Reading Creatively or Yes! That’s What I’m Talking About!: A Guest Post by Trisha

Today’s guest post is by the wonderfully articulate and incredibly intelligent Trisha from eclectic/eccentric, and it’s about the wonders of being an active reader no manner the genre you’re reading (only that’s probably too simple a way to put it). This is a theme near and dear to me, as nothing disappoints me more than seeing otherwise intelligent readers fail to engage with a book because they’d decided beforehand it wasn’t worth of any serious intellectual attention. Trisha is a literature professor, and along with Andi or Jeanne she’s always there to remind me not to make silly generalisations about academia, even when I get frustrated with it. But enough blabbing from me: I’ll let Trisha’s excellent post speak for itself.


Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us "there is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world."

Books, the ones we love, touch us by saying that which we cannot articulate ourselves. While reading - if we are truly, actively reading - we see connections to the world around us, to our own lives, to our own thoughts, and this makes the story itself even more powerful, full of truths momentarily captured.

This moment of shared imagining, shared insight, can spark a feeling of enlightenment, a feeling that something we have always known deep down has been discovered, interpreted, and made manifest by another. These are the moments that make you want to scream YES! THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

I read for this sensation, the feeling of connection with the text and with the author in those moments of realization. Sometimes the sentiment is one which is familiar:

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As Sidda sat at the edge of Lake Quinault, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war with each other.

Historiography has long been an interest of mine – the disparity between what actually happened and what our own senses record and what actually gets told is a fascinating subject. Reading these words in a novel gave me that momentary sense of being connected on an intellectual level with the author. But the passage did more than that for me. It took the concept, the practical thought, and made it poetic and a bit more abstract; a sense of the import rather than just the literal idea. The second and third sentences in the passage elevate the concept of history by suggesting the flexibility of the mind to overcome boundaries, to float heedlessly wherever necessary, to remedy inconsistencies in memory.

Other times the sentiment is one which is unfamiliar, but obvious, a thought or insight we wish we would have already had:

Of the countless cruelties of racism, Sidda thought, one is the unspoken rule that white children, once we reach a certain age, are supposed to renounce the passionate love we feel for the black women who raised us. We’re supposed to replace it with a sentimental, patronizing affection.

Prior to reading this passage, I had never considered the horrible irony of white children living in a world which stressed their dominance over the very women who took care of them as a mother would throughout their childhood. That rite of passage, moving from the nanny’s child to the nanny’s superior, must have been extremely painful for both parties. I may have never considered this particular thought had I not read this book, and while my life may not be any different for knowing it, at the time of the reading, I was blown away by the recognition that I had not yet recognized such a horrifying truth.

Both of the above quotes come from The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, a book I read two times back-to-back when I was 19 or 20. I chose this book to illustrate my point precisely because it is not an overly intellectual piece of canon literature. Every book - whether classic or contemporary, literary fiction or fantasy, novel or comic, adult or YA - every story has the potential to ignite something within the reader, a moment of intellectual connection with the text and with the world that can enrich the person’s reading experience.

Even a middle grade fiction fantasy novel like K.A. Applegate’s EverWorld series can have me nodding my head in agreement. In the second installment in the series, one of the characters explains that the ancient gods created a separate universe for themselves, and they brought all the creatures of myth and legend. And they dragged a healthy number of humans across with them, because, hey, what's the point in being a god if there's no one around to kiss your immortal butt?

Despite the humorous tone, my brain latched on to this thought as one I had considered many times. Without humans to worship them, what are the gods? I felt a kinship with the author and a greater respect for the text because of the simple inclusion of a familiar and yet thought-provoking statement.

Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, writes: There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Many times my moments of YES! THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT occur because the thoughts being expressed are my own “formless feelings” which have not risen to the consciousness of words, and the author managed to make those revolving bits and pieces of insight come together like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle. Hurston’s quote represents one of those instances.

No matter if it’s the familiar, unfamiliar, or formless, the ideas presented in literature are what resonate with me, what keep me reading and thinking and reflecting. Are there any particular passages that resonated strongly with you? Any passages that made you want to stand up and scream Yes! That’s what I’m talking about! ?

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Joss Whedon: A Guest Post by Lightheaded

Today’s guest post is by a blogger I think of as my book twin, Lightheaded at everyday reads. Lightheaded and I have quite a few favourite authors in common, and when she recommends something, I know I can be 90% sure I’m going to like it too – which is why I should have listened to her about Atonement when she first recommended it to me some three years ago. And speaking of things I should listen to her about (not to mention to countless other blogging friends), Lightheaded’s post is about Joss Whedon, he of Buffy and Firefly fame. Yes, I’m properly ashamed of myself for not having watched season one of Buffy yet, even though I promised Amy I would last year, but at least I’m packing the DVDs to take with me to my new home. That’s a start, right?


Hello, I am Lightheaded. I'm a book addict. Kidding. I'll be posting today because Ana's knee-deep in books, alas studying them instead of the usual thing we book bloggers do. I mean reading for the pleasure of it. And while she's away I'll go tinker with her blog a bit. Insert maniacal laughter here.

I will deviate from my usual rambles about books and instead focus on one other thing. One other person, I mean. Today I will share my total and complete adoration of Joss Whedon. I mean, if I'm going to do a guest post on my Book Twin's blog (I'm truly honored that Nymeth considers me her Book Twin, so much so I give it a proper noun designation, hahaha) what better way to "hijack" this venue by writing about someone she hasn't even discussed yet, right?

Well, "hijack" is such grave a term. And I do hope you guys enjoy this one.

I don't remember when was it that I started referring to Joss as a genius. I used to just watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back in the days when torrents were but a hacker's dream. Of course I'm being overly dramatic. Then again, if you live in a tropical country like me and your source of foreign tv shows are channels that show them at least two seasons behind from the ones being aired in the States, today's sites for downloading are simply havens of delight. Too bad that there aren't any Whedon shows on air now. But I digress.

While I don't remember when I started referring to Joss as a genius, I knew early on that BtVS was special. Back then it was different. Of course it wasn't a procedural unlike other dramas. It had vampires and werewolves and your usual monsters of the week. But it was more than that. It had a story that kept you glued. It had adults that act like adults and kids that act like kids. And well, the monsters that act like monsters and some that don't. It had characters that make you believe that you were back in highschool, facing the demons (real or imagined) they were actually facing. And it was while watching BtVS and the spinoff, Angel that I started regarding Joss for what he is, a god, I mean a master storyteller.

And that's what ties all of us book bloggers together, you see. We all love stories. Good stories. We are charmed by characters that weave magic into our hearts and believe that they could overcome any plot difficulties - be it Tally Youngblood undergoing changes in the Uglies Trilogy, Christopher Chant becoming Chrestomanci, Liesel Meminger writing her stories in The Book Thief or even Briony Tallis trying to atone for her sins. We love stories because we see the truth in them. We adore authors that make us react, make us feel, make us believe. And I could say the same thing about Joss Whedon.

He created a heroine out of a cheerleader who eventually burned her school down. How awesome is that? And it wasn't enough she had to go through highschool, she did it while recognizing her own strengths and weaknesses as a Slayer. The Chosen One. Ok, so I'll stop there. I mean probably everyone knows who Buffy is anyway. But the good thing about having a master storyteller craft a show is knowing that the central figure needs strong support from other characters. And here we have an excellent cast: the bestfriend Willow, bookish, nerdy and powerful in her own right, the other bestfriend Xander who acts like the voice of (wimpy) reason, the librarian Giles who guides the Slayer, and the sulking, brooding Angel who's a vampire with a soul. And that's just the first two seasons. Of course I'm not here to write about every episode of the show. That would take "hijack a blog" to a certain extreme. Hahaha. But there are great, great episodes in the entire seven season run. My favorite is Once More with Feelings primarily because it's a musical. My other favorite is Hush, an episode with barely any speaking parts.

I do recognize that Joss had very strong support in the scripts. But it's his story that people are telling. BtVS is a great show but what's even greater is the spinoff, Angel. Sue me if I consider Angel more of my favorite. It's darker yes, but it's also geared for adults. It's a story for adults who have gone through a lot as most of us have. Angel is the tortured hero, a champion. He didn't want to be one. He was the meanest, baddest vampire of all called Angelus, until he killed a gypsy and her relatives cast a spell on him to bring his soul back. Hence all the people he killed and maimed and what-have-you weigh down on him everyday with that soul in his being.

And to make matters more confusing, only a master storyteller can craft a villain that will grow on you. A villain in the name of Spike. Also a vampire. An evil vampire. A former bumbling poet in the Victorian era turned into a fiendish rake who has killed two Slayers already. A villain who morphs into a hero when he fell in love with the enemy.

