does the narrator tell the world about Nemo, or do the men keep his secret? I wanted to know a lot more about Nemo – who he was, why he did the things he did – but Jules Verne left this pretty ambiguous, which frustrated me. I did, however, like reading about the technologies that Verne imagined in the 1870s such as breathing apparatuses, energy production, and undersea tracking. I wish the book had explored the character of Nemo more and described the undersea landscape less.

The Historian

While I may have much more free time now that I have moved, I have significantly less internet. Actually I have no internet at my apartment, as I'm waiting until I can get internet and cable connected at the same time, and currently don't have a fully-functioning TV. All this to say that I'm getting a lot more reading done, but also a whole lot less blogging.

Case in point: I finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova back in early August, but haven't had the chance to write about it until now. It was a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but as I've read three books since then, I can't remember it well enough to give it a complete and well-thought-out blog post. And that really is a travesty, as I literally could not put it down and attempted to read while cooking dinner, which happens to be really hard to do when the book is a hefty 689 pages and you're trying to hold it in one hand and stir pasta with the other.

The book revolved around the tracking of the vampire Dracula, mixing fact with fiction and lore to create a hauntingly believable tale that crossed centuries and borders. There were times that I would have to stop myself from reading it at night because while it was absolutely compelling it was often really creepy. It was also very reminiscent of classic novels, featuring multiple family generations and often told through letters. Before I even finished it I recommended it to my sister, explaining it as a combination between Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring. It's full of history, legend, academia, mystery, and a dash of romance.

Multiple friends of mine whose literary taste I trust had recommended this book to me, so despite being hesitant about reading a bestseller about vampires (been there, learned that lesson), I added it to this year's list anyway, and am glad that I did. This was a great novel.

A Room with a View

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog a little lately – okay, more than a little, it’s been over two months since I last posted, which is not at all like me. I’ve been really busy, I promise! Since I last updated with my review of The Help, I was hired full-time at my office (yay!) and finally made the move to Columbus (double yay!!). Unfortunately I totally missed finishing a book in the month of July. At one point I thought I would be able to make it in the last few days of the month, only to realize that I had got September’s book instead. Sigh.

So now that I’m in my own place, and have a lot more free time on my hands, I was able to get and read July’s book, A Room with a View by E. M. Forester. The novel is about a young woman and her chaperone traveling in Italy sometime before the First World War, with a major theme being the societal roles of women at the turn of the last century. The young female lead, Lucy, is quite an independent young woman, especially for her time period. She wants to learn and have adventures but all of those things are considered “unladylike” and instead she is expected to do a little traveling, meet a nice young man, settle down and get married. While she is in Italy with her older cousin Charlotte they stay at a pension (a term I learned while reading The World According to Garp) and meet the eccentric novelist Eleanor, two kind elderly sisters traveling the world, a kindhearted and funny but socially improper gentleman, and his young son, George, who, if he lived today, would be exactly like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer: a sad, creative hipster hoping to meet a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

While Lucy doesn’t quite fit the mold of the uber-bubbly and quirky as the stock Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she is a kind and thoughtful young woman that everyone seems to be drawn to. She has two men in her life: the successful and traditional but boring and condescending Cecil, and the odd and progressive but exciting and romantic George. The two men represent the conflicting parts of her life: the conventional lady that her elders expect her to be, and the unconventional woman that she wants to be. Should she follow societal norms and become the perfect hostess and housewife, or follow her own heart and strike out on her own, getting a flat in London and seeing the world her own way?

What I loved about Lucy is that despite being innocent and naïve to a point, she also knows that she is, and longs to discover things for herself. She is constantly frustrated and people telling her what she can do and what she can’t and how she should feel and what she should want. In an important scene where she (Spoiler Alert!) breaks her engagement with Cecil, she tells him,

“I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you?”

In a wonderful moment for ladies everywhere, she chooses to think for herself instead of succumbing to those who try to control her life. Good for you, Lucy! She may not know exactly what she wants for her life, but she knows what she doesn’t. In the end, it’s almost as if she were the emotional, brooding creative type (she plays the piano exquisitely) who needed a Manic Pixie Dream Guy like George Emerson, who runs around in his shorts after playing in mud puddles and kisses her amongst the violets without asking her first, to show her what life is really like.

I really enjoyed this novel, and could tell it was written at the cusp of the flapper era, where women like Lucy often did the unconventional. It reminded me of a mix between Pride and Prejudice and The Importance of Being Earnest, with a little bit of modern British romantic comedies stirred in for good measure.

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The Help

I know what you're thinking - "It's only the 8th, isn't that a little early for you to be posting the June book review?" Considering my history, where usually I'm just now getting around to posting the last month's book review, you're right.

But I've already finished The Help! I just started it yesterday afternoon and stayed up until 3 a.m. last night finishing it. I don't think I've read an entire book that quickly since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out twelve years ago and hid out in my junior-high bedroom and gobbled up the whole thing in one sitting.

I put off reading Kathryn Stockett's The Help for a long time. It was all over the media, and the bestseller bookshelves, and everyone and their brother was reading it, which made me a little skeptical. Lots of things make the bestseller list just for being popular, and I didn't want to end up reading another Nicholas Sparks novel but set in Mississippi in the 60s.

But after it was adapted into an Oscar-award-winning movie and was still on the charts long after it's debut, I figured it was time to give it a chance. Last June I decided to give Eat Pray Love a chance and ended up loving it - and the same thing happened with The Help. It's a great novel, full of poignant stories and characters that you grow to love/hate. A quote on the cover compared it to To Kill A Mockingbird, which was a little much for me - sure, it deals with the same issues of race relations in the south, but The Help just didn't have the timeless quality that TKAM does, at least in my opinion. It's a great summer beach or book club read that shows what it's like to be a black woman working as a domestic during the tumultuous 1960s. It reminded me a little of the musical Hairspray, a kind of light-hearted and easy-to-grasp story of racial tension. Not that it was completely sugar coated; there were plenty of sad and horrible things that happened to these women, but for me, it was predicable. Of course women were going to eventually open up, of course the book would get published, of course Stuart wouldn't be as perfect as she expected, of course the ladies would gain some ground.

