“ZZ’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers� may not be the best story in St.Lucy's Home for Girls Raised as Wolves (2005) by Karen Russell, but bec“ZZ’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers� may not be the best story in St.Lucy's Home for Girls Raised as Wolves (2005) by Karen Russell, but because my immediate family has a fascinating history of sleep issues, this is the one I found a pdf for and shared with the fam.
I hesitate to call these experiences disorders, as Russell would call it fascinating opportunities for amazing psychic and imaginative experiences. Okay, since you’re curious: We have had sleep talkers, sleep walkers, insomniacs, night terrors, lucid dreaming, those who see dead people, all of it (though not me, I’m not psychic, boring).
The camp has a series of cabins: Sleep apneacs, somnambulists, somniloquists, headbangers, night eaters, gnashers, night terrors, insomniacs, narcoleptics, incubuses, and incontinents, which is also a kind of ranked order of the social hierarchy--being teens, there has to be a social hierarchy.
Oh, and there’s one more category: Other, which the narrator of this story occupies. “That means we’re considered anomalies by Gnasher dudes who have ground their pearly whites down to nubbins, by Incubus girls who think that demon jockeys are riding them in their sleep.�
“At precisely 4:47, we woke up screaming, staring straight at one another. Oglivy’s hair was sticking straight up, his white eyes goggling out in the dark, the mirror image of my terror. Our screams gave way to giggles. ‘What did you dream?� he wheezed. ‘I dreamed,� I gasped, still laughing, “that there was this silver rocket, burning and burning.� He stopped laughing abruptly. ‘Me, too.� I was a prophet. Annie calls them my postmonitions.�
There’s an insomnia balloon you can go in. “This year, we’ve got a New Kid, this Eastern European lycanthrope.� There’s Felipe, a parasomniac with a coincidence of spirit possession. The closing of “Sleepaway camp�:
“Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees slashes like cerebral circuitry.�...more
Why is it I never had read Karen Russell’s St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2005)?! Great title! And it is terrific, a story collection withWhy is it I never had read Karen Russell’s St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2005)?! Great title! And it is terrific, a story collection with irrealist or magical realism intent; there is real invention and effervescence and more great ideas in it than in a hundred books. Magic, grounded most often in the real world of growing up; could be a YA book. All the stories take place in the same island community in the Florida Everglades. Infused with lyrical prose and humor.
So many stories I loved. The title story is about girls raised by wolves who are now being “reformed� by nuns to enter the human world. I was reminded of schools in general meant to school the wild out of you. Stand in line, be quiet, do what you are told. Indigenous schools where the “Indian� is beaten out of indigenous kids. This is a feminist story, too, of course, since it is about girls raised to be domesticated. And, sadly, this process works for most of them. But not all of them!
“Ava Wrestles the Alligator� is the first in a series of stories that became Swampklandia (which I have yet to read), about the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty—Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old Ava—proprietors of Swamplandia!
The opening story, “Haunting Olivia,� grabbed me right away. It’s about two young boys who make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister. The last line took my breath away! “ZZ’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers� may not be the best story in the volume, but because my immediate family has a fascinating history of sleep issues, this is the one I found a pdf for and shared with the fam.
I hesitate to call these experiences disorders, as Russell would call it fascinating opportunities for amazing psychic and imaginative experiences. Okay, since you’re curious: We have had sleep talkers, sleep walkers, insomniacs, night terrors, lucid dreaming, those who see dead people, all of it (though not me, I’m not psychic, boring).
The camp has a series of cabins: Sleep apneacs, somnambulists, somniloquists, headbangers, night eaters, gnashers, night terrors, insomniacs, narcoleptics, incubuses, and incontinents, which is also a kind of ranked order of the social hierarchy--being teens, there has to be a social hierarchy.