Typing that and I started seeing Spike arriving in Sunnydale with his too yellow hair. Hahaha.

But see, a master storyteller just doesn't stop at the mythology of the slayers and vampire. He creates other worlds, other series. There's that much missed Firefly, of course. It could have been his greatest work yet but hey, he was subject to the powers-that-be of Fox which cancelled the show just when we were starting to look forward to more adventures for Captain Mal and his crew.

Me, I actually watched Serenity first. The movie. [Aside: Talk about cool, here's a link to an old interview with Joss Whedon and that other master storyteller, Neil Gaiman prior to the release of Serenity years ago. Total geek goodness.] Then I backtracked with the Firefly DVD. It's a story about the future. A future that is bleak. A future controlled by the Alliance. Dystopian? Yes. With a merry ragtag team of eh, thieves who refuse to submit to the Alliance's control? Oh yes. If there's one show I'd like to see more of it's this. Really, Serenity is just the start. I want more. I know there are a lot of Browncoats out there like me, too.

The latest show to get the ax was Dollhouse just this year. Not a lot of people liked this but I did. It is a show about mind control, touched in part by the film Serenity but explored here to more destructive proportions. The Dollhouse is a place for dolls: people whose memories have been wiped off and installed new ones depending on a client's wish. It was wrapped up too soon but at least that was better than the early cancellation of Firefly.

And then there's Dr. Horrible and His Sing-Along Blog. It's a web show spun from the Writer's Strike a couple of years back. It's a musical, again. And it's a story about a villain, Dr. Horrible, trying to get into the Evil League of Evil. And yet, and yet this villainous guy who blogs his evil exploits has a serenade in mind for the girl of his dreams. Unrequited love captured to perfection:


I know I'm rambling. Sorry.

But see here, he wouldn't be a master storyteller without these stories and the characters in them. He writes not just strong women characters but believable ones. Even characters with a smidgen of airtime has lasting significance. When he writes about stereotypical characters you tend to know them beyond such labels. See, first you had the snobbish, spoiled cheerleader Cordelia during the first three seasons of BtVS. It was quite easy to hate her. And yet she starts growing on you. Then the geeks Warren, Jonathan and Andrew. You see some of them throughout the course of the seasons until they come and haunt you with the fact that they actually studied you from afar and are now formidable enemies in their own right. Supporting characters such as Sierra and Victor who are as formidable as Echo. The Empath Demon of Caritas who can read your life through any song you sing. You have stories of heartbreaks in all the series because a master storyteller isn't afraid of anything: neither death nor destruction. Everybody feels, nobody's safe. And that's what life is all about.

Of course tv shows aren't like books. A network decides on the airtime of shows unlike in books where the author decides for himself or herself when to stop. That notwithstanding, Joss Whedon will always be my favorite master storyteller. And that's actually surprising, coming from a book addict like me. Yay for confession time!

And I thank my Book Twin, Nymeth, for allowing me a space to ramble about my complete and total adoration of Joss. Rambling is probably an understatement. So may I suggest you get the DVDs of Whedon's shows and experience the highs and lows of life. You just might like them too.

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Context: A Guest Post by Memory

Today’s guest post is by my favourite speculative fiction blogger, Memory from Stella Matutina. I once said that if Memory switched to blogging about deep sea fishing I’d still happily read everything she posted, and I completely stand by those words. Memory’s guest post is about narrative context – how a story is framed or justifies its own existence – and it’s both wonderfully written and full of questions about storytelling that I also find fascinating. I hope you’ll enjoy it every bit as much as I did.


First person narratives always get me thinking about context.

(A brief explanatory aside, now: when I say “context,” I’m referring to the story’s existence within the book’s own world; the context within which the narrator tells the tale. Is it written down? Is it an oral account? Are we right there with them, viewing events through their eyes? Does the story exist in physical form, within the book itself?)

If we read something in the third person, we can assume that we’re dealing with an omniscient narrator who’s relaying the story from a distance. Easy stuff. When we shift to the first person, though, the whole idea of context becomes just a touch less clear.

In most cases, context is implied, not directly stated. If the narrator sometimes addresses the reader directly, as Jacqueline Carey’s narrators do in her KUSHIEL’S LEGACY series, we can assume she’s writing these events out after the fact. Moirin, the most recent trilogy’s narrator, even references the second story arc in such a way that it’s clear she’s read it. The books exist in her world, in physical form.

If the narrator speaks entirely in the present tense, like Todd in Patrick Ness’s THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, we can assume we’re riding around inside his head, watching events as they unfold. Todd isn’t necessarily creating a record for future generations, though his physiology ensures that those around him will still hear his story, since men in his world cannot help but project their thoughts.

Occasionally, the narrator does provide us with a concrete context. Fitz, who narrates Robin Hobb’s FARSEER and TAWNY MAN trilogies, tells us right up front that he’s trying to write the history of his country… but he keeps getting distracted by his own life story. He’s got stacks of paper sitting all over his house, and this physical record causes him a few problems in later books. The title character of Francesca Lia Block and Carmen Staton’s RUBY wants to give her lover an account of how they came together. She address him as “you” throughout the text, mingling the first person with the second. Holden Caulfield of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE has been asked to detail the events that led him to come west. We never learn whether he’s telling his story aloud, presumably to someone with a tape recorder, or writing it down; either way, he’s created a physical record that any of the story’s characters could pick up and read.

Then we have Anne Rice, who is the queen of context. She gives us a concrete context for every one of her first person gothic novels. (Her religious novels and her erotica are a little less defined). Louis, Armand, Quinn, Azriel, Marius and (in one instance) Lestat tell their stories aloud. They make a record of events for one particular person, with the understanding that this person will transcribe the account and share it with others. Lestat, Pandora, David and Triana write their stories themselves. They intend to “make a book” out of it, as David says, and they sometimes address the reader directly.

But it’s THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED that interests me the most, so far as context goes. In this book, Lestat’s first person POV alternates with a number of third person POVs—and Lestat tells us, right up front, that he gleaned the third person bits from peoples’ minds as they told him about their experiences. There’s still context.

Why the italics? Well, this is the only first/third combo narrative I’ve ever encountered where such is the case. These sorts of narratives don’t really lend themselves to context. We can assume that the first person narrator is either telling us the story or writing it out at a later date, as we established above, but how does the third person enter the picture? How does Katherine’s perspective join with the third person bits in Ellen Kushner’s THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD? Where does Bartimaeus’s first person fit in with Nathanial and Kitty’s third in Jonathan Stroud’s BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY? There’s no context.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it’s an interesting problem to mull over. And it becomes even more interesting when you consider how the first and third persons combine over larger series. How do we reconcile the vampiric first person with the third person perspective prevalent throughout Anne Rice’s Mayfair books, which are set in the same world and fit into the same overall series? How does Fitz’s context-heavy first person fit in with the omniscient third person in the LIVESHIP TRADERS series? What about Diana Gabaldon’s OUTLANDER books, which began in the first person from Claire’s perspective but later became a mix of first person and third? Hmm.

Then we have the multi-first person narratives, where context flies even further out the window.

How do these narratives come together? Are the narrators consciously sharing the storytelling; are they aware of the other person’s narrative? In most cases, it seems a bit of a stretch to believe so. If we look at a book like THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger, written in the present tense, we can assume we’re living it alongside the characters, but what about something like Anne Rice’s EXIT TO EDEN, or Sarah Monette’s DOCTRINE OF LABYRINTHS series, or Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett’s HAVEMERCY? We’ve basically gotta throw the whole idea of context out the window and just roll with it. Suspend our disbelief and accept that these stories have come together somehow. Never mind the specifics.

I didn’t mean to ramble on for nearly this long, but context really does fascinate me. How about you? Can you think of any other combined first/third person novels with a concrete context? What about multi-first person works? I know my examples are fantasy-heavy; can you recommend any relevant mainstream titles, or books in other genres?

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Warrior Women: A Guest Post by Jodie

Today’s guest post is by one of my very favourite bloggers, Jodie from Book Gazing. I love Jodie for her willingness to both speak up and listen, as well as for her insightful and thoughtful posts on everything from books to social issues to popular culture. A new post from Jodie never fails to make me happy, both because a) I know it’ll both entertain me and make me think and b) she always makes me feel better about my own tendency to write lots and lots of words. I particularly love this post of Jodie’s on female characters, which deals with some of the same questions I’ve wondered about aloud before, and I’m proud to share it with you today.