I know the book has gotten some flak for being a feel-good version of the south, "written by a white woman to make other white women feel better about how blacks were treated," to paraphrase some reviews I've heard. But you know, it got people thinking about racism both then and now, and the movie earned Octavia Spencer an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress - making her one of only 6 black women to ever earn an Academy Award acting. And even if it wasn't on the same level as TKAM, I know I sure couldn't put it down. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good novel to enjoy and think about over their summer vacation.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

This was a lovely book that I am so glad to have read. Set just before World War I, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith is the coming-of-age story of a little girl named Francie growing up in New York. We meet her as a child, get flashbacks to her parents lives to learn the circumstances into which she was born, and follow her through her early teens as she experiences school and work and life. In my version there is a forward by Anna Quindlen, who explains that the plot of the book is hard to pin down, but the best way to describe it is as a book about "what it means to be human." I would agree, this novel is not just about a little girl growing up in a sad family in a poor neighborhood, but it's about relationships with your parents, learning about love, doing your best, making the most out of life, and all those little lessons that life teaches you without you really realizing it.

Francie is a wonderful character. She reminds me a little bit of Scout Finch in her intelligence and tenacity. She's not as much of a tomboy as Scout was, but she has that same understanding of the world - that doing what's right is important. She didn't understand when people treated others unjustly, just like Scout. They both have this quality that makes them simultaneously innocent and mature beyond their years, and I suspect that this is part of what has made both of them such beloved characters.

I could see myself a lot in Francie - she was a shy and quiet little girl, who loved reading and spent much of her time at the library. She vowed to read every single book they had and later wanted to become an author, writing stories and compositions in school. Her proudest moment was getting published in her school's magazine, and I could resonate with her excitement as she saw her name in print for the first time. She was also the kind of girl who was often lonely, especially in a crowded room of people, but was independent and didn't mind spending time by herself.

It was interesting to read this right after The World According to Garp. Both books follow the lives of a young character who wants to become a writer, discussing their lives and their families and their thoughts. Both of them have plots that are hard to pin down and both are set in a specific time and place in American history, both on the outskirts of a war. And yet the two are told so differently! I think I've decided that part of the reason I didn't like Garp was that I couldn't find any meaning behind it. People tried to do things that made them happy, but for what? Most of them ended up unhappy, having lived a ridiculous and bizarre life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, on the other hand, featured people struggling through unhappiness in a routine and mundane life, and ending up happy. Where the characters of Garp seemed to spiral out of control into weirder and weirder individuals, the characters of Brooklyn gathered themselves and stood proudly, becoming better than they were at the start. Even if it didn't have an outright moral, Smith's book gave live meaning - even boring, everyday life. I would recommend it in a heartbeat and am sure I will read it again.

The World According to Garp

Admittedly, when I read the description of this book, I knew it was going to be weird. I’m used to weird. Last year I read Slaughterhouse-Five and A Handmaid’s Tale, I am prepared for strange. But The World According to Garp was a whole new kind of weird.
  
When people fell from the sky and turned into animals in The Satanic Verses, it wasn’t a problem because you could tell Rushdie was using magical realism to prove a point. When Alex and his gang broke into houses and raped women in A Clockwork Orange it was disturbing but made sense in a dystopian novel. When Chief started talking about listening machines in the walls in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it didn’t phase me because he was in an asylum at the time. But with Garp, all the characters are basically normal people but have the most messed-up lives of just about any book I have read.

The novel starts with nurse Jenny Fields, a young woman who is so practical as to have almost no emotions besides a strong maternal instinct. She decides she wants to have a baby but has no interest in men or romance, so she essentially rapes a nearly-braindead and dying young soldier in her hospital in order to impregnate herself. Weird. And things start getting more strange from there.

 She raises her son – named Technical Sergeant Garp, after what was written on his father’s dog tags – on the grounds at an all-boys school where he grows up about as normal as a kid in his circumstances can. He falls in love with his wrestling coach’s daughter, whom he eventually marries after he and his mother live for a while in Vienna, where he befriends the local prostitutes (weird). During their time in Europe Jenny writes a book about her life and becomes a famous feminist in the process. It’s a really complicated storyline so I won’t go into the whole thing, but some of the highlights include Garp and his wife dating another couple, a former pro-football player who has a sex change, a horrible car accident that causes a child to loose an eye, an assassination, a crazed stalker, women who willingly have their tongues cut out as a political statement, and a story about a bear who rides a unicycle in a hotel hallway. Just to name a few.

Honestly, it is one of the more bizarre books I’ve read – probably up there with Vonnegut’s Galapagos, where over the course of a couple hundred years all humans evolve into hairy seal-like creatures on a single island. By the end of the novel I wasn’t sure if I liked it or hated it. I felt like I was watching a ridiculous soap opera full of sex, far-fetched scenes, and ridiculous familial relationships. Things that seemed to have little impact on the story (like young Garp biting a dog that once bit him) were described in great detail, while other very important events (a certain death in the story) were tiptoed around and never fully explained.

In the end, The World According to Garp read like a fictionalized celebrity tell-all rather than a novel of literary merit. Why was this popular in the 70s? I have no idea why this book was such a big deal. I will say one thing, though: this makes the third book about characters with psychological issues on my list this year.

The Bell Jar

This month's selection, The Bell Jar, was included on the 2012 reading list for a few different reasons: first, it is considered a classic, as in a no English major worth their salt has never read Sylvia Plath kind of classic; and second, it is important to me to read classic novels written by women. I choose my reading list after carefully scouring best-seller lists, lists of American classics, and recommendations from other readers. It seems that, overwhelmingly, the books commonly considered to be classics - both traditional and modern - are written by men. Out of TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 novels, only 15 had female authors. That's less than a quarter, which seems low to me, as women have been publishing novels since the mid 1800s or earlier.

Last year somehow turned out to be the year of distopian novels, and it seems that this year might be the year of characters with psychological disorders - two out of the three books I've read this year have been set in a mental hospital. It was actually very interesting to see how the hospital Esther stayed at compared to the hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published only a year before, in 1962. In Cuckoo's Nest the hospital was much like a prison, where in Bell Jar it was more like a dormitory. Chief and McMurphy had horrible experiences with the shock treatments, while Esther's went pretty smoothly. And no surprise, considering the contrast in treatments - the men got worse, while Esther got better.