Oh, and there’s one more category: Other, which the narrator of this story occupies. “That means we’re considered anomalies by Gnasher dudes who have ground their pearly whites down to nubbins, by Incubus girls who think that demon jockeys are riding them in their sleep.�
“At precisely 4:47, we woke up screaming, staring straight at one another. Oglivy’s hair was sticking straight up, his white eyes goggling out in the dark, the mirror image of my terror. Our screams gave way to giggles. ‘What did you dream?� he wheezed. ‘I dreamed,� I gasped, still laughing, “that there was this silver rocket, burning and burning.� He stopped laughing abruptly. ‘Me, too.� I was a prophet. Annie calls them my postmonitions.�
There’s an insomnia balloon you can go in. “This year, we’ve got a New Kid, this Eastern European lycanthrope.� There’s Felipe, a parasomniac with a coincidence of spirit possession. The closing of “Sleepaway camp�:
“Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees slashes like cerebral circuitry.� ...more
I put Treacle Walker (2021) by Alan Garner on my tbr list because it was a Booker prize nominee and it wa“Time is ignorance�--the epigraph to the book
I put Treacle Walker (2021) by Alan Garner on my tbr list because it was a Booker prize nominee and it was short, basically a novella, but I still didn't get to it until now.. Walker is known for children’s fantasy, I have heard, and the book description calls it coming-of-age. Think here: Harry Potter/Dumbledore, Luke Skywalker/Obi Wan, Grasshopper/Miyagi, Frodo Baggins/Gandalf. You know, that mentor/mentee thing.
A kid named Jack who reads comics and plays marbles all day meets Treacle Walker, a Rag and Bones man who mentors him in the ways of time and the imagination. This Rag and Bones guy is also a Death figure in literary history, just so you know. Possibly because Garner is older the language has a nineteenth-century feel to it, or maybe it’s just meant like a lot of fantasy to seem “timeless.� “Treacle� to folks in the US is blackstrap molasses, by the way, but doesn't it sound more exotic that way?
At any rate, language in Treacle Walker is a central consideration, as is time, and as is the relationship between the real and the imaginary, or stories. There’s plenty of refs to myth, and fantasy across the ages. Garner, 90 in 2024, says it encapsulates everything he ever wanted to say in 15,000 words, and many see it as his crowning achievement. Not exactly my cuppa, I write honestly but not intentionally callously, so I probably need to reread it more slowly to get it better, maybe, but it was still lovely to read and should be a must for Garner fans, a kind of capstone.
“Treacle Walker? Me know that pickthank psychopomp? I know him, so I do. I know him. Him with his pots for rags and his bag and his bone and his doddering nag and nookshotten cart and catchpenny oddments. Treacle Walker? I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart.�...more
I think this is my fourth book by the Norwegian artists Oyvind Torseter. His simple and clever The Hole (it has an actual hole drilled through the booI think this is my fourth book by the Norwegian artists Oyvind Torseter. His simple and clever The Hole (it has an actual hole drilled through the book, that obviously is central in the plot) was one of my favorite books of 2014. My Father's Arms Are a Boat was one of my favorite books of 2015.
Now he is working on what appears to be a middle grades or YA series, fantasy. I read the first one, The Heartless Troll, based on a Norwegian fairy tale, and liked it, and this one features the same main character on what sort of appears loosely to be based on Ulysses' journey, but just loosely because, though it does feature a boat and a cyclops, there's not much more to offer Ulysses fans.
It does feature Torseter's characteristic silly/absurd humor. Mulysses is fired, evicted from his home, and for some reason has to come up with a huge amount of money to get his belongings back, which were put in storage. Of course in a seedy bar he meets a guy, an extravagant collector, who had lost a locket in the sea, who offers him that exact amount if he goes on a journey to find the largest eye in the world. Oh, just go with it, it's just random. Or, wait, there's a cyclops in the story. . .
So it's a quest, an adventure, and on this adventure we find (spoiler alert) that a girl/woman, the bartender (Harbor Bar Girl) at the aforementioned seedy bar, who is stowed away on the boat. "I like the smell of your hair," he tells her. "Coconut," she tells him, and that's enough of a basis for a romance in the adventure! And sure, they find the eye, and the cyclops is missing the eye, and they also find the collector's locket, so it's happily ever after for all concerned. Oh, and the Harbor Bar Girl and Mulysses get tattoos. Silly fun....more
“We are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed.�
In the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus hangs twelve maids he felt may have been disloyal t“We are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed.�
In the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus hangs twelve maids he felt may have been disloyal to him when he was on his two decade travels or, odyssey). Shortly before this, Odysseus slaughters all the suitors who tried to step in and “hook up� with Odyssey’s wife Penelope. Penelope is the very model of the faithful wife: Hubby gone, twenty years, in which time she raised a son, managed the house and empire, and never gave in to the temptations of the suitors.
These maids, before being killed by Our Epic Hero, forced the maids to clean up the bloody mess of the suitor slaughter. We never know the maids� names. Of course, because they are maids, working cvlass women.