My love for fictional female warriors is everlasting. I chase after any television series that promises to be the next Buffy, or any book that claims hints of Alana. When I was a teenager I got hooked on Xena. Right now I’m mainlining Firefly, marvelling at Zoe Washburne. As long as people keep writing women who fight I’ll be following them around with a bloodthirsty, glazed expression, shouting ‘Finish it!’.

However, expressing my love for female characters who stab and slash can be complicated. By becoming warriors, fictional female fighters discard traditional notions of what a woman should and should not be, for example conventionally women are not expected to be aggressive, physically strong, or interested in warfare. They then show that they are capable of excelling in areas that women are conventionally assumed to be less adept at, like strangling people with their bare hands. With this in mind the fictional female warrior, becomes a prominent symbol for female power and feminism. Hurray, strong women who frame themselves outside traditional ideas of what women should be = feminism.

It’s never that simple is it? Our ideas about feminist behaviour are forever changing and as our ideas about feminism alter, our ideas about a potent fictional feminist icon, like female warrior characters, will inevitably shift. Ideas about feminism don’t change in a linear, universal, or permanent way. Instead interpretations spring up side by side, ideas change, then change back. We all try really hard to respect the contributions of the past without compromising our own ideas. Working out how a new generation of female warrior characters fit in with both old and new ideas about female strength becomes as complex and as rewarding as hashing out ideas on feminism itself.

Let me briefly describe an alternate theory to the women + swords = emancipation sum. When female characters are described as strong, there’s a good chance they’ve been written with a weapon in their hand and a gleaming set of muscles. Warrior women are primarily seen as strong female characters because of their physical strength. This association between the strength of a women and increased physical strength can be problematic, because it stems from what men perceive as strong and physical strength is traditionally thought of as male. While I’m busy watching Buffy, saying ‘Hurray for women being physically strong, it seems very useful to be able to heft a sword’, I can’t help but hear a rumbling that reflects that statement back as ‘Hurray for women finally realising that the only way to have strength is to adopt the a male form of strength, physical strength’. So female warrior characters set up the default for women’s strength, but it’s a default that conforms to male ideas of strength. Women + swords = conformity. The maths comes out wrong.

The idea that a physically strong female character is just acting like a man is a theory that I personally reject. I believe physical strength isn’t a male characteristic, it’s a non-gendered characteristic that many women have been socially encouraged to repress. Just because a female character kicks arse, doesn’t mean she’s acting like a man. In fact, that assertion sounds like basic anti-feminism to me. While I disagree with that idea, I find myself troubled by the idea that a female character taking on the kind of strength traditionally associated with a man keeps people from recognising alternative kinds of strength, for example emotional strength. It’s not the female characters fault, it’s not the authors fault, it’s just that society general associates strength with traditionally male actions like fighting. Generally a female character is going to be praised as strong if she fights, rather than if she exhibits emotional strength. Oh, unless she’s stoic, society really loves to characterise stoicism as strength. I can’t control the way other people view strength (secretly works on mind control helmets). There’s nothing I can do about this except alternate between going arrrgggghhh and hoping for the best.

Personally, I like to see people who write female warriors make effective use of what might traditionally be thought of as female emotion. Again I believe that having a capacity for emotion and listening are non-gendered personality traits, just like physical strength, in fact I think they’re some of the greatest emotional strengths a human being can possess. However, traditionally emotional feeling has been linked with the female sex. I like to see authors give importance to things like listening (even if it leads to trickery) being emotionally open (even if it leads to trickery) and most importantly not just killing people because you have a very sharp sword. If someone is going to write a female warrior I want her to be physically strong and emotionally strong and by emotionally strong I don’t mean hard, or unbending. I do want female warriors to be able to make tough decisions, but how tough can a decision be if a warrior character never connects emotionally with other people?

Now, because expressing emotion is generally thought of by society as a female trait, not a male trait and ‘maleness’ is often viewed as the default for awesome, these character traits that I want could be construed by others as gendered weakness. They could, in some peoples minds, illustrate why a woman doesn’t make as cool of a warrior character as a man. People who want to defend the female warrior character from scrutiny might say female characters emotions should be suppressed to prevent female warrior characters from appearing less exciting, or weaker than male warriors who would never let emotions obscure their vital need to slash, smash, kill, buuuuurn.

In my opinion, when a female warrior is created with emotions it doesn’t make her less warrior like, or weak, even if these emotions sometimes complicate the effectiveness of her killing. It makes her a conflicted human being. Giving a male warrior character the ability to express confusing emotions would make a male warrior a conflicted human being too. The problem is, not that many years ago anyone calling for female warriors to be kept emotionless to increase their appeal and validate them as warriors might have been on to something. If an author had written a female warrior who sat down and talking to her enemies instead of breaking their bones, that might have been construed as female warriors not being as awesome and capable as male warrior heroes. As far as we’ve come, female warriors who feel might still be responded to in this way.

Remember that sci-fi brouhaha last year which basically said that sci-fi is suffering from increased feminisation and (among other reasons) this is bad because girls aren’t as cool as boys. The guy who voiced that opinion would not like female warrior characters like Buffy, who feel and have relationships and he would find people who support his views. You can see why people would search for ways to head off this criticism. I can’t bring myself to reject the more simplistic female warrior character, who discards all feeling, because it’s tough to be a warrior woman in book world.

Following female warrior characters can be complex. Creating them must be a joyous nightmare. Everything about them is kind of bloodily wonderful. What’s my final solution for how to create the perfect female warrior? Well, looking back at what I’ve written it seems to be:

1. Make her a physically strong human being
   
2. Stick your fingers in your ears when people give gendered meaning to parts of her personality

Did I really just spend over 1,000 words to end up saying I want female characters who fight to be human beings. Yes, yes I believe I did. Let me leave you (what took me so long) with a list of book full of female warriors, some I’ve read and loved so hard, some I’m desperate to get hold on. Happy reading:

• Silver Phoenix – Cindy Pon
  
• Bleeding Violet – Dia Reeves
  
• Devil’s Kiss – Sarwat Chadda
  
• Alanna The First Adventure – Tamora Pierce
  
• Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle – Manda Scott
  
• Warrior Queens – Antonia Fraser
  
• Graceling – Kristen Kashore
  
• The Pirate Queen – Diana Norman
  
• The Carhullan Army – Sarah Hall
  
• Amazon Ink – Lori Devoti
  
• The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
  
• Leviathan – Scott Westerfield

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Comfort Reading: A Guest Post by Renay

Note from Ana: Today's guest post is by one of the funniest, smartest and awesomemest bloggers around, Renay at subverting the text. Renay always speaks up about the things she cares about, and she's someone who manages to make me laugh, nod in agreement, and think about things in ways I hadn't considered before about three hundred times per post. But instead of trying to convince you of the truth of this statement, I'll let you discover it for yourself. I hope you're having a great Book Blogger Appreciation Week, by the way!

When Ana asked me to do a guest post, my first thought was, "I AM NOT WORTHY!" followed by crippling indecision and self-loathing. That's just how I roll when my critic-idols come ask me to put my words in their space. I have dreams about posting terrible, error-ridden screeds about chickens, teriyaki sauce and the merits of lawn checkers that no one but me cares about.

I couldn't decide what to write, at all, and then my cat died.

It's very sad, of course. I miss my grumpy ass cat and her snubbing me. I would give a lot to be snubbed by her again. But, life goes on, and now everyone has emotional whiplash from the transition from Paragraph #1 to #2 which speaks volumes about this entire post. Welcome to my head! It is like this all the time!

I am not sure if anything good can come out of my cat's death, but in the end I got an idea of what to post, though the means were inherently negative and often leave me in tears. I mourned, and I read and I mourned. I did a lot of comfort reading the last few weeks. I buried myself in it, like a drowning person in the ocean clings to the giant sea turtle that's just happened to be in the neighborhood. Life is hard and full of woe, and when tragedy strikes, it's hard to know how to move forward. It's hard to know how to continue with the day to day momentum when a piece of your life has been ripped out, when you're at a loss, when you sit down and finally realize that something irreplaceable is gone forever. I dealt by returning to words, because words (at least in English) offer me the grace and the stillness of body, the ability to lie back and go, do, be whatever I want. The Reading Rainbow theme song wasn't lying. LeVar Burton would never lead anyone astray, give me a break.

What do we talk about when talking about comfort reading? It's different for everyone.

I know mine is different, because I don't tend to read books, I tend to sink into fanfiction, which is exactly what I did this time. I dived into the Inception fandom, took a giant swig of the Arthur/Eames kool-aid and never looked back. Really, you could read this which will break you and then put you back together or this which is full of delicious, delicious angst and sexy times, or you could read this which makes me want to EXPLODE FROM HAPPINESS. Except you can't read ANY of them without seeing Inception, so feel free to get on that. This is what I did: I let fandom take me apart with their angst and woe skills and put me back together with their romance and cuddling and make outs. I read and I dealt and I read some more. I can't always manage it these days with books, because it's hard to find the right combination. I can do it with rereading, but it's harder to lose myself, harder to let go. It's better if I don't have a perfectly clear picture of where I'm going. Sometimes there are no maps in mourning.