This book is a fascinating insight into the life of a young woman in the 60s. She felt monumentally alone, being distanced emotionally from her family and somewhat outcast among her peers. Her stream of dates and writing scholarship to New York made her seem happy, but deep down she never was, and didn't know how to deal with it. Her journey into insanity was very subtle - I didn't realize how odd she was acting until she threw all of her clothes out of the window and into the wind. Esther's downfall escalated from there, eventually finding her holed up in a dark part of the basement after swallowing a bottle of pills.



I was struck by how much this novel reminded me of the movie Girl, Interrupted - until I found out that it is based off of the memoir of a woman who spent time in a psychiatric hospital during the 60s when she was young. It's no wonder that when I was reading I kept imagining the hospital in the film. The girl she knew in the hospital, Joan, reminded me a lot of Brittany Murphy's character Daisy, who also seemed well adjusted but came to the same tragic end.

This novel was beautifully written, which gave it an almost haunting quality, as it is essentially about a young girl's life. Below is one of my favorite passages, written about the weather:

"When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew strait down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalk with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete." - pg. 41

How delicious is that writing? This is why it is important to read books like The Bell Jar. New books focused on plot just don't have the same quality.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

*Spoiler Alert: I'm going to talk about all three of the novels, so if you haven't finished them yet, don't read any further! I also ruin a couple other novels, so be careful.* 

I'm not one to give into trends just because everyone else is doing them. Just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean that it is good, so before I read a trendy book or shell out the money to see a big-name film, I check to see what critics are saying about it and how friends with similar tastes feel. I put off reading Eat, Pray, Love because every Oprah-watching soccer mom I ever met swore by it, and I don't usually have the same tastes in books as they do; but after seeing the author speak in a TED talk, I gave the book a chance and loved it. I was anxious to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, especially after a movie adaptation was announced, but after the advice of a similar-minded friend who said "don't waste your time," I chose not to read it.

So when everyone and their mother started talking about The Hunger Games, I was only somewhat interested. Another YA trilogy about a teenage girl? There are a million of those out right now, filling up the somewhat depressing "Supernatural Romance" shelf in the teen section at Barnes & Noble. Not worth my time. But then people started telling me I needed to read it - people I majored in English with at college, well-read people studying to be teachers, basically everyone who loved the same books I did. So I decided to give it a chance, picked up a copy at the bookstore - and read the first book in less than two days. I was hooked.

I described the first novel to my sister as a cross between Harry Potter and The Giver. Suzanne Collins writes much like J.K. Rowling, with simple fluid words, captivating characters, and forward-marching plots that leave you telling yourself, just one more chapter, then I'll stop for a while. And much like when I read Rowling's books, I couldn't put them down and devoured them almost all in one sitting. The Harry Potter series, The Giver, and The Hunger Games trilogy have one pivotal thing in common: they are using the experiences of a single character in order to teach the reader a much larger lesson about life. Potter is about friendship, loyalty, doing what's right in the face of adversity. The Giver is about remembering your past, gaining knowledge, learning what it means to be human. The Hunger Games is about protecting the innocent, ending senseless wars, and doing what is right for your community.

The first novel had me captivated. Katniss is a different type of heroine: tomboyish, intelligent, and brave, but views herself as no one special and has a hard time understanding what everyone else sees in her. She is compassionate, although she doesn't like to show weakness; is pretty, but in a simple way; and responsible almost to a fault. She's complicated - which makes her realistic. The first book introduced us to Panem, the country governed by the spoiled and treacherous Captial, and the Games, which were contrived to put each of the twelve Districts into their place by forcing them to watch their children fight each other to the death on live television as if it were a horrible version of Survivor mixed with American Idol. But despite the pageant-like interviews, the training, the blood-thirsty teenagers and cruel Gamemaker's twists that reminded me of The Truman Show, Katniss and her fellow tribute Peeta buck the system, getting the Capitol to let both of them survive by pretending to be in love and drawing on the emotions of the audience.

The second novel shows us just how vile the Capitol really is. In a power-play after being upstaged from a couple of teenagers from the least important district, they announce that the next Games, in honor of their 75th year, will be comprised of previous winners fighting to leave one victor alive. Think Survivor: All-Star but with people ranging from 17 to 80, many of whom have gone nearly insane after surviving their own games only to have to serve as a mentor to other young tributes and watch them die year after year. This rag-tag group of people are forced to compete and quietly bind together in order to break out of the arena and escape to the supposedly-destroyed District 13, where they start a rebellion against the Capitol.

Katniss finds herself at the center of the rebellion, as its symbol, the Mockingjay. In the third book we learn that her hometown has been destroyed and many of its people lost their lives. Kind-hearted Peeta has been captured and tortured into believing he hates Katniss. The president has a personal vendetta against her. She is injured and traumatized over the fact that she has caused all of the problems the world is now facing. I keep having to remind myself that she's only 18 and has experienced so much death, destruction and heartbreak. It's no wonder she is often hiding in closets. When she regains some strength she starts visiting other districts in hopes of rallying the troops and giving the rebellion some hope for their future. Eventually she and other members of the rebellion take the capital - but not without the loss of plenty more lives, including that of her beloved sister, which sets her over the edge. The leader of District 13 takes over as president and proposes a new version of the Games, this time pitting the survivors of the Capitol leaders against each other. Katniss, who seems to be the only one seeing the big picture, realizes that as long as someone tries to gain power by force and punishment, nothing will ever truly change. So she kills the president from 13, forever cancelling the Hunger Games as a national show of power. Finally she is sent back to her home in 12, to live out the rest of her life, knowing that despite all she did to protect her little sister, she couldn't save her in the end.

And now for the Epilogue. At the end of the series, Katniss is a mess. Her sister is dead, her mother has left her, her best friend is never coming back, and the deaths of all of those she was forced to kill or inadvertently caused to die haunt her forever. But a new Panem is emerging, one that is a much better place than the one she grew up in. And as the years go by she and Peeta come to rely on each other again, and in the end they are together, raising their children, collecting and honoring the memories of all those who fought in the Games, getting through the hard times by focusing on the good ones.