Margaret Atwood has problems with some of this story, especially the disrespect for Penelope and her maids, so decides to write a novella, The Penelopiad (2005) to help us reconsider things. We see events in part from Penelope’s perspective, but the Greek Chorus here is comprised of the Maids (whom she names The Chorus Line, ha), who actually are given voices at last.
Atwood doesn’t trust the epic storyteller (and liar) Odysseus, who after fighting in the Trojan War and sleeping with goddesses (because how could he not? Goddesses, duh! And, you know, you can’t expect A Man to be celibate for twenty years!) returns to tell his tales. Unreliable narrator, much? Though to be fair, if the big O gets questioned, you gotta do the same with Penny in this story, yes? I mean, did you get a look at some of those hunky suitors? Come on, Penny Lane! Tell us another one!).
But seriously, who speaks for the maids, and attempts to correct aspects of the story? Penelope, and Atwood. Which is also to say they speak for any women ignored, slandered, assaulted, murdered. Non-famous women, unlike Penelope and her famously gorgeous cousin Helen of Troy.
Rewriting iconic stories is part of the history of literature, of course. John Gardner’s Grendel. Recently, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. And stories told from the perspective of minor characters have developed their own tradition, such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This is a good one, for substance, but it feels at times to me more like a critical feminist essay than a story--very prosaic writing, on the whole. But it is a very good critique, finally, making a very good point about the epic tale where the Male Hero gets defied as the women are ignored (and/or killed).
The Penelopiad was adapted for dramatic production here at the Goodman Theater in Chicago March 2024. I was supposed to spend a recent evening there also going to workshop, and post-performance activities, but last Wednesday I had retinal surgery and am legally blind (i.e., no reading and writing) for a few weeks (??!), though here I am hunting and pecking and getting help with editing. . . but I should be okay in a month. I'll say 3.5 stars, rounded up, but I bet it would have been a more enthusiastic review had I actually seen it. But if I can I'll still get over there to see it and let you know. ...more
“You’ve told it all wrong again—you little monster”—Poor Deer, to Margaret
This, Poor Deer (2024) is my first novel from Menominee’s Own (Michigan, a U“You’ve told it all wrong again—you little monster”—Poor Deer, to Margaret
This, Poor Deer (2024) is my first novel from Menominee’s Own (Michigan, a UP-er, or Yooper!) Claire Oshetsky, who was a journalist and also wrote Chouette and other stories. She is active on ŷ (yay) especially as Lark Benobi. I just finished rereading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which features the marvelously strange main character Merricat, so I sort of associated the also marvelously unusual Margaret “Bunny� Murphy, in Poor Deer, with Merricat as I read. They seem to be operating in the same mystical universe. And then, both are associated with murder they dealt with when young.
But also look at the opening of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House:
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
And Margaret makes up stories, imagines, and dreams, and has nightmares.
We learn early on that four-year old-Agnes is dead, and that many people seem to have been blaming (and bullying, horrifically) the also then four-year-old Margaret, who tells this story at age sixteen about years 4-16. Well, people blame her, yes, but principally it is Poor Deer, a kind of “bad angel� sitting on her shoulder, shaming her for her assumed part in her friend’s death. Or maybe it is like a bad Daemon, in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials terms. The personification of childhood shame. As the publisher writes, Poor Deer won't rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.
Poor Deer is in itself an interesting, quirky title, or name for a "spirit" at Margaret's side. If a child dies, such as Agnes, people might say, "poor dear," about the lost child. No one seems to have sad this to Margaret. Only cruel, mean things, assuming her (4-year-old!) "guilt," but this is initially how I see Poor Deer, as a manifestation of grief, though it later seems to be something rather different, not at all sympathetically caring about Margaret.
Catholicism also plays a big part in the guilt and shame, too, but is a child of four morally culpable under the eyes of God, really, if she is in fact really responsible for her friend's death? And storytelling--the things Margaret makes up in her head, which she does constantly-- is central to how she navigates her sense of herself and the world. Can she tell the difference between myth and “reality�? She seems neurodivergent, though I am not sure how that label is necessarily relevant. She just sees the world in unique ways. Or is trauma that has twisted her perception of the world? Fantasy guides her understanding of the everyday. I like how the tale resolves, in the end, with some reconciliation, some forgiveness. I think there is a lot of quirky, lyrical, whimsical, and at times disturbing prose here in what is basically a sad and thoughtful and weirdly sweet coming-of-age reflection on childhood grief and trauma. Highly recommend! Good job, ŷ friend Claire!...more
Sweet book, lovely illustrations--some of them I associate with the word "cameos," (?) as they depict round, borderless scenes--in watercolors, set inSweet book, lovely illustrations--some of them I associate with the word "cameos," (?) as they depict round, borderless scenes--in watercolors, set in a rural place near the sea where Margaret moves with her parents. And then Margaret finds a lost unicorn and takes it in to raise it! Sure, why not? And then everywhere you look it seems magic is possible, just on the edge of your perception.