But then, I used to do it with books and probably will again, because sometimes re-reading is what Dr. Heartbreak ordered, and Ana isn't running A Blog For Wayward Fangirls here, so I suppose I need to stop hijacking her space to promote my boys kissing!!!111 agenda, whether it works for me or not.

I flip and I flop between tones and themes. I break myself and then find something so ridiculously happy that it's like the sun busted up into my apartment to hand deliver some vitamin D and cheer. The last time I fell into The Doldrums, I made a list, and I followed that list until I felt like my heart had stopped revolting. Sharing them almost seems counter-productive, because, as has been established, comfort reading is different for everyone. However, in the interests of full disclosure and to round out this entry as ALL ABOUT RENAY YES ME ME ME ME, AND DID I MENTION, MYSELF?, why not?


I didn't expect The Lies of Locke Lamora to be one of THOSE books. You know the ones. You take an innocent trip into a new fantasy series and then the author PUNCHES YOU IN THE SOUL. That's a good way to describe what Lynch does. I think it's totally worth it, except for a chaser something nice and fluffy had to follow or I would have just sobbed into my pillow for three weeks. That's where Howl's Moving Castle comes in. I am a sucker for some nice, antagonistic romance with bonus plot.

Of course, I don't have to introduce Diana Wynne Jones to anyone here, because Ana is awesome and has done all the legwork for me and I will just take shameless advantage of her. Howl's Moving Castle, if you like the style, will seriously make everything sparkle and the world look just a little brighter. It might also bring you some tissues and given you a hug. Maybe.


Perhaps you are now sensing a theme here, where I blatantly appropriate Ana's reviews for my own nefarious ends. She reviewed Looking for Alaska way back in 2008 (has it really been that long? Wow.), but when I need to sink into the Swamps of Sadness, it's pretty much a guarantee that I will pick up this book and allow Green to tug me into the complicated world of a Southern boarding school, let his words roll over me like waves on a far shore, my eyes full of sky and let the end of this book fill my heart, because what's gone is not forever lost.

On the complete opposite side, My Most Excellent Year is a recent addition to my comfort read shelf and I have found it really compliments bittersweet, angst-filled books that renew teenage suffering and melodrama. It is so sweet and earnest that it is cavity inducing, the best combination of first love, friendship and family I have found in a book. It is shamelessly happy and wants you to be happy, too. It will never give up in its attempts to make you a melted pile of happiness on the floor. This book is not just a spoon full of sugar, it is the entire sugar cane field distilled into the form of a book. Your dentist advises caution.


Again, anyone familiar with Ana's work knows of her love of Palimpsest. I have not read it yet, but I have read this duology by the same author, and it is so beautiful. In the Night Garden was a surprise find. Unlike the other books in the pairs, this book is more melancholy, and heartbreaking in subtle ways. If ever I have found a book that so neatly takes me away from my problems and my personal sadness, it is this one.

When I finally picked up In the Cities of Coin and Spice, it was like coming home during a snowstorm and finding the cocoa already piping hot with delicious marshmallows and a blanket ready on the couch for snuggling. The second book closes the journey, makes sense out of tangled threads. Its pages were a smile and nimble fingers that sent me twirling back down where the first book had twisted me tight without me realizing it, and when it was done I was dizzy as hell but wow, what a ride.

We're all so different, and have so may varied ways of dealing with sorrow. The stories I have linked to and talked about are my way. As active participants in reading and this community we have an escape always waiting to wrap us in words and sweep us up or down, and possibly sideways. What do you read when sad? What's your comfort reading? Books? Blogs? Maybe you don't read fiction at all, but escape to facts and nonfiction. Maybe you spend some time in a different genre, or like me, go dig up some fanfiction. Perhaps you find the labels of cleaning product the best catharsis ever, hell yeah, scrubbing bubbles, take me away. As always in our journey as readers, it's the way we all find different paths to get to the same end that's the most fascinating; the way we can use words to find peace.

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Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: a Guest Post by Jenny

Note from Ana: First of all, happy Book Blogger Appreciation Week, everyone! I'm currently on a blogging hiatus, and so I'll have to miss out on the fun this year. But I hope you have a great time and appreciate the heck out of one another, as you all certainly deserve it. As I explained last week, a few lovely bloggers are taking care of my blog while I'm gone, and today's guest post is by Jenny from Jenny's Books.

Jenny is an excellent and incredibly funny writer (I'll let this story about her blue library card or her post tags speak for themselves). She's also someone I'll be eternally grateful to: she nudged me to read Dorothy L. Sayers, forbid me from starting with Gaudy Night, and introduced me to the likes of Hilary McKay and Jean Webster (of Daddy-Long-Legs fame).

Jenny's post is about Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barret Browning. You might remember that earlier this year I read and absolutely loved Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning's letters (also at Jenny's urging). Aurora Leigh is a book I've never posted about, but it's one that means the world to me - I can trace my love of all things Victorian directly to the class in which I read it. But I'm not the one who's supposed to be telling you all about it, so I'll shut up now and let Jenny convince you that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is as awesome as it gets.

The problem with kids today (don't you find?) is that they just don't write enough epic poetry. If only we could all be Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her Aurora Leigh is a book-length poem about women and men, art and charity work, marriage and sexual mores, and the respective value of living by one's head or by one's heart, and it is absolutely marvelous. I would say the best way to advertise its charms is to display them at length, so here we go. The eponymous (how much do I love the word "eponymous"?) Aurora Leigh is an English-Italian orphan living in England with an English aunt, who

...had lived, we'll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all,
(But that, she had not lived enough to know).

When Aurora is eighteen years old, her intensely practical and very well-intentioned cousin Romney proposes to her. It's a very St. John Rivers sort of proposal: he says that he wants to work to improve the lot of Man and desires Aurora as his helpmeet. But she refuses, saying that she wants to dedicate her life to writing poetry, which Romney considers a useless past-time, when there are people living in poverty that need to be helped. They have a smashing and eloquent argument about the relative values of his work and hers:

If your sex is weak for art [says Romney]
(And I who said so, did but honour you
By using truth in courtship) it is strong
For life and duty. Place your fecund heart
In mine, and let us blossom for the world
That wants love's colour in the grey of time.

To which Aurora replies:

For me,
Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,
Of work like this!...perhaps a woman's soul
Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,
And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir;
And if I fail...why, burn me up my straw
Like other false works--I'll not ask for grace....I
Who love my art, would never wish it lower
To suit my stature.

The poem takes us through years in Aurora's life, as she works to become a poet and Romney works to reform humanity through his social programs. His passion for social reform leads him to seek a wife among the lower classes, a humble girl called Marian Erle from a vagrant family, to prevent which nuptial bliss the (apparently) socially conscious Lady Waldemar applies to Aurora, now a successful London poet. Relatively successful:

I worked with patience which means almost power.
I did some excellent things indifferently,
Some bad things excellently.

You may be surprised to hear that Lady Waldemar is not as nice as she pretends to be. Aurora Leigh sees right through her ("Nay, go to the opera! Your love's curable.")

Browning is at her very best in this poem when she is writing about love and art. Knowing what I do about Elizabeth Barrett Browning--how she lived under the thumb of her oppressive father, reaching the outside world through her poems and correspondence, until she met Robert Browning and they eloped adorably--Aurora's struggles with her art are the strongest thing in the poem.

While art
Sets action on the top of suffering:
The artist's part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost: never felt the less
Because he sings it.

As a reader, one of my favorite things is to read one book and realize that an author I like has read it before me. I like seeing lines of influence. Elizabeth Peters read Dorothy Sayers; Neil Gaiman read Hope Mirlees; they couldn't have written the books they wrote without reading these authors first. When I was reading Aurora Leigh, I was struck by how much of Aurora Leigh must have infiltrated the mind of LM Montgomery before she wrote her Emily series, my go-to books about authoressing when I was a wee lass. The themes are sort of the same anyway, the relative importance of love and art and doing the kind of work you were born to do ("Books succeed / And lives fail"), and the handling of them falls along strikingly similar (but not derivative) lines.

If you haven't read Elizabeth Barrett Browning before, a book-length poem may be an intimidating place to start. It intimidated me, but I sensibly read it one book at a time, until eventually I had read all nine. There were times when it dragged, because I didn't care for self-righteous Romney and his St. John ways. Browning's didacticism felt forced and stagey at times, which is kind of par for the course with Victorian writers. Set against this are her elegant turns of phrase and her often very modern-feeling lines.