I know a lot of people were disappointed with the end of the series. I believe that it was a perfect ending in the sense that it could not have happened any other way. After everything that happened - the Games, the rebellion, the deaths - there is no way there could have been a happy white-picket-fence ending. At the end of the day, this was a tale of war and loss and coming out on the other side - it was not intended as a love story. I wanted Katniss and Peeta to live happily ever after just like everyone else, but given the life they led and the world they live in, it would have been a disservice to portray them as a perfect couple in such a broken and imperfect world. Personally, I can't think of a better way to end the book than with them, together, surviving, and happy, or at least as happy as they can be. Was it sad to see them afraid to have children, tortured by nightmares, disturbed by the world around around them? Of course. But that is what war does to people. It's not pretty. When I closed the third and final book my heart felt heavy for them, as it did at the end of 1984 when despite everything Winston does to rebel , he finds himself betraying his true love and succumbing to Big Brother. Or at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when the Chief suffocates McMurphy for his own good. Or in Never Let Me Go, where Kath must guide her friends toward death as they are forced to donate their organs as they are were clones created for spare parts.

Have you seen the film Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson? I features Ferrel as a man who finds himself to be the main character in a novel being written by Thompson. She has decided that his character will die, and doesn't want to change the ending, because as a writer, when you create a character they take on a life of their own and sometimes you have to let them do things that you don't want them to do. It's what makes them real. I remember seeing an interview with Rowling where she said how much she cried when she killed Cedric, because she didn't want him to die, but knew he had to. That's what happened with Katniss and Peeta - Collins couldn't have written them happy-go-lucky, it wasn't in their nature. And I'm glad they weren't forced into that role.

In the end, I'm glad I read these books, and highly recommend them. They're hard to read, but equally hard to put down. 

Jurassic Park

I am a Michael Crichton fan, so it wasn't hard to decide to put this classic on my 2012 reading list. I was first introduced to him the summer before my junior year in high school. My English teacher for the next year gave us a reading list for the summer, which included The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible, and inexplicibly, Crichton's recently published Timeline (I was a junior in 2003, it was released in 1999). Seeing as the rest of our list was classic novels written during or about American history, this one seemed a little out of place. But my friends and I read our books anyway, writing the required 1-page reflection on each one, and brought them to the first day of class like we were told. When we asked our teacher later why it had been required reading, she said something along the lines of "I thought it was a fun book and that you guys would enjoy a break from the heavier stuff." I have to give her credit, she was probably the teacher who influenced me the most when it came to enjoying and analyzing literature. She also introduced us to The Goonies, for which I am forever grateful.

Anyway, after my first brush with Crichton's work then, I scoured my mom's bookshelves for his other novels. I loved his techno-thriller genre mixing and detailed scientific information infused with fiction. Not literary fiction, by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely a fun and engaging read.

You would have thought that by now I'd have seen the movie version of Jurassic Park, but truth is I never have. It came out in 1993 and was a huge hit - but unfortunately I was 7 at the time and way too young to see it. I remember going to California to visit my Aunt and Uncle a few years later and during our trip to the Universal Studios park seeing the dinosaur attraction, but that and clips shown on TV of people running from velociraptors were all I knew about the book before reading it.

The beginning of the novel was positively creepy. Like young dinosaurs sneaking into nurseries and eating newborn babies creepy. I quickly decided not to read it at night (yes, I'm a chicken, I'm aware of this). Dinos eating humans aside, I really enjoyed this novel. It was a fast an interesting read, and fairly believable as far as technology and cloning goes (man, computers were simple in the early 90s!) I'm pretty sure the first half of the book was entirely made up of foreshadowing, or at least it felt that way. I was able to make a lot of predictions as to what would happen later in the book. (Metal bars on the skylights? All the electricity on the island is controlled by one computer? They accidentally planted poisonous ferns by the pool? Sure, sounds like everything is going to be fine...)

I loved that one of the most informed characters in the story was a nerdy little boy who not only knew how to act around dinosaurs but how to fix the computer. And that almost none of the adults wanted to listen to him. It just goes to show you, kids really do know more about what's going on around them than grown ups give them credit for.

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good thriller that will keep them on the edge of their seats for a while. The characters weren't developed a lot, but there is plenty of action to make up for it, which is what made it such a great film (not to mention the Steven Spielberg direction and John Williams score). Just don't read or watch it if you're squeamish - there are way too many half-eaten bodies for the weak of stomach.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Even if you haven’t seen it, you know about the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from 1975. You know it stars Jack Nicholson as a sane person in a 1960s asylum. You know calling someone “Nurse Ratched” means they are a terrible person. And you know her ward is not the kind of place you want to spend an extended period of time.

And if you’re like me, you haven’t seen the movie, and that really is all you know about the story. I knew this would be a controversial book but as is my policy with the books on my reading list, I had no idea what else the book was about. I like it best that way so I can read the book with an open mind and free of misconceptions.

I expected this book to be harsh. I expected a messed-up group of people trying to make it in a messed-up world. I didn’t expect psychological torture, lobotomies, and men treated like children so long they started acting like them.

In a nutshell, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about a man who for unknown reasons has been living in an Oregon insane asylum, and feels obliged to share about a man named McMurphy who came to the ward to get out of work  and ruined his life in the process. He even says at the beginning of the book, before he starts his tale, that “you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is to awful to be the truth…but it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” Which brings me to what ran through my mind for the majority of the book: Can I trust this guy? He’s been committed for years, is he a reliable narrator or do I take what he says with a grain of salt? We learn that he’s been pretending to be deaf and mute for years and this invisibility has caused people to say things in front of him they wouldn’t otherwise. This gives him a little more credibility – he knows much more than he’s letting on – but he’s also convinced that there are mechanical listening devices in the walls, so there’s that.

The main character is not the narrator but McMurphy, played by Nicholson in the movie. He comes to the ward sane – with a complicated past, like a lot of men, but still sane. He’s an outgoing and rebellious man who tries to give the sheltered men he’s living with a taste of dignity and life on the outside. Nurse Ratched doesn’t like him meddling with the emasculation of the men on her floor and makes it her personal vendetta to bring McMurphy into submission as well.When punishment doesn't work she turns to psychological assault, which works on most of her men. When that doesn't work she sends him for electrical shot treatments - and when he refuses to succomb to her after that she forces him to be lobotomized. By the end of the novel he has completely transformed from a rambunctious man's-man to a sad vegetable of a human being. The narrator's introduction was correct: it does seem to awful to be true. 