Most of the story is just a sweet rural northern family story, it seems, and then there you go: Add a unicorn! There is so much love and warmth and caring and love of family in it! Everyone would want to live Margaret's life. Young children's fantasy! Recommended!...more
Mrs. Caliiban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls, features an interspecies romance! I did not read it looking for anything in particular. I saw that The BritishMrs. Caliiban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls, features an interspecies romance! I did not read it looking for anything in particular. I saw that The British Book Marketing Council had it on its list as one of the best post-WWII American novels. What is the current reference? Hentai monsterporn? So I’m a comics guy, and what immediately came to mind as this almost six-feet-tall lizard or frog-like creature starts “doing it� with the missus was Swamp Thing, and I don’t know enough to be able to say if Aquaman sleeps with anyone non-amphibian. A comic I read titled My Boyfriend is a Bear. That’s maybe it for this subgenre of what? Fantasy? Romance? SciFi? Magical realism? All of that, sure.
Mrs. Caliban, also known as Dorothy, is married to Fred, who is away a lot and--she knows--is having an affair. She’s not happy in this marriage, it lacks passion, but then meets “Larry� who it appears may have killed some people, we later learn may have been justified, but the passion thing--boom! True love?!
The story begins when Dorothy, home washing the dishes, hears herself being addressed on the radio: “Don’t worry, Dorothy.� Then she hears of the beast, escaped after having been captured and experimented on by scientists, tortured by them, he tells us, and yes, they taught him to talk. He walks into her kitchen and sure she is scared--he's like, a monster, duh! But then finds him sort of attractive. So why not, sure, let's start a torrid affair with a lizard!
They have a storage room where he stays, and Fred is oblivious, with his own affair(s) to keep him occupied. Dorothy wants to tell her best friend, but doesn’t, even as one of her kids later interacts (hugely important) with the “monster� who is actually a nature boy, a tender (but strong!) with big hands (not tiny hands, nope!) and feet (all this echoes with the back to nature feel of Swamp Thing).
This book is short, and very, very strange. I thought: Is she talking about an appreciation of differences? I honestly don’t know, but it is not played for laughs. They really do connect, and then there's the complicated ending I won’t reveal, but it is interesting. Things fall apart, with best freind and hubby? Everything in the affair seems vitally important, in technicolor, as I imagine can happen in an affair, everything else dull and boring. Escape! In many ways, as it reads like a straight-up conventional affair story, but with, oh, Swamp Thing! But I liked it!
PS: I listened to it, and that version was assigned a different, sort of fifties pulpy cover, but I prefer this cover, with his green hands tenderly (or potentially menacingly?) on her face, and then I like it that they announce that it is "A Novel," as if the first moment Larry is in the kitchecn you'd think this was memoir, haw....more
“Stay me with flagons, Comfort me with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, And his right hand doth embrace me. I charge you“Stay me with flagons, Comfort me with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, And his right hand doth embrace me. I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, and by the hinds of the field, That ye stir not up, nor awake my love, Till he please�--Song of Solomon 2:5-13
“I was made for him.�
Comfort Me With Apples is my first book by Catherynne M. Valente, a novel with references to. . . can I say, for a book a couple years old? Well, spoiler alert, maybe, though I will only say there are references to myths/fairy tales/sci fi novels including Blue Beard’s Wife, Stepford Wives. . . but it is primarily a feminist fantasy/horror retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, complete with a snake-like demon named Cascavel (which I find means rattlesnake in Portuguese). All the names and chapter titles are part of the scheme, which is cool.
I had to work at this one, since I am not much of a myth or fantasy guy, but in general I like literary puzzles, and we are indeed heading into Halloween (oh, I know it’s still September, but this year Halloween is for me September through early December, since I am teaching a ghost course. I especially like the turn on the Genesis story. But yeah, I liked it, as a kind of departure from the kinds of things I typically read. It begins all flat and measured and strange, and then. . . builds into what it will become. Really well-written, layered, wicked!...more
A long graphic novel (more than 150 pages) about a girl who feels alienated by her parents' divorce, runs away to live in the woods and escapes into A long graphic novel (more than 150 pages) about a girl who feels alienated by her parents' divorce, runs away to live in the woods and escapes into a world--The Wondrous Wonders--with elves, foxes, multi-colored ponies fighting a tomcat. So it's a story within a story, and a kind of allegory on facing your challenges: 1) fantasize; 2) get over your anger.