This grows absurd! too like a tune that runs
I' the head and forces all things in the world,
Wind, rain, the creaking gnat or stuttering fly,
To sing itself and vex you;--yet perhaps
A paltry tune you never fairly liked.

Yeah, I know how that goes. I've got Carly Simon's "Mockingbird" running i' my head at the moment.

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In Which I Say Goodbye (For a While)

I’m moving away to start library school at this end of the week, which means blogging will have to go on hiatus for about a month or so, until I get properly settled in and find a new routine that will hopefully allow me to be around semi-regularly again. For the first three weeks or so, I expect I’ll have no Internet access at home: I’ll need to find a home to begin with, then pick an ISP, and then probably wait a few weeks for the Internet to be connected. You know how it goes. So apologies in advance for not being able to visit any of your lovely blogs in the near future, and also for having been such a neglectful blogging friend these past few weeks. As I’m sure you can imagine, preparing for the move has made life very busy indeed.

You know, I started this post planning to tell you that the way I blog will probably change once I come back; that I hope I’ll have time to do it at all; that I won’t be able to post nearly as often, one of reasons being that I won’t be able to read nearly as much as I have for the past few years; and so on and so forth. But then I told myself to quit being dramatic. What does it matter if I only post three, two times, or even once a week? Also, from now on I’ll get to write about library school news, bookish events, visits to literary sites, meetings with other book bloggers (hopefully), used bookshop finds, library loots, etc., none of which I had the opportunity to do until now. All in all, things will probably even out, which is why speaking of a big change doesn’t really make that much sense.

I don’t know what my life will be like in the future – I can’t predict the structure of my days a month from now, and that kind of uncertainty is a little unsettling for someone like me, who takes great comfort in regularity and routine. But even if my blog does take a new direction, well, it’s not like it has stayed exactly the same for the past three years and a half (and it has seen me through an international move before). Our blogs are after all a reflection of who we are, so change is only to be expected. Also, fellow grad students slash bloggers like Kim and Lu have set my mind at ease by repeatedly reassuring me that finding ways to balance graduate school and blogging is indeed perfectly possible. I’m determined not to fret too much and just go wherever life takes me. If I’m too busy to post for a week at a time, so be it. Hopefully I’ll be able to continue to share my bookish adventures with you, even if in a slightly different way.

To keep my blog for becoming a complete post-apocalyptic wasteland in the next month or so, I asked a few of my fellow bloggers to occasionally cover up for me, so once or twice a week you’ll be kept entertained by Jenny, Renay, Jodie, Claire, Lightheaded, Heather, Trapunto, Trisha and Memory. They’re all smart and interesting people who have blogs I absolutely love, and I really think you’ll love them too, if you don’t already.

I’ll miss you all, and I’ll be sure to ask you to tell me all about what you’ve been reading once I come back. The hostel where I’m staying for the first week or so (hopefully apartment hunting won’t take much longer than that? – fingers crossed!) has free wireless, so I might be able to say hi on Twitter or Tumblr every now and then. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail at any time – I know I’ve been horrible at e-mail lately, but I’ll probably be in dire need of encouragement and moral support to get me through the initial stress of an international move, so I’d absolutely love to hear from you. That’s one of the best things about having friends online – I get to take you with me wherever I go.

Wish me luck, everyone! I’ll see you sometime in mid October. Until then, I hope you have a great month, full of excellent reads and bookish discoveries.

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Passion by Jude Morgan

Let me sum up my reaction to Passion in one word: wow. I’ll begin with an aside, just because I think it’s relevant to tell you a little about my experience with this book. I wasn’t supposed to be blogging this week – I’m preparing to move away to start grad school very soon (which is why I’ve been ignoring everyone’s blogs lately—I’m so sorry! You know it’s no lack of love), and I had more or less decided that whatever I read between now and the time I move would go unreviewed. But then I found myself reading over 500 pages of Passion during a weekend away in Spain; hauling this monster of a trade paperback chunkster to a music festival because I couldn’t bring myself to put it down. And now that I’ve finished it, I’m afraid that I must tell you all about it: it possibly ties with Gaudy Night as my favourite read of the year so far.

Passion is a historical novel about the lives of four women who were involved with the second generation Romantic poets: Mary Shelley, who dispenses introductions; Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron’s half sister and lover; Lady Caroline Lamb, who shocked Regency London by taking the end of her affair with Byron so badly (and doing so very publicly); and Fanny Brawne, John Keat’s fiancé. Passion begins – appropriately, wonderfully – with a chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft, and then follows the lives of the aforementioned four women until the death of the last of the Romantics (Byron, at only 36), which marks the end of the most tumultuous phase of these women’s lives. If this makes it sound like the book only considers them in regards to the men who loved them, rest assured: nothing could be further from the truth. Passion is a much more complex novel than that.

Along with about five million bookworms everywhere, I have a fascination with the Romantic circle. In the case of Mary Shelley in specific, the fascination borders on the obsession, which has led me to seek out several fictional and non-fictional accounts of her life. Passion is a dream-book come true for me: nothing that I read before had satisfied me nearly as much as this.Jude Morgan’s imagination clearly follows the same path as mine – he wonders about all the same things I’ve always wondered about; he looks at these women’s lives and asks all the same questions I have always asked.

To explain this further I’m going to have to tell you why the Romantics have always interested me so much. It’s not because they were so deliciously scandalous, though they were that, nor because they’re the very embodiment of what are now classic Gothic tropes. It isn’t even their poetry per se. No; what interests me is the fact that they were among the first to consider ideas that we’re still debating and struggling with today – ideas that, two centuries later, I still find relevant for my life. They’re Mary Wollstonecraft and the beginning of feminism; there’s the very idea of democracy; there’s their belief that perhaps there were forms of experiencing relationships other than traditional marriage; there’s Shelley’s atheism, pacifism, vegetarianism; there’s Byron’s bisexuality; there’s the whole circle’s defiance of social conventions because they honestly believed that there might be other, happier ways of living their lives. And then there’s the inevitable question: at what cost?

A satisfying book about the Romantics must be, for me, one that takes these ideas seriously, even as it exposes the unforeseen consequences of moving them from the theoretical to the practical. Until I read Passion, I felt that most accounts of these people’s lives, both popular and academic, were either very Byronic and virile and romanticised (nevermind about the ex-wives drowning themselves, or the dead children, or the near fatal miscarriages); or else told from a female perspective, but very reproachful in tone and altogether dismissive of their uncommon living arrangements.

I felt this when reading Anne K. Mellor’s biography of Mary Shelley in particular, though I enjoyed it for the most part. I was obviously not around back then and can’t tell what these people were really like (but then again, neither can anyone else); still, it saddens to read books that adopt a tut-tut sort of approach – that instantly assume that, say, Shelley’s belief in free love was just a cover for his sexual promiscuity, and poor Mary was mislead and dragged into it kicking and screaming and would have obviously led a much more traditional life if she’d had a choice.

Perhaps she would have – but then again, as Morgan’s Mary Shelley realises at one point, perhaps she’d also have spent the rest of her life feeling empty and slightly bored. Perhaps she struggled with these things not because she was being “corrupted”, but because she herself was trying to reconcile abstract beliefs that were also her own and her actual life – her fear of losing Shelley, her grief over the children she lost, her discomfort over her stepsister’s constant presence, her awareness that something about her situation wasn’t quite fair.

I loved Passion because it’s a book that fully respects these women’s agency. This is a novel in which they’re allowed to want: they make their own choices; they’re not little girls who are seduced and abandoned or mislead. But none of this is to say that they don’t find themselves in incredibly unfair situations; that being women doesn’t make them powerless in many, many ways; that these experiments in living aren’t full of emotional costs, consequences and conundrums, all of which they felt much more acutely than the men because of the gender power imbalance. Jude Morgan’s Mary Shelley suffers because of these things, but she also wonders – how else could she have been happy?

Passion is a book that takes the idealism of the Romantics absolutely seriously, even as it also explores its darker side. It doesn’t dismiss them as misguided or immoral people who were merely after easy sex, which has always struck me as simplistic and incredibly unfair. But at the same time, it acknowledges the male privilege that, for all their idealism, Shelley and Byron never did acknowledge. It has always upset me to see any relationship model that questions entitlement, possessiveness or the legitimacy jealously dismissed as a) a sexual free-for-all or b) an obvious product of the male psyche. Contrary to popular rumour (both then and now), this was not what the Romantics were all about. But their ideals were problematic, simply because there was always much more at stake for Harriet Shelley, for Mary Shelley, for Claire Clairmont, for Caroline Lamb or for Augusta Leigh than there ever was for the men they loved. It’s the power imbalance that makes the whole thing difficult; not the fact not wanting to get married is by definition a strictly male impulse. These difficulties are what Passion is all about. It’s a novel of questions, not of answers, and that has always been my favourite kind.