According to IMDb, the tagline of the film when it came out was "If he's crazy, what does that make you?" - which is a really good question. McMurphy wasn't crazy, but was nearly forced into madness just for being insubordinate. This novel is a disturbingly telling story of what can happen to a person's personality when it runs out of control. I'm not surprised that this novel is considered brilliant or that the film adaptation is a classic.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I've finished my final book of the year! And with two days to spare, too.

I decided to finish out the year with Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay because compared to the rest of the books on my 2011 list, it seemed a little less serious. Over the past 12 months I've read heavy-handed titles like Atlas Shrugged and Satanic Verses so in contrast a novel about a couple of young men in the comic book business seemed easy.

I really enjoyed this novel. Spanning close to 20 years in the lives of cousins Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier as they start drawing The Escapist in the late 1930s/early 1940s, it gives us a glimpse into the golden age of comics. This is the time when Superman and all of the rest of the big name heroes were selling hundreds of thousands of copies, comics were being shipped to soldiers overseas along with their chocolates and cigarettes, and every kid wanted to grow up to be a masked man in tights. Comic books have never really left since they were first introduced into American culture, and although they are growing in popularity again it is nothing like what they had after WWI.

While a lot of the story revolves around the comic business, the story is essentially about the lives of the two young Jewish men. Sammy was raised by a single mother, his father a traveling performer who only visited when it was convenient. Joe lived with his parents and younger and brother in Prague, but was able to escape before the Nazis invaded, and came to live with Sammy. The two become fast friends after realizing that Sam excels at storytelling while Joe is an excellent artist and can partner up to create wonderful comic books. They create The Escapist based on Joe's experiences as an apprentice to a magician back in Prague, which goes on to become a best-selling character.

Throughout the novel we see Sam struggle to come to terms with homosexuality, both in his own life an in his comics (there is a huge scandal about the young male sidekicks that accompany nearly all masked heroes and what this insinuates). He spends the majority of his life unhappy after years of hiding his true identity for the sake of his friends and family. Joe, on the other hand, works hard to bring his brother and the rest of his family to America, putting all of time, effort, and money into doing so. He finds love but feels guilty being happy when his family is facing war in Prague. When he learns of his young brother's death he leaves town and joins the war in hopes of killing a German in retaliation, and endures a horrible time stationed in Antartica before coming back and hiding from everyone he knows, believing them to live a better life without him.

There are lots of levels to this novel, and it is written so it might flow together simply and easily. This book reminded me of something else I've read, although I can't put my finger on what. The Blind Assassin?  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? Special Topics in Calamity Physics? This is a wonderful, sweeping book and it is no wonder that it is a Pulitzer Prize winner. I would recommend it to anyone, especially those with a penchant for comic books and their creators.

The Road

When making my list of books to read for the year, I chose The Road by Cormac McCarthy as my October book because I thought that based on the creepy-looking trailer for the 2009 film version starring Viggo Mortensen it would be appropriate for Halloween.

I finished the book last night, and yes, it is creepy. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the there have been widespread fires throughout the United States, where all of the animals and birds are gone, plants don't seem to be growing, and everything is cold and dark. Much like in the film The Book of Eli, there are hordes of marauders looking for trouble. Most citizens died of starvation or tying to flee the fires, their abandoned corpses litter the highway like broken down cars. People have resorted to cannibalism, starting with the children. It's disturbing on a lot of levels.

What I didn't anticipate was how sad and heartbreaking this book would be. Essentially it is the story of a man and his son, traveling South in hopes of finding warmer weather and good people. They search abandoned homes for food and carry what little provisions they have in backpacks or in a shopping cart. All they have left in the desolate world is each other. The man does everything he can to keep his child  alive and often cries at night knowing that not only is there little hope for the boy, but that he is slowly dying. The boy tries to help, but is only about 8 years old and is frightened most of the time. Understandably - he is nearly kidnapped by a hungry passerby, has seen people chained up and kept for food, and passes melted corpses on the highways. His father has even taught him the best way to commit suicide should he be taken by "the bad guys". It's a lifestyle that would be horrific for anyone, let alone a child.

In the end, the story is sad and disturbing, but there is hope. When it comes to the sacrificial love of a parent, this book is a beautiful example. It's written simply, but with descriptions that only multiply the eerieness of the world it is set in. It leaves you with so many questions - what caused the end of modern society? What caused the fires? Are the animals gone because they fled, since there's no traces of them? What made the ocean smell of iodine? Are there "good guys" somewhere in the world?

It's okay that there are questions, though. I think one of the signs of a well-written book is that when it's over, you wonder what happened to the characters next. This book definitely left me wondering.

Brideshead Revisited

I have to confess, I’m getting pretty sloppy about writing these blog posts. I finished this book probably two weeks ago and instead of blogging about it right away when it was fresh in my mind I put it off over and over again. It’s becoming a bad habit, waiting to long and then not having much to say about the book when all is said and done. I feel like I’m cheating it in some way by not giving it a proper memorial. Better late than never, though, right?

The complete title to Evelyn Waugh’s book is Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

[Sidenote: I always forget that Evelyn Waugh is a man. Evelyn seems like such a feminine name, it’s not even one of those gender neutral it-could-go-either-way names like Kelsey or Jordan or even Shannon. It probably sucked having a girly name. Then again, I’ve always lived as a girl with a boy’s name, and it has served me pretty well. Except that time I was at the ER as a kid and the doctor was surprised I was female (Didn’t the F on the chart tip you off? Why am I trusting you with my healthcare?). But I digress.]

Starting the novel, I knew it would be about the life of Captain Ryder. The prologue starts in the outer ring of the narrative with some scenes from his life during the war, so it all makes sense. He literally revisits Brideshead, an estate tied to his past, which propels us into the novel-long flashback that is his character’s autobiography from college to sometime before he joined the army and explains the importance of the estate.