I'd say it is longer than it needs to be, but since I just read and reviewed the author's Juliette and have fallen in love with her art--sweet, pastel colors, delicate, loose, intimate lines--I can move my 3.5 rating up to 4 stars. The translation into English is great, makes it feel contemporary and quirky/snarky in places. ...more
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospidinov was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2023. I bet it is my first Bulgarian novel, translated wonderfullTime Shelter by Georgi Gospidinov was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2023. I bet it is my first Bulgarian novel, translated wonderfully by Angela Rodel. The skinny: An enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail. Gaustine’s assistant narrates the story.
How can I describe it? Post-modern? A playful philosophical meditation on time, the past, memory. A reflection on the fact that in an aging population, someone is diagnosed with Alzeheimer’s or dementia every few seconds, and that begs the question how many are undiagnosed. It’s less a novel than it is an explosion of ideas/perspectives about memory and memory loss. Things like this are on every page:
“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.�
“We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.�
So it’s kind of exhilarating in some ways in terms of structure and invention, form, and terrifying in terms of its theme--memory loss--even as we can acknowledge that memory is one of the central foci of all literature. But it’s not a story where you “like� the characters; it’s meant to nudge you to think. I wasn’t all that engaged, maybe in part because I have been reading several sort of traditionally emotionally engaging novels, the likes of Elizabeth Strout and Kent Haruf. But:
*I have two older sibs who no longer know who I am that I visit periodically in nursing facilities. The places are filled with people like them.
*I had a talk with the 91-year-old mother of friends recently who asked me four times where I now live; on the fourth occasion, I nearly answered, “I am so glad you asked that question! No one ever asks me that!� to lighten the conversation for others in the room, but I held off. I mean, that might be me, sooner than I think.
I didn’t love this book, but I was impressed with its drive and energy. There’s a lot in here about the writer’s role in the process of exploring memory and the past, the impossibility of getting it right. It’s also about Bulgaria and the European Union generally and the anxiety of dealing with the challenges of the present as we ever forget the past....more
“What’s the secret commonwealth?� “The world of fairies, and ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.�
So we in this house decided to finally look at the second “What’s the secret commonwealth?� “The world of fairies, and ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.�
So we in this house decided to finally look at the second season--The Subtle Knife season?--of the tv series of His Dark Materials, which reminded me that I was the only person in the house who had failed to read The Secret Commonwealth. So I have now read it, coming in at 734 pages, over the space of a couple weeks. Or rather, I listened to the wonderful Michael Sheen’s reading of it, and will actually read the hardcover here at some point as well. The Secret Commonwealth is set twenty years beyond when the first volume of this second series, The Book of Dust takes place, when Lyra is a baby, and seven years after the events of the first trilogy, His Dark Materials.
The first series is shelved in libraries as children’s lit, grade six, though I always saw it as all ages, as it references some great moments in the history of Literature, chiefly John Milton’s Paradise Lost (which is where the title His Dark Materials comes from) and the poetry and cosmology of William Blake. One of Pullman’s central complaints in the first trilogy is the way (especially) religious and educational institutions find ways to destroy the imaginations of young people. Story and imagination are two key elements that are essential to human growth, and schools and churches take a black/white view of morality and knowledge. Differences add color to the world, and we have to embrace and celebrate them to thrive. Pullman’s literary world is fantasy, though he would insist it is just realism, a more complicated world than is usually depicted in books.
“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.�
“Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been - was now - the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.�
The Book of Dust continues this view without adding very much, but I liked the second book, Commonwealth, a bit more, because it adds references to our contemporary world--immigration/refugees, worldwide poverty, and the horrific selling of body parts for profit (in this case Lyra finds folks who sell daemons). At the same time, the machinations inside the Magisterium (aka, Pullman’s tyrannical Church) are getting darker and more violent.
And Lyra is separated from her own daemon, Pan, after a blow-out fight, so they are essentially in ths book on the road to find each other. This is more of a young adult or even adult book, dealing with philosophical and theological issues on a bit older level. And Lyra now seems to be (somewhat secretly or at a distance) “in love� with Malcolm. Expect in the last book of this second trilogy for Lyra to find Malcolm and Pan and her imagination and once again take on the magisterium.