As Mary says at one point, these women wanted to be the subjects, not merely the objects of passion. They wanted to feel, to be alive, to make the most of their lives. Morgan’s novel fills the gaps of what couldn’t be expressed at the time both in regards to female sexuality and to countless other things. Though I’m not someone who has ever believed that love becomes boring once you have spent that initial passion, I could fully sympathise with Lady Caroline Lamb, with her penchant for theatrics, with her need for constant emotional tumult. You see, she had nothing else. It’s easy for me to prefer a more serene kind of romantic love when I live in a time and place that allows me other interests, several intellectual pursuits, all kinds of other passions and things to be enthusiastic about. That wasn’t really the case with them – and Caroline, a passionate and intense young woman turned into a scandalous society lady, feels this more acutely than anyone else.

The result of Morgan’s insightful and sympathetic portrayal of these women is a sort of regency Frankie-Landau Banks for adults: these aren’t merely silly girls who fall for men who are clearly bad news. No; they’re intelligent women who are for the most part aware of their own value, who know their own minds, but who want more — they want to be alive, and they want some of the excitement the men they love could have access to so easily, be it through poetry, through tours of Europe, though battles for the independence of Greece. Who can dismiss them for that?

Another thing Jude Morgan does brilliantly is bring the Regency period to life. I’ve always been a Victorian girl at heart, but Passion made me see the appeal of the early nineteenth century much more clearly than anything I’d read before. The novel perfectly contextualises all the emotional intensity the characters experience, and shifts back and forth between their individual lives and the bigger picture with absolute ease. We see the echoes of the French revolution; we see social tumult; we see the scandal that followed the appearance of the waltz; we see Napoleon’s second coming and the battle of Waterloo; we see political unrest; and so on. None of it is there simply to be there, or just so Morgan can show off his erudition. On the contrary; the historical background helps us make sense of these women’s lives and of the difficulties they faced – and that’s exactly what historical fiction should do.

Passion is an epic historical saga that is actually about much more than I made it out to be – but this post is already ridiculously long, so I’m going to wrap it up soon. I didn’t quite know what to expect when I picked up this book, but I know I didn’t expect it to be nearly as good as this. I’d imagined it to be lighter, somehow; perhaps fun in a salacious sort of way but not much more. Instead, I discovered an author who reminds me of Sarah Waters. Yes, Passion is that sophisticated, that insightful, that intense, that wonderfully written, that smart. It kept me in suspense and broke my heart even though I already knew everything that was going to happen, and it allowed me to step into the shoes of women with whom I feel a deep sense of kinship. How much more difficult these things that continue to trouble us today must have been for them.

Right now I’m experiencing the deep joy of discovering that a possible new favourite author actually has an extensive back catalogue – Morgan has a novel about the Brontë sisters called The Taste of Sorrow, and I can’t imagine anyone more capable of writing about them and getting it right. He also has several other historical novels set in the Regency period, and even a series of Regency mysteries published under the pen name Hannah March (and yes, I thought he was a she too until Violet told me differently). I absolutely can’t wait to read them all.

Favourite bits:

Caroline makes up stories. They pop into her head unbidden. Sometimes they have fairies in them, and witches and goblins: sometimes stranger things. ‘A sugar loaf as big as a house, and on the top there lived a mouse, with whiskers on his chin, and he made such a din when he fell into the well and broke his nose and tore his hose so he ate his toes…’
‘It doesn’t make sense, Caro,’ complains Frederick. ‘Tell the one about the soldier. This one’s silly. How can he eat his toes?’
‘With a knife and fork.’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
But Caroline is used to that. Many things in her world do not make sense. She has seen Papa shouting at Mama, and his fingers fiercely gripping her arm just as they grip the reigns of a half-broken horse. In a world that made these, that would be as bad as her temper. But it’s not, apparently; and she is not even to mention that she saw it. Indeed, it did not happen at all. Which makes no sense.

Well, here is a thought for you. Now let me see if I can take you over the fence of this one. You’ll agree that there are times in your life that are happier than others—yes? And so out of all of those there must be one time that is the happiest—yes?—just as among some trees that are taller than others, there must be one that is the tallest of all even if only be an inch—yes? Thus there must be one period of time in your life that is, taken all in all, the happiest, the truest, the most fulfilled, the best. So.
What if that time has already been and gone?
And you know it?
No, no – I’m quite well – I just fancied I heard my grandmother’s ghost at last. Saying that in her day they did not think of such things.
Well for them, perhaps. Part of me does long to lace up my feelings in that narrow bodice and tread that old narrow path. But I think it’s closed off to us now, whether we like it or not.
Do I think my best time has gone? Why – how could I go on living, if so?

The trouble is this. What Mary is drawing towards, what she is impelled to, is something that does not really suit her. Thought she always feels strongly, the mind is the ruler. This mind is accustomed to seeing all around a question. It has the gift of analysis, which is also, perhaps, a curse: while appreciating the beauty of a rose it will also be estimating the length of time before the rose withers. But still she trusts it as a watchmaker trusts the steadiness of his hand.
And her mind cannot approve the dubious shape of the future to which passion is driving her. The shape is shadowy, awkward, chaotic. It is revolution: and that mind has too much logic to believe that revolution can be accomplished without blood.
Still, it is a mind with a sharp edge, impatient of prevarication: let your yea be yea. Thus, for Mary Godwin the most momentous decision of her life is completely out of character, except for the fact that she makes it.

Augusta, having extracted and opened the volume somehow, unconsciously, snapped it shut. No letter from him lately. She drained her glass and confronted her reflection.
‘Is that all we are, then? Women – are we just there as inspiration? Muse? Subject of a poem? Object, really.’ She said it out loud, quite without meaning to, and the effect was as if she posed the question to the woman in the mirror. The woman has a strong, sensual, fleshy face: a wicked face, Annabella would say, and she would be quite right.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

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The Canon by Natalie Angier

As the title indicates, The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science is an introduction to the fundamentals of several sciences, namely physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology and astronomy. Angier dedicates a chapter to each of these, and precedes them with three more general (and absolutely brilliant) chapters on the hows and whys of the scientific method. After finishing Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography a few weeks ago, I couldn’t resist starting The Canon right away: I was hoping for more of her dazzling erudition and accessible handling of science, combined with her warmth and humour; her passion and enthusiasm. And that, my friends, is exactly what I got.

The Canon is a book meant for a general audience who will not necessarily have a scientific background, but it’s not the kind of book that becomes tedious when you already know the things it’s telling you. Natalie Angier’s tone immediately captured me: she’s conversational and humorous, but also extremely precise, and her approach is always fresh. I was as enthralled when reading the chapters that were about things familiar to me as I was when reading the ones that were new. Having said that, I did have my favourites – astronomy, evolutionary biology and geology interested me more than physics or chemistry (I’m so sorry, Flavia de Leuce!). I feel bad for having such a clichéd reaction, especially as The Canon talks about how underappreciated physics is, and how on the other hand everyone seems to love astronomy, but I really can’t help it. I fear that I just lack the background to be able to appreciate physics properly.

As much as I enjoyed being reminded of (or introduced to – my scientific education is sorely lacking) the basics of several sciences, what really made The Canon for me were those three initial chapters. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll have realised that I’m a humanities girl who’s absolutely passionate about science literacy, and who really regrets all the misunderstandings and occasional absurd enmity that seem to exist between the two fields of knowledge. I know that we humanities people often feel that what we do is dismissed because it’s considered not as good or as real as hard science, and yes, that’s a valid and justified feeling, but I won’t get into it here – what I want to talk about is the fact that this is sometimes countered with a dismissal of science that is based on a deep misunderstanding of what it is and how it works.

I realise that just the other day I was raging against universal book recommendations, but, contradictory human being that I am, I’m going to say that The Canon (along with Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science) is a book I wish everyone would read. I don’t say this because I want everyone to be persuaded to see the world this way or that, but because these books are full of important knowledge that I wish more people had access too – and more, they present it in a completely accessible way. No, science isn’t infallible, and yes, there are important conversations that can be had about the philosophical implications of science, about science and ethics, science and sexism, science and racism, and so on. However, it upsets me to see easy, lazy and dismissive science criticism which is based on nothing but straw man arguments, least of all because this can never lead to any productive conversations. If everyone knew the basics – the kind of basics The Canon presents so well – it would be possible to have discussion that went far beyond dispelling misconceptions. And wouldn’t that be better for everyone?