As the flashback/biography begins, we are introduced to Charles Ryder as a college student at Oxford and all his experiences beginning at that point. There he meets a fantastically absurd young man named Sebastian Flyte who is not only popular and fond of drinking parties (which are much different in 1923 Oxford than they are at modern universities, most notably being the absense of red plastic cups) but carries with him to all of his social engagements a Teddy-bear that he speaks of as if it were real. It’s as if he were some sort of debauched Christopher Robin and his bear Aloysius is a socialite version of Winnie-the-Pooh. Or maybe their relationship is more like Calvin and Hobbes. Either way its pretty atypical of the traditional 1920s male collegiate.

Through his friendship with Sebastian he meets the Flyte family with which he becomes permentanly entangled. He finds himself in the middle of a messy separation where Sebastian’s father moves to Italy with his mistress, his mother dies, and the family falls into dissaray. A daughter is married of shamefully and Sebastian becomes a runaway drunk. Meanwhile Charles is fostering his artistic abilites and becomes somewhat famous, marrying for image rather than admiration, and eventually having an affair with the shamefully married sister of his former best friend. At the end of the book Sebastian is living near a Catholic mission in Morocco as a marginalized character half in and half out of society, pious but too fond of drinking. Charles divorces his wife and leaves his children to take up with Sebastian’s sister, who after the death of her father leaves him. It is no surprise then that he is an empty shell of a man serving in the army during WWII barely admitting that he even knows the Brideshead estate at all.

The book was written really well, as the characters and locations all seemed lifelike rather than pastiches of reality. Early on the relationship of Charles and Sebastian reminded me of the sense of male camaraderie that is popular again in society, a “bromance” if you will. Seeing so much of Sebastian early in the novel had me expecting that despite being Charles’ point of view that this book would tell the story of his life instead. I think I would have much rather read about the life of a young man who carries a Teddy-bear and ends up lush in the tropics rather than a morose young man who becomes a lonely and cynical artist.

The Satanic Verses

First and foremost, let me say that this is not a book promoting Satan, filled with verses celebrating Satan, or even one demoralizing Christianity. People seem to get worked up when I tell them what I’m reading. This is a novel – most of the verses in question are poetry and rhymes used diabolically, and therefore are satanic in the sense of extremely evil or wicked in contrast to connected with Satanism. Yes, there is plenty of religious imagery, and yes, at times the characters question whether or not the verses came from Satan himself. This mention of the creature of Satan does not make this a Satanic (in the connected with sense) any more than the mention of him makes Milton’s Paradise Lost a Satanic poem.

As a Christian, I do believe that Satan is real and that there are dark, demonic things going on in this world. If I had had any indication that this book was associated with the occult or in some way glamorized Satan to the point of worship I would have immediately removed it from my reading list. But having read work by Salman Rushdie before and being familiar with his style of writing, in conjuction with the fact that this book is so highly acclaimed and has been for over 20 years, I was not worried. And now, having finished the novel, I have found that I was correct.

Rushdie is known for writing in the style of magical realism. Think about things like Big Fish or the short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or even The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the mythological and supernatural mix in with the everyday like it is normal. We all know that you can’t literally open a wardrobe and find another world with talking satyrs, and that men don’t turn into giant fish upon their death – but when reading or watching or hearing these types of “fairy tales” you must suspend your disbelief and consider these fantastical things to be truth for the sake of the story. This is how you must read Rushdie. The main premise of this book is that two Indian actors were on board a flight that was hijacked, and as it blew up they fell towards the English channel, clutching one another, and miraculously survived. There were side effects, however – Gibreel Farishta takes on angelic qualities, believing himself to be the Angel Gibreel (Gabriel) while Saladin Chamcha takes on devilish qualities. Chamcha is taken away by police as Farishta does nothing to stop them, which causes Chamcha to become so angry that his devilish qualities overtake him and he literally turns into a cloven hoofed and horned goat of a man for a period of time. For the remainder of the novel Chamcha is plotting revenge on Farishta for abandoning him, while Farishta is diagnosed as schizophrenic and has visions of himself as the angel giving revelations to a variety characters. The novel is an interesting concoction of good vs. evil, the opposing cultures of India and England, personal relationships, and the innermost desires of men, told through magical and allegorical lenses.

This book was confusing at times – as I am neither Indian nor British, and so much of the vernacular was specific to these countries. The interweaving of storylines and the Dickensian connections between characters made it hard to follow what was going on and who was doing it, but I managed. There aren’t going to be any quizzes on it like when I read another of his novels in college, so that’s a plus.

I chose to read this book because of its cultural impact. One of the visionary side-stories is based on the story of Mohammed, and depicts him as somewhat of a false prophet who agrees to include the acceptance of the worship of certain pegan goddesses into the religious text as part of a business deal. The story of these “satanic verses” in the Qur’an caused an uproar among many Muslims, who considered it blasphemous and mocking. As a result the book is illegal in all but one dominantly Muslim country and in 1989 a fatwa was issued against Rushdie by the Iranian leader, who called Muslims to kill the author and his publishers. Rushdie was put under police protection in England and lived in hiding for nearly 10 years while riots and violent attacks surrounding the book continued. The Japanese translator was stabbed to death, multiple international publishers survived assassination attempts, and the Turkish translator was target in an event that lead to the massacre of 37 people. It amazes me that fictional writing can cause such non-fictional friction, and that a novel so revered in Western society is so hated in other parts of the world.  

A Clockwork Orange

I know it's the middle of August, and I'm just now getting around to posting the July book review. I've been doing pretty well with reading my novels before the end of the month like I intended, but in July this just didn't happen. My little sister got married at the end of the month (yay!), and with all the wedding prep I completely ran out of time to even buy a copy of the book. I just finished reading it, which is definitely going to put a strain on finishing my August book before the first of September, but I'll be pressing on! Maybe this year I will finally accomplish one of my New Year's resolutions.

The word that best describes my initial reaction to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is "perplexing." The story was completely bizarre and somehow extremely familiar. I know it sounds weird, but I feel like I know someone who acts kind of like Alex, repeating words three times and acting tough but listening to classical music in their spare time. Maybe I just have some odd friends.