So, it's a long book, something between 3-4 stars for me, as it doesn’t tell me much new about dust or the world I hadn’t already known, but I did nevertheless enjoy it. I like Lyra! ...more
My least favorite novel from Cormac McCarthy thus far, so thanks be that it was short. Short, nasty and brutish. Set in the south, it features yet anoMy least favorite novel from Cormac McCarthy thus far, so thanks be that it was short. Short, nasty and brutish. Set in the south, it features yet another evil madman such as The Judge from Blood Meridian or Chigurh from No Country For Old Men but with less lyricism, more necrophilia (yes, you heard that right and have been warned). But just in case you wonder if McCarthy thinks things are getting worse than ever, he has one cop ask another that very question and the guy responds no, human nature has always been like this. In other words, people like this have always been around.
Oh, McCarthy is probably the greatest living American writer, and the prose is pbviously good, but tp what end? It is just quite possible that with the reading of Jo Nesbo and this that I have had my fill for the month of crazy, depraved, sexually deviant serial killers, but if you are due for one, have at itm, be my guest. I am just not that eager to delve into the mind of psychopathia, even one set in the moral universe of McCarthy. Please, I need a heartwarming picturebook or a funny book to try to scrub my mind from what I just read....more
"What happened in the arena? That's humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, educat"What happened in the arena? That's humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are"--Dr. Voluminia Gaul, to Coriolanus
“And if even the most innocent among us turn to killers in the Hunger Games, what does that say? That our essential nature is violent,� Snow explained. “Self-destructive,� Dean Highbottom murmured.
One of the questions I had while reading this book was what the author hoped to reveal to us that we didn’t already know from the original trilogy. The innocently or at least lyrically titled Song of Larks and Snakes, a prequel, is a kind of origin story about Coriolanus Snow, who we already know is a Bad Guy, a cruel fascist, and we know the games he in large part shaped are cruel, sadistic, class-based, ludicrous torture porn where kids are required to kill each other until one kid is left standing. Do we really need to know about how Snow and the games got this way?
� of the way through this book, which I read at the insistence of my teenager, I was annoyed, telling Susanne Collins I was through with her. I knew that the first book was the best, that it was handed to her publisher as a one-off, she got talked into doing a whole series, the movies, you know the rest. The first � of the book takes us through yet another occasion of the Hunger Games, this one where Snow is a teenager assigned to lowly District 12, a (small) girl (oh, no!) named Lucy Gray Baird.
So we go back in time, of course, to when Coriolanus was an impressionable kid and things could have gone differently for him and the world. In this past Hunger Games "match," of course everybody but one kid dies, and in the process Coriolanus kinda and improbably falls for (and illegally helps) Lucy Gray Baird. This is meant to help us reflect on Snow’s view of Katniss. Snow hates music, hates nature, hates birds and in particular Mockingjays but falls for the Katniss-like Lucy, a hippie-ish gypsy musician who loves nature and birds. Talk about a case of Opposites Attract, the Angry Good-Looking Billionaire from the Capitol (“Snow always comes on top!�) and the earthy gypsy girl. Perfect for fanfiction sex story ala 50 Shades of Gray (ha, Lucy Gray!) via Twilight?
Anyway, we didn’t need that long a version of the first � getting us all worked up about the evil Hunger Games and romance, as we already know it is despicable and we know the romance is doomed. We already know that most of mankind is cruel and violent and that we have to fight that part of (in)humanity from the trilogy. We don’t learn anything new about hunger and inequity, really. But the publisher and the filmmakers know the game is the marketing carrot. Gotta have it.
I guess origin stories of evil folks are part of literature. How did they get that way? Mein Kampf, Joker, and now Coriolanus, though I am not sure that the dive we take into his past is all that deep, but this is housed in the children’s section of the library, so maybe it doesn’t have to go all that deep.
The last third of this book takes place in District Twelve and without spoilers I can’t say too much about it, but it sort of took me from two-starring the book to three stars. I was never convinced of the romance, but I was still a bit surprised by how things play out in the District, when things begin to spin a little out of control.