As I’m sure you can guess, Natalie Angier is nothing if not passionate about science literacy herself, and she spends part of The Canon tackling common misconceptions about how the scientific method works. She talks about the huge misunderstandings surrounding the word “theory”, about probabilities and statistics and how easy it is to manipulate people’s understanding of them (note to self: read How to Lie With Statistics), and about the fact that misinformation about science is so frighteningly prevalent. She gives an example in particular that really struck me: when asked to explain the fact that we have seasons, a frighteningly high percentage of university students, even post-graduate students, mentioned the fact that the orbit of the earth around the sun is an ellipses, which means that sometimes we’re closer to it (summer) and sometimes further away (winter). Never mind that this wouldn’t explain the differences between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, of course.

Natalie Angier mentions that this is an example of the kind of easy pseudoscientific explanation that many people are exposed to when they’re very young, and that permanently remains unexamined at the back of their minds. The really scary thing is that I clearly remember being taught this explanation for the seasons myself. If you’re confused at this point, by the way – and if so, you’re very much not alone – the real explanation has to do with the earth’s tilt. Angier is an unapologetic advocate of a revolution in how science is taught, and having been thoroughly miseducated myself, I can’t disagree with her. In the meantime, I’m extremely grateful for books such as The Canon.

Favourite bits:

“Science is not a collection of rigid dogmas, and what we call scientific truth is constantly being revised, challenged, and refined,” said Michael Duff, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan. “It’s irritating to hear people who hold fundamentalist views accuse scientists of being the inflexible, rigid ones, when usually it’s the other way around. As a scientist, you know that any new discovery you’re lucky enough to uncover will raise more questions than you started with, and that you must always question what you thought was correct and remind yourself how little you know. Science is a very humble and humbling activity.”

Yes, the world is out there, over your head and under your nose, and it is real and it is knowable. To understand something about why a thing is as it is in no way detracts from its beauty and grandness, nor does it reduce the observed to “just a bunch of” — chemicals, molecules, equations, specimens for a microscope. Scientists get annoyed at the hackneyed notion that their pursuit of knowledge diminished the mystery or art or “holiness” of life. Let’s say you look at a red rose, says Brian Greene, and you understand a bit about the physics behind its lovely blood blush. You know that red is a certain wavelength of light and that light is made of little particles called photons. You understand that photons representing all colours of the rainbow stream from the sun and strike the surface of the rose, but that, as a result of the molecular composition of pigments in the rose, it’s the red photons that bounce off its petal and up to your eyes, and so you see red.
“I like that picture,” said Greene. “I like the extra story line, which comes, by the way, from Richard Feynman. But I still have the same strong emotional response to a rose as anybody else. It’s not as though you become an automaton, dissecting things to death.” To the contrary. A rose is a rose is a rose; but a dissected rose is a sonnet.

People have the mistaken impression that the great revolutions in the history of science overturned prevailing wisdom. In fact, most of the great ideas subsumed their predecessors, gulped them whole and got bigger in the act. Albert Einstein did not prove that Isaac Newton was wrong. Instead, he showed that Newton’s theories of motion and gravity were incomplete, and that new equations were needed to explain the behaviour of objects under extreme circumstances, such as when tiny particles travel at or near the speed of light. Einstein made the pi wider and lighter and more exotically scalloped in space and time. But for the workaday trajectories of the Earth spinning around the sun, or a baseball barrelling toward a bat, or a brand-new earring sliding down a drain, Newton’s laws of motion still apply.

We human beings are, genetically, 99.9 percent identical to one another. Those few places where our genomes differ—from the archived archetype and from one another—help explain the individual differences that our eyes easily seize on, and too easily magnify. If only we could see the genome we carry within us; then we might appreciate the homogeneous depths of our common humanity.

Other reviews:
Tammy’s Book Nook

(Yours?)

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RIP the Fifth

Part of me can hardly believe that the fifth annual RIP challenge is here, or that this is my fourth time participating already. It feels like it was only some two months ago that I was making my list for RIP IV, and preparing to discover the wonder that is Wilkie Collins for the first time. And only a mere six months before that – surely it can’t have been longer? – I was hurriedly putting together my list for RIP II (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Book of Lost Things were included) and preparing to leave to study abroad for a semester (kind of like now). Where does time go?

No, it has not escaped my notice that this is not the first time I begin a RIP post with a bout of nostalgia – and this is only one of the many ways in which Carl’s reading challenges are just like Christmas. Unfortunately, this year I won’t actually get to be around^* for much of RIP (which, for the newcomers, lasts from September 1st to Halloween), but I shouldn’t let that keep me from the joys of list-making, should I? I’ll hopefully be with you for the final weeks of the challenge, and until then I’ll certainly be thinking about joining this lovely bloggy celebration of all things creepy, Gothic, horrific, mysterious and perilous. Without further ado, here’s my list of potential choices for this year’s RIP:

• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been saving this one because I don’t want to run out of unread Sarah Waters novels. But I’m only human, and I can’t resist for much longer.
  
  
• Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenager – Yes, as usual I’m one year behind everyone else.
  
  
• Ghost Stories by Edith Wharton – I don’t know much about these, actually, but I love those Wordsworths Classics of the Supernatural editions, and somehow I have a feeling I’d like Wharton’s short fiction a lot.
  
  
• Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen – I’ve only ever read one of Blixen’s short stories, “The Blank Page”, but I absolutely loved it. Time to read more.
  
  
• East Lynne by Ellen Wood, Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and No Name by Wilkie Collins – If I could, I’d happily spend the whole of September and October reading nothing but Victorian sensation novels. I hope to get to at least one of these, but it will depend on what the library at my new location has.
  
  
• The Woman in Black by Susan Hill – Another one I can hardly believe I haven’t read yet.
  
  
• Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier and The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – because both authors are brilliant, and because I need to read more short stories.
  
  
• Fledgling by Octavia Butler – I absolutely loved Kindred and can hardly wait to read more Butler.
  
  
• The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie – …which will be my first Christie. I’ve been on a mystery kick this year, so it’s about time I make Dame Agatha’s acquaintance.
  
  
• Love Lies Bleeding or The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Wilson Crispin – Another classic mystery author I think I might really enjoy.
  
  
• Whatever I can find by Michael McDowell – I confess hadn’t even heard of McDowell until recently, when a reader of this blog and fellow lover of du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter e-mailed me urging me to read him. How can I resist a recommendation from a fan of those three writers? McDowell specialises in Southern Gothic family sagas, which definitely sounds right up my alley.

There. As always, if you’ve read any of these I’d love to hear your thoughts. Considering how busy I’ll be for all of September and part of October, I doubt I’ll have time for more than three or four books, but listing them is half the fun, right? I can’t wait to hear all about what everyone else will be reading.

In other news, I’m off to spend the weekend in one of my favourite cities in the world, Santiago de Compostela, where I’ll see The Arcade Fire, one of my favourite bands. I hope your weekend is as wonderful as mine promises to be, and I’ll see you next week!

*on which more soon.

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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is mostly set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during WW2, and tells the story – or rather, a very personal story – of its occupation by the Italian and German armies. It’s the story of Dr. Iannis and his daughter Pelagia, a young woman much too smart and independent for her time and place; of Mandras, Pelagia’s betrothed, who joins the Greek resistance and is almost driven crazy by what he sees; of Drosoula, his mother, a woman whose widowhood has doomed to invisibility; of young Lemoni and the pine marten she find and tames along with Dr. Iannis and Pelagia; of Carlo, a gay Italian soldier who joined the army in the hopes of finding someone to love; and of course, of Captain Antonio Corelli (and his mandolin) – a sensitive, funny, intelligent, artistic, and vaguely embarrassing and apologetic Italian invader who the Greek characters grow to love despite their determination not to.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a fictional social history of a forgotten side of WW2, told in a style reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a sweeping, passionate, and alternately hilarious and heartbreaking novel, and it’s and a novel that does the very things I love the most about historical fiction: it fills the gaps in history; it focuses on the individual human costs of the political bigger picture; it draws attention to the cobwebby corners of the past that seemed doomed to being forgotten; and most importantly of all, it humanises them in a way that a simple factual account never could. I had only the vaguest idea of what had happened in Greece during the Second World War before reading this book. And I had somehow never even heard of the massacre of Cephallonia, which cost over five thousand people their lives. I won’t tell you more than this about it, though, because as unfortunate as it is that it isn’t remembered more widely, perhaps it’s not a bad thing for readers to have it take them by surprise as they read this book—I know that after this I won’t forget it any time soon.