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. It's about a young boy, out causing trouble while speaking in an unfamiliar dialect, who goes through a brief transformation before returning to his old ways. That's probably where the parallels end, though. Where Huck is a redeemable character, helping out Jim and generally trying to make a good life for himself in the only way he knows how, Alex is different. He's young like Huck, only fifteen in the horrible first part of the novel, but commits horrible crimes like assault, rape, and murder without any smidgen of remorse. It's been five years or so since I've read Mark Twain's book, but I remember him doing ridiculous things like stowing away or stealing because he needed the money to survive or he was helping someone. Alex, on the other hand, did things that were against the law for the sole reason that it gave him pleasure. He enjoyed beating up old men and and leaving people bleeding in the gutter.

I have to say, the first couple chapters of this book were hard to read. And not just because half of the words are made up. In part one, the reader is tagging along while Alex and his gang (his "droogs") do drugs, break into houses, beat people senseless, rape women, seducing little girls, and killing an old lady. It's disgusting and disturbing to follow them do these things so nonchalantly, like it's a typical Friday night. And for them, sadly, it was.

It was no surprise then when Alex was hauled off to jail. He was a menace to society and everyone knew it, except maybe his mother, who it seemed to live in denial. The state of the jail didn't surprise me either - overcrowded, dangerous, unrefomative. "Cram criminals together and see what happens. You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment," explains one of the jailers. So they take him out and send him to a government facility where he can be turned into a new citizen.

This section reminded me a lot of George Orwell's 1984. When they put him in the room and made him watch films all I could think of was the "Two Minutes' Hate" propaganda that the government forced everyone to watch. In both circumstances they were made to watch things they didn't want to in order to be brainwashed by the government. Granted, Alex's experience was heightened by whatever concoction they injected into his system that caused him to associate pain with violence, which made it even worse than Big Brother's hate videos.

This is a small book, but there is so much going on. What is it about society that has made it possible for hooligans to run the streets at night causing this much chaos? Why are intellectuals seen as outcasts? How did this bizarre slang come about? The prison chaplain was an interesting touch, trying to practice Christianity in a world where kids like Alex wish they were the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross, because it would be satisfyingly "ultra-violent."

Despite his political selfishness and anger, I think I liked the character of F. Alexander, the writer whose wife had been raped and beaten by Alex and his droogs that later took him in and recognized him as a victim of the state. F. knew that what they had done to Alex was wrong - they had taken away his free will, and as F. quotes, "A man who ceases to choose ceases to be a man." It would be better to choose his own way and be bad then be forced to do good, the writer argues, which is true. Without choice we are nothing but machines, which is the premise in the book written by F. Alexander, also called A Clockwork Orange. He writes that people are being turned into machines when they are more like fruit, naturally cultivated on a tree grown in the "world-orchard" and planted by God because He "had need of us to quench his thirsty love." It's a fascinating explanation.

By the end of the novel, Alex realizes that he does not want to be clockwork, and is glad when he is re-reformed to not be affected when seeing violence. The last chapter sees him at 18, released into the world, realizing that there is more to life than "ultra-violence" and finally wishing for a normal, settled-down life. Maybe in this sense he becomes like Huck Finn again.

I can see why this is considered a classic, with it's foreboding future, themes of free will and liberty, and a timelessness that makes it seem set in modern times despite it having been written nearly 50 years ago. Now I have another film to add to my watch list: Stanley Kubrick's 1971 adaptation, a classic in and of itself.

Brave New World

This month it was time again for a pre-1970's selection, and the lot fell to Brave New World, the 1932 classic from author Aldous Huxley. It's a small novel, but one that is often referenced and is most likely on the same Time Magazine's Top 100 Novels of All Time list that the majority of these books are included on. Finally having a day free to read I delved in and hoped that I would like it as much as I was told that I would.

I knew that it would be about a utopia, judging by the French epigraph, which when translated spoke of the reality of utopian societies and the fact that modern society may instead be turning towards the imperfect. Chapter one threw me into the heart of the "new world" - the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where individuals were cloned, predetermined, actualized, and molded into who society need them to be.

In this new society, children are taught to want to do the job they've been created for, and to be glad that they are in their specific strata and therefore not envious of anyone else. "Everyone is happy nowadays" is a phrase characters often utter; and indeed they are -  stresses, tragedies, passions, every sort of extreme has been erased from their lives, leaving them to live in the moment and feel good about it. Religion has been replaced with industrialism, with Ford being used in place of God, obviously an homage to Henry Ford, his Model-T (all crosses have been repurposed as T's), and his ways of capitalism and assembly lines. Freud is thrown into this odd religion/patriotism (they believe Freud is Ford's psychological persona) and subsequently all happiness and entertainment is sexual in nature. Promiscuity among children is encouraged, all films are pornographic and/or violent and relationships have disappeared in favor of "everyone belongs to everyone else" mentality. With cloning as the main means of reproduction, nuclear families have also disappeared and asking someone about their mother is a dirty insult. Humans almost world-wide are psychologically trained to accomplish exactly what society needs them to, and they are more than content to follow along unquestionably. 

I am really fascinated that I happened to line up this novel directly after Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's interesting to see how two different authors, 50 years apart, present a utopian society and the people in it. Huxley's world looked forward to the future, while Atwood's world did the opposite and reverted to the past. Atwood's characters could remember the world before the utopia, while Huxley's characters knew nothing of the past. Atwood used surrogates to repopulate the human race, Huxley used artificial cloning. Yet somehow, they both taught the same message: Utopians are unnatural. They do not work, no matter how complicated or simplistic they are created to be.

I loved Huxley's jumping between characters and storylines, especially in Chapter Three with the juxtaposition of at least three stories told alternately one line at a time. Brilliant. I also enjoyed the inclusion of John, the savage, and his love of Shakespeare. Ironically, the one that is considered the most uncouth is instead the most intelligent and the most aware of what is actually going on in the world. He's the one who fights for religion, for modesty, for goodness, for education - and when he learns that nowhere in the world, not on the reservation or the outside, is any of this accomplishable, he kills himself rather than succumb to the modern ideal.

It's no wonder that this is considered a classic. It speaks of the human condition, what is important in life, and what is important enough to die for. It forewarns the dangers of putting too much stock in industrialization, of ignoring education and history, and of altering the natural way of life. And all in less than 200 pages.