I like Coriolanus as an evil character (and by now, of course, who can see him as anything but the affably evil Donald Sutherland?), and I guess it adds a bit of complexity to him that he likes Lucy Gray. I really like Lucy Gray, too, and even more when I look again at what really happens throughout. I like it that all of the names will encourage kids (or teachers or parents will nudge them) to see that Coriolanus was a tyrant in a Shakespeare play and that the name of Volumina (Dr. Gaul’s first name) is the same name of Coriolanus’s mother in Shakespeare.
I like it that Lucy Gray is based on William Wordsworth’s poem (here’s two stanzas):
Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child; That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind.
Here’s a singer, Maiah Wynee, putting the character Lucy Gray’s song to music:
Here’s another singer, Alexis Leder, setting Wordsworth’s original poem to music:
I like all the music in the book, all the old-timey folk music. I'll probably read the inevitable sequel to this prequel, because: daughter, and I am sure there is a movie deal already.
PS Weird that I would have read in the same month two books that cast shadows on the typically innocent image of a snowman: This book, and Jo Nesbo’s thriller about a serial killer dubbed The Snowman....more
The title of this, the third and final volume of the Afro“I am Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya Osemba, master harmonizer�--Binti
The title of this, the third and final volume of the Afro-futurist science fiction trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor, refers to a specter of change that appears to significant people at times of great crisis.
At one point Okorafor glibly summarized the book: "African girl leaves home. African girl returns home. African girl becomes home."
Binti is a Master Harmonizer (peacemaker) Himba woman who, in the first volume, defied her family and left home, Namibia, to go Oomza University (in space).
The third volume begins with a violent and confrontation in space that leads to a very surprising turn of events, and a trip home for the Himba Binti, who must continue the path to discover herself and see how she can contribute to peace for her people. There are some traditions worth keeping, and some that need to change.
“I’d seen myself as broken. But couldn’t you be broken and still bring change?�
Violent confrontation is everywhere. Can we indeed find a way to reach across differences to live together? Throughout the series, there’s been a spiritual component to Binti’s science and tech-centric world. Here, the mystical and the mathematical are fully revealed as essential, and the Night Masquerade, signaling change, becomes something other than what Binti feared it might be.
As with all of her work, strange and wonderful creatures and concepts populate this world. Binti’s hair, or her tentacle‐like okuoko almost becomes a character in its own right. As a Himba, she colors her skin with the Namimbian soil, Otjize, which gives her power and beauty. Her friend Okwu, a jellyfish-like alien from a race called the Meduse � is under attack from the Khoush, Earth's dominant ethnicity and the Meduse's ancestral enemies. That Binti is friends with Okwu is unusual, and a simple but important aspect of the story.
The Night Masquerade concludes by holding Oomza University up as a shining example of an ideal society � but what makes it ideal is its diversity, its principle accommodating difference. Okorafor has two masters degrees and a doctorate in English, and has been a long time professor, so she has spent many years in the university, so one site for hope is the uni, a laboratory for learning and the development of unity:
“The way people on Oomza Uni were so diverse and everyone handled that as if it were normal continued to surprise me. It was so unlike Earth, where wars were fought over and because of differences and most couldn't relate to anyone unless they were similar.�
In the end it is partly up to Binti, with another new friend, Mwinyi, to try to prevent a war that could wipe out her people. So, Binti is sci fi/fantasy with some sci but more heart, a hopeful allegory, a coming of age story with twists and turns, well-written. ...more
I listened to the audiobook read beautifully by Robin Miles. This is the second installment, maybe a sequel. In the first, short, novella, Binti suddeI listened to the audiobook read beautifully by Robin Miles. This is the second installment, maybe a sequel. In the first, short, novella, Binti suddenly leaves home to go to Oomza University. In the process this 16 year girl experiences a traumatic event, and before this second book, apparently completes her first year of school! The school is all about knowledge AND imagination, and Binti is a math whiz with tentacle-hair and with psychic/magical powers.
Because of said traumatic event, Binti has major PTSD, with panic attacks. To in part cope, she engages in "mathematical meditation," thinking of trapezoids and square roots. She is also quite fascinated by bio-diversity, by flora and fauna, strange creatures and plants. She is from the Himba tribe of Namibia, and she needs to the desert, to home. But the question in this second, more ambitious and longer volume is the nature of home for Binti, who needed to leave the planet to explore for herself what she might become. Where or what is home for this young girl, Binti, now almost 18? NBinto carries with her an artifact from home, an Edan, or godstone, but will it always be there to protect her?