Captain Antonio Corelli, the character who gives the novel its title, doesn’t make his first appearance until a good two hundred pages into the book. So yes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starts off slowly, but the back story is absolutely necessary. The fact that you get to know the characters so well is a big part of what gives the book its emotional power. Furthermore, the fact that we get a glimpse of pre-war life in Cephallonia allows the contrast between the then and the now to be all the more marked. Much like the characters, you barely realise there’s a war coming, and even after it does come, you sometimes forget it’s on at all. But then come the hunger, the unspeakable violence, the death, the grief, the misery, and the wounds that last a lifetime.

Having said that, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a book that crept up on me. I didn’t realise at first just how much I had grown to care. In the final a hundred and fifty pages I knew I was sufficiently emotionally invested in the story to cry; but then again, I’ll readily admit it doesn’t take that much for that to happen. It was only after I finished the book that I realised how much it had affected me and stayed with me. I dreamed about the characters for two nights straight. I found myself missing them terribly. I miss them all still.

One of my favourite storylines was Carlo’s, the Italian soldier I mentioned above. Carlo’s story deals with the invisibility of glbtq people, and with the absolutely crushing weight of a silence that, in that particular context, could only be broken at the cost of his life. His story captures the overwhelming loneliness of knowing there’s a crucial part of you that can never be known, let alone loved. Carlo falls in love twice, and army life allows him to be close to the men he loves—but he knows that if they had the smallest inkling of the truth nature of his feelings he’d be lost, in all senses of the world. This bit in particular absolutely broke my heart:

According to Dante my like is confined to the third ring of the Seventh Circle of Nether Hell, in the improbable company of usurers. He gives me a desert of naked spirits scourged by flakes of fire, he makes me run in circles, perpetually and in futility, looking for the ones whose bodies I’ve defiled. You see how it is; I have been driven to search everywhere just to find myself mentioned. I am mentioned almost nowhere, but where I find myself, I find myself condemned. And how remarkable it is, you doctors and priests, that Dante pitied us when God did not. Dante said, ‘It makes me heartsick only to think of them.’ And Dante was right, I have always run in circles, futilely, looking for the warmth of bodies, scorned by God who created me, and all my life has been a desert and a rain of flakes of flame.
Yes, I have read everything, looking for evidence that I exist, that I am a possibility. And do you know where I found myself? Do you know where I found out that I was, in another vanished world, beautiful and true? It was in the writings of a Greek.

Other than Carlo, my favourite character was Pelagia. First of all, I have to confess it took me a while to make sense of how the book dealt with the whole theme of gender: in one of the initial chapters I was taken aback by a joke about battered wives. There’s of course a world of difference between portraying a certain attitude or mindset and the kind of world in which it’s prevalent and endorsing it or dealing with it lightly, and the very last thing I want is for literature to sweep anything disagreeable under the rug. But at first it can be hard to tell, with a storyteller you don’t yet know and trust, how the narrative as a whole frames the characters’ stance on certain things.

Fortunately, as the novel progressed, Louis de Bernières completely earned my trust. Corelli lost part of my respect towards the end with a comment about “damaged goods” in reference to – I kid you not – women raped during the war. But that’s the character; not the book as a whole. Comments like these are not gratuitous, and while the narrator does not of course address them explicitly (not being George Eliot, I doubt he could get away with it), there’s ample room in the narrative for a consideration of their consequences. So all in all, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin dealt with gender very satisfyingly, and it took Pelagia and her plight – as I said, a smart and educated young woman in a world not really ready for it – absolutely seriously.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a love story, a very human account of the war in Greece, a plea against totalitarianism of any sort, and a book that effortlessly combines humour with gut-wrenching moments. I couldn’t have loved it more. This marks the ending of my unofficial quest to read five books from my tbr pile this summer that you picked for me. I owe you a big thank you: I loved Half of a Yellow Sun, Atonement, and this, and I had a lot of fun with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Eyre Affair. We’ll need to do this again soon; clearly you know me well, and thus letting you make my reading decisions for me every now and then is evidently a very good idea.

Favourite passages:

I know that the Duce has made it clear that the Greek campaign was a resounding Victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it. He ought to know that the truth is that we were losing badly until the Germans invaded from Bulgaria. He will never acknowledge this because the ‘truth’ belongs to the victors. But I was there, and I know what was happening in my part of the war. For me that war was an experience that shaped the whole course of my thought, it was the deepest personal shock I have ever had, the worst and most intimate tragedy of my life. It destroyed my patriotism, it changed my ideals, it made me question the whole notion of duty, and it horrified me and made me sad.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I ad it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one three and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnished hero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once shone brighter than the summer sun, but now had disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heat of massacre and cumulative remorse. He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.

Other opinions:
Giraffe Days

(I was surprised not to find more, but I guess everyone else read this pre-blogging? Let me know if I missed yours.)

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Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Year of Wonders is set in 1665-6 in the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, and is based on a real occurrence: historical records tell us when the Bubonic plague reached Eyam, its inhabitants voluntarily quarantined themselves to keep the disease from spreading to neighbouring towns. Brooks tells the story of the plague year from the point of view of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith. Anna is an ordinary woman who works at the rectory as a domestic servant, and despite her young age she is a widow and a mother of two. During the plague year, she suffers many loses; learns much about herself; and befriends the rector and especially his wife, Elinor Mompellion. The three take the care of the town into their hands, but most of the time they can do little but watch helplessly as the world as they’ve always known it changes beyond recognition.

Geraldine Brooks begins this story in media res, in the autumn of 1666, when Eyam’s population had already been more than halved by the plague. She then takes us back to 1665 and shows us how it all began. Normally this is a narrative technique I like, but I’m not completely sure it was effective in the case of Year of Wonders—on which more soon. Anyway, I liked how Geraldine Brooks used this set-up to comment on gender, class and power; I liked her examination of social tensions, fear, violence, and the many factors that will push people over the edge; and I liked how well she captured the fear, disbelief, despair, numbness and loneliness of the townspeople as the population continued to drop.

I also liked Anna a lot – especially the fact that Brooks picked a narrator with a certain degree of powerlessness who becomes more powerful as the story progresses, thanks to her role as a caretaker and to the knowledge and expertise she acquires. As the number of those afflicted by the plague increases, the traditional social order erodes, and Anna’s age, gender, widowhood and social stand cease to weight as heavily on whether or not she’s taken seriously. What matter is that she sits with the sick when nobody else will, and that though she can’t work miracles, she can bring them some relief. Of course, whether or not these changes are lasting is a whole other matter; and as the story of another character shows us, there’s danger in power and in the visibility it brings, especially when so many are desperately looking for something or someone to blame.

Most of all I liked the fact that Year of Wonders is a story about a world “on the brink of modernity”, as Brooks herself put it. Through the inhabitants of Eyam, she attempts to capture a paradigm shift; to portray the mindset of a group of people who were experimenting with new ways of thinking about the world. In Eyam different faiths, beliefs and forms of viewing the world coexist, though not always peacefully as it can be expected. There are some who see the plague as divine punishment for the townspeople’s sins; others as the result of a curse or the practice of witchcraft; others as a natural phenomenon to which God, if present at all, is indifferent; and others still, like Anna, as a natural phenomenon whose occurrence shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted in terms of faith. My one complaint is that Brooks didn’t take these ideas further – Year of Wonders is not a very long novel, but there was perhaps room for a little more depth when dealing with these issues.

I quite enjoyed this book for the most part, but unfortunately the final section lost me. First there’s the problem I mentioned earlier, with the in media res beginning: you know from the very start which characters survive and which ones don’t, and the death of a certain character in particular is foreshadowed so often that when it does happen, it no longer has the emotional impact it could have had – instead, the whole thing just feels overly dramatic, faintly ridiculous, and far too drawn out. (I kind of feel like a horribly callous person for saying this, but I really can’t help it.)

After that a lot of equally dramatic things happen in quick succession, and I’m afraid that my suspension of disbelief deserted me for good at this point. It’s not so much what happens in itself; it’s the fact that the final section feels so at odds with the emotional tone of the rest of the book. Though it deals with tragic events, Year of Wonders is for the most part a very restrained novel. Anna sounds like someone who was numbed by so much grief, and for some reason this felt more real to me than the histrionic tone of the final forty pages or so.

I could say that Anna’s initial moderation struck me as more true to the worldview of the time period than the final drama, but to be fair I have no reason at all to believe that seventeenth-century people were any less given to strong expressions of emotion than we are. Yet there was something about the ending – I cannot pinpoint what – that felt wrong to me. Perhaps it all comes down to the fact that in historical fiction, the perception of accuracy can matