Clearly, I Need Professional Help

So, prior to going back to therapy (which - it will soon be obvious - I clearly need), I have read yet another post-apocalyptic novel.  No, I don't know what is wrong with me.  Yes, I agree that something is very, very wrong.  I promise my next novel post will not involve the end of the world as we know it.  I'm blaming this one on the Twilight series and the accompanying films - one of which my teenage daughter dragged me to recently.

Lately I've been getting book ideas from O magazine, and one of the books from her list that looked interesting was Justin Cronin's, The Passage.  For those of us who are (more than) a little tired of pretty, sparkly vampires, Cronin delivers true monsters - and not the kind of monsters who invade our pretty little unsuspecting world, but monsters we create ourselves.  I find that an interesting little twist on good old Vlad.

And I LOVED it.  It's a good long read - a dark, twisted Odyssey with a whole cast of interesting, likeable and flawed characters rich with moments of heroism, great twists and richly painted settings and plot events.  One of the very best things about it is the ending, which is just as flawed and complicated as real life really is, and it is one of those books that you are so sorry to see end when it's over.  Every once in a while I read a book that makes me want to pause before picking up anything else (and this is very, very rare with me - I ALWAYS have a book in the queue).  The last book I can remember feeling this way about was Memoirs of a Geisha - after which I took a week-long hiatus so that I could continue to live in Japan a little longer.  I think it says something that I was sorry to leave Cronin's world - which is arguably nowhere near as nice a place as Golden's Japan.  If it hadn't been so wonderfully and completely terrifying, I'd have handed it to my teenager - 'honey, this is what vampires are really like!'  No one sparkles in the sun in The Passage.

So hopefully this marks the end of my little post-apocalyptic orgy (which I will confess also included a viewing of The Road and The Book of Eli - seriously - WHAT is WRONG with me?).  Someone please recommend something a little more hopeful and uplifting for me to read now!

Intrusions - Ursula Hegi

From a craft point of view, this novel is a really interesting read. I read Stones from the River quite a while ago and remember loving it, so I thought I would take on another novel by Hegi. WELL, this one is quite different. First of all, it has 169 chapters! This is because the main characters (a married couple, Megan and Nick) are constantly "intruding" on the author's attempt to complete her book. Megan is undergoing a bit of an early mid-life crisis (she's only 30) - attempting to deal with her mother and grandmother, evaluating their life choices, and evaluating the state of her marriage. In the meantime, the author's children, husband and lack of motivation are competing for her attention, as are the constant interruptions of her characters as they argue with her plot choices for them and insist that certain decisions aren't true to their characters. While not much actually "happens", the book is worth reading in a sort of esoteric way and is a worthwhile addition to a collection of books on writing, the creative process, or the intersection of fiction and reality. I found myself wondering to what degree the book's author was Hegi herself - in other words, how far removed was Hegi from the "fiction" of her novel? This is a good book to discuss with a group.

It's the End of the World As We Know It....

About four years ago, I got the chance to teach a course at GMU entitled "Young Adult Literature in Multicultural Secondary Settings" (or some equally stupid title which meant, using YA lit in middle and high school English classes).  I used the syllabus of a colleague I really admired as the basis for my own, and borrowed her assignment of reading 25-30 YA lit books over the course of the semester.  That sounded like so much fun, that I decided to do that as well, so I spent that semester teaching the course and reading a pile of YA books that I'd never had time to read before.  The thing about YA lit is that even though I know there's amazing stuff out there, it never occurs to me to put them on my already mountainous "to be read" pile of books, and this was like a free pass to do just that; the equivalent of borrowing your niece and nephew so that you can go see Little Mermaid before you had kids of your own.

That was so much fun, that I've made it a practice to put a YA title on my list (or in my Kindle queue, these days) periodically, just to check out what's happening.  And yes, I did read the Twilight series, but this post is not (thankfully) about them. 

I just finished Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and I've realized I'm a bit of an apocalypse junkie.  I kind of love these end-of-the-world scenarios, beginning with an early worshipful relationship with Stephen King's The Stand, and continuing all the up to my sincere adoration of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

Pfeffer's story of an asteroid knocking the moon closer to the earth's orbit and the ensuing environmental fallout (figuratively and literally) is certainly not the roller coaster ride of King's book, and can't boast the phenomenal writer's craft in The Road, but it was a fun enough read to prompt me to download The Dead and the Gone, Pfeffer's telling of the same story from a different perspective (which is an interesting twist on the traditional sequel, I think).   Life is a much stronger story - told as a series of journal entries written from the perspective of an adolescent girl whose biggest problem pre-asteroid was dealing with her parents' divorce, and who finds inner strength and resourcefulness she didn't know she had.  There is a lot of focus on food here - I had no idea how quickly food would run out in the case of the disasters Pfeffer describes.  I even learned a little science - while I had anticipated that the repositioning of the moon would impact tides and cause all kinds of related environmental disasters (floods and tsunamis), I hadn't realized that it could also cause all kinds of volcanic activity which would intern create ash clouds that would block out the sun.  From there, it's a forgone conclusion....but Pfeffer leaves the ending uncertain and unwritten.  Just like it is.