What is clear is that family, and national and ethnic heritage, and local environment ground her, but like any college girl, she has seen the stars, too, and is like her father a "master harmonizer" who asserts communication as the old school solution for inter-ethnic, interspecies conflicts. She takes with her Okwu, her agender Meduse friend, the first Meduse--jelly-fish-lke aliens--to come to Earth. Guess who came home to dinner, Mom and Dad! She clearly needs family and the stars to be who she is, to reach her destiny.
Strip almost everything away from this well-written book and it is a girl's coming-of-age story. But why would you want to strip away anything from this Afro-futurist science fiction story rooted in Africa, with cool gadgets and creatures.
I'm a friend of the author, and have read some of her other books. And will read the next installment (or end of the trilogy, depending on what happens....more
I was unable to attend the exhibition at the British Library on the occasion of the twentieth year since the 1997 release of the first Harry Potter voI was unable to attend the exhibition at the British Library on the occasion of the twentieth year since the 1997 release of the first Harry Potter volume. Well, a book about Harry Potter and magic, you say? Isn't a companion book on magic a bit redundant? Well, you have a point, but this is a lovely illustrated coffee table (paperback, which is to say affordable) commemorative version, the primary audience (appropriately, I guess) young people, illustrated by the two central (and both wonderful, in different ways) Potter World illustrators, Jim Kay and Olivia Gill. And it highlights all the magic in the books, of course, and yes, can be consulted as you read or reread, which will be fun for me to do at some point.
Unable to afford (or attain at all, even if I could afford it) the limited release hardcover edition with what I expect will be a somewhat broader focus, I patiently await my name to come up for it in the library queue, will read and review it and tell you whether it will be worthwhile checking out, but I bet it will. Of course there appears to be a paperback version of it available as well. So much to do!...more
But the book is beautifully produced, a work of art in itself, featuring the Hogwarts artistic vision, stills from the films, paintings, all of the creative ideas for characters and settings. A \behind-the-scenes celebration of the sheer imaginative accomplishment of the world-making. I read it through the first day we got it, and now everyone in the house has pored over it. I know to the Harry Potter reader it appears just like the usual cash grab that accompanies every Big Film, but this is really a fine production, and a lovely read for Potterites (such as everyone in this here house, including me)....more
I don’t take the reading or reviewing of this book lightly: My own daughter is named Lyra, the name of the main character of several books by Philip PI don’t take the reading or reviewing of this book lightly: My own daughter is named Lyra, the name of the main character of several books by Philip Pullman. So it pains me to say that I began and paused in the reading/listening of this book a few times over the past couple years before finally finishing it, reading half of it in the past two weeks. Executive summary: I was disappointed in it and didn’t think it added much to my overall understanding of the world or any of its characters.
The Book of Dust (what a great title, right, if you know the original books?) is the first book, a prequel, of a trilogy related to his original, celebrated trilogy, His Dark Materials. Clever. Since the next two books describe events that take place after His Dark Materials, Pullman’s calling this new trilogy an “equel.� Clever! I love and highly recommend the original trilogy, which I have both read and listened to from the brilliant, audiotaped production with Pullman himself as narrator. We listened to it—all three books—on various road trips and loved it. We have read all the companion books as well. But we all found this first book of the new trilogy, with Lyra as a baby, disappointing. We all really like Michael Sheen’s audio reading of the book, and some of us all also read the hardcover version we had purchased the first week it came out.
What else I liked: I liked being transported back to Oxford and the Lyra-verse; 2) The first trilogy was a conversation between atheist (but very spiritual) Pullman and Christian C. S. Lewis (of The Narnia Chronicles), as well as with Milton’s Paradise Lost (though you don’t need to have read any of that to understand what is going on); The Book of Dust references Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and I liked that it made me look up passages I hadn’t read in decades (but again, you don't need to read Spenser to enjoy this book); 3) I liked main character teen Malcolm well enough, though the boy-girl pair rescuing Lyra feels quite a bit like a lesser version of Lyra and Will of the original trilogy; 4) it’s an all-right adventure story, and 5) I like the Biblical/literary allusions to the flood and a baby being pursued, kept in hiding, among other things.
But I didn’t like that our knowledge of the political and religious critiques and even our knowledge of The Book of Dust itself is advanced so little; 2) I wanted more magic, more new invention (more flying bears!) but it wasn’t really there, and 3) I didn’t learn much about any of the characters I wanted to know more about, such as Lord Asriel, Mrs. Coulter, and others.
But of course the second book comes out soon and I will read it. I have the feeling I will like the next two books more....more
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