The Handmaid's Tale

First and foremost, you should know that I am a little biased when it comes to Margaret Atwood. The first book of hers that I read was The Blind Assassin for a course I took on contemporary literature, which I absolutely loved (both the novel and the class). Since that time I have read two more of her novels, not including this one, and own three of her collections of poetry. I am a huge fan of her writing and included her on my 2011 reading list as an excuse to read more of her work.

I chose The Handmaid's Tale because of it's popularity and the fact that the description on the back of the book made absolutely no sense. Offred? The Republic of Gilead? I love reading books that I am intrigued and confused by. As with the other books I've read so far, I made a point not to research it or read any reviews before reading it, so that I can experience it without any preconceptions.

As I started reading, I found myself in the not-too-distant future, where society is structured much like that of the Biblical Old Testament - patriarchal, with women reduced to a status significantly lower than their male counterparts. In the new Republic of Gilead, where the novel takes place, men are employed in a military-style hierarchy ranging from lowly servant types to powerful commanders. Women are categorized by the role they are expected to fill, including Wives (those technically married to the men), Marthas (serving women), Handmaids (young women whose sole job is to reproduce), and Aunts (women who teach the Handmaids). This bizarre reorganization of societal roles emphasizes the new mentality that life is only rules and regulations; no longer are emotions and individual thoughts important. It reminded me a lot of The Giver, the young adult novel where villagers must get permits to have children, jobs and marriages are assigned, and only one person in each generation can see color.

The scariest part of this novel is how quickly the new Republic of Gilead took over, and how creepily plausible the transition from typical American society to cult regime actually was. One day people were going about their lives, the next women were no longer allowed to work or spend money and the soldiers posted nearby were suspiciously wearing unfamiliar uniforms. Atwood created an authentic sense of dystopia, where in contrast to a far-fetched futuristic novel, this featured a situation that actually could happen. All of the characters in the new Gilead, even the men who seem to be in powerful positions, are under the control of some larger organization that quietly gained power and is never discussed. Other than the fact that they employ Eyes as their scouts, we (both the reader and the narrator) know nothing about them.

This unnamed, invisible leadership was a brilliant move by Atwood. They--whoever they are--created a "monotheocracy," as its called in the Historical Notes section, and used religion to back up their new laws and regulations. Biblical scripture is twisted and altered to instate the Handmaids and Marthas (both Biblical references) and to push the female population into submission. But despite the "manifest destiny"-like propaganda that God ordained this rather than the government, the people don't seem to believe it. They're simply afraid of the consequences - and rightly so, for those are also of Biblical proportion. In this new Gilead where punishments that rely on psychology are the norm (such as hangings displayed publicly as examples, or male rapists presented to groups of rallied women for group beatings reminiscent of stonings, it is easier for the characters to repress their memories of the world before and follow the rules, at least on the surface. Under the surface, however, is an entire network of people trying to escape to a life that even remotely resembles the one they knew before.

It is revealed at the end that this book, much like The Blind Assassin, is essentially a nested narrative - the entire book is a transcript of a recorded diary found much later by a society that has thankfully progressed past the "Gilead" stage. This new society, set in 2195 when the outer narrative takes place, looks back at Gilead much like we do pre-Civil War slavery or the Salem witch trials. They study it, teach courses on it in their universities, collect artifacts from the period. There is something unsettling about this future society of 2195 that comes about in their "Historical Notes" epilogue.  In one of the few pop-cultural references say that they "must be grateful for any crumbs that the Goddess of History has deigned to vouchsafe us." They also reference Eurydice, the daughter of Apollo in Greek mythology that dies but is retrieved from the underworld. Is this new society female-centric?

I have so many questions that remain unanswered. What caused the fall of Gilead? Was Offred ever reunited with her daughter? Was anything ever done to memorialize the women objectified by Gildeadeans, or are gaudy things like the "Outdoor Period-Costume Sing-Song" the only way they're remembered? And more importantly, should we stop romanticizing time periods like the Antebellum south and the European medieval era and instead look at the historical atrocities that accompanied them? Should we be careful not to let church and state get entangled so that out-of-context religious rules never become deity-ordained laws? It's been almost a week and I still find myself wondering about this book. As the professor of that contemporary lit class always said, if you find yourself thinking about a movie days after watching it, you know it was good. I think the same thing goes for great novels.

Slaughterhouse-Five

One of my favorite things about reading new books or watching new movies is the excitement that comes with watching a storyline unfold the first time. There's a reason I don't read too many reviews or summaries of books - I'd rather find out about them on my own. So when I was researching novels to read this year, I purposefully didn't research them much farther than their basic Amazon.com description so I could enjoy the drama of being a first-time reader.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the kind of book that is often referenced but rarely described. Kurt Vonnegut is typically hailed as a genius writer, and the only other book by him that I've read - Galapagos - was facinatingly disturbing (it revolved around a group of people left on an island in a post-apocalyptic world attempting to repopulate society, but one of the people had a birth defect and at the end, hundreds of years later, human life has evolved into hairy, walrus-like creatures. Aren't you glad I didn't put that one on the reading list?).

Unfortunately, I started writing this post right after I read the book and ran out of time to finish my train of thought. It's been almost a month since then, so rather than try and finish it, here's the list of observations I planned to blog about:

- Interesting way to write about a personal experience without using the first person point of view
- Billy Pilgrim: did the character really time travel, or was he influenced by Trout's books? He did travel before he read Trout, though...
- Why did Trout's books match Pilgrim's experiences so well? He asked at the party if he had gone through a time window. Maybe he traveled too?
- Maybe Pilgrim's time traveling is a metaphor for his insanity and trying to deal with Dresden
- Tralfamadorians see time all at once, seeing all times simultaneously, knowing all outcomes. Much like C.S. Lewis' "sheet of paper" description of how God sees time in Mere Christianity and how characters like Rochester experience time in Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair
- Pilgrim calls his time-traveling experiences a disease, what does this mean?
- Tralfamadorians explain that they can't change outcomes because the moments are structured - but by whom?

Some interesting thoughts - I'll have the reread the book to expound upon them.