The Physik Book of Deliverance Dane

This one was purely for fun.  I've always liked period pieces.  My husband swears that if, while flipping through channels on the TV I catch a glimpse of anyone in a corset, that's what we wind up watching.  I also like stories about witches - no comments from the peanut gallery, please.

The Phyisck Book of Deliverance Dane is no great literary masterpiece, but a fun, relaxing escape.  The story is Connie's - Constance.  A graduate student in history at Harvard, Connie (Constance) is embarking on her dissertation, trying to find and hone a topic while also cleaning out her grandmother's abandoned home, and deal with her flighty and difficult advisor.  For various reasons, Connie finds her research leading her to attempt to find a rare primary source - the physick or receipt book of a woman tried and found guilty of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials.  She finds that her life and the life of the accused witch, Deliverance Dane, intersect in many important ways. 

"My Orange Duffel Bag"

Read the first half of the book the first time I opened it. The story is fascinating, and the presentational style is equally compelling. Hard to describe, but falls somewhere between scrapbook and collage. Reminds me of the Griffin and Sabine series a bit -- although the style they use is as suited to they story they convey as Bantock's is to a correspondence. My friend Echo Garrett helped Sam Bracken create it -- it is his memoir.

It is not available through amazon.com. Apparently there are lots of issues (of which I was unaware until Echo explained it to me) and they chose to publish through the website for the book instead. Don't have the URL handy but you can google the book title -- or it has a fan page on FB.

I would love to hear from you what you think of it -- and pass the feedback along to Echo. I am trying to get her involved with Fall for the Book -- and she and Sam are already doing a lot of touring and other promotional work. The book was only recently released.

Re-reading Alice Walker

For reasons I don't want to go into here, I decided to re-read Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy after nearly twenty years.  It tells the story of Tashi, an Olinka girl briefly mentioned in Walker's more famous The Color Purple, and imagines her life in Africa and America.  More importantly, it directly confronts an African tradition of female circumcision (or, as Walker puts it, female genital mutilation) - a topic which became for Walker a kind of cause celebre'. 

I will confess that on my first reading, I didn't understand at first what it was that was being described, it was so far outside my ability to imagine.  It was, as I'm sure Walker intended it to be, horrifying, but at the time I didn't know what to do with that (not that I know now).  After reading it, I think I decided that it was a practice that happened half a world away from where I safely live, and is safely in the past.  I was wrong.

A little Internet research has revealed the startling statistic that Excision and circumcision are reportedly practised in Sierra Leone by all Christian and Muslim ethnic groups, with the exception of the Krios who live in the western region and in Freetown. The mutilations are performed as part of the initiation rituals of the Bundo and Sande secret societies. According to the World Health Organization, the prevalence rate was 90% in 1997. However, the IPU has no first-hand official statistics or other details on this subject.  Those of you who know me understand why this statistic is of particular interest to me. 

Walker's description of this practice as a kind of sexual binding of women akin to foot-binding in China  seems especially apt.  By crippling women and physically taking control of her body in this way, she is both damaged and enslaved to men.  What is so threatening in a woman's sexual power that we must remove it entirely and render her incapable of pleasure?  That doesn't even address the issue that millions of women girls (the procedure is commonly performed on the very young) die during and immediately following the procedure from blood loss and infection, that millions of others are unable to give birth or those who are frequently suffer from further complications brought on by scar tissue....

So book report....It's an amazing book - Walker has a way with words that makes you want to write sentences and phrases on your walls so that you can look at them and think about them over and over again, and she has a quiet way of inciting your anger and outrage that just builds and builds (I'm sure you've noticed from this post).  It's a tough subject, but not one worth ignoring.

Await Your Reply

I just finished reading Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon.  I'm not sure exactly how to describe this book - and still not sure how I feel about it.  It's kind of a mystery (which is not my usual preferred genre) without a body.  Miles Chesire has spent most of his adult life trying to track down his wayward, possibly schizophrenic con artist brother Hayden, and the story is the result of the intersections of Miles' life with Hayden's various aliases and the people whose lives he's touched or destroyed along the way.  I had thought I had figure out the "trick" of the book, and was eagerly awaiting the vindication I thought I'd get at the end of the book when it was revealed that I had been right....but either I missed it or it didn't happen.  I'd love for one of you to read it and let me know what you think - which is why I'm being cryptic and vague is this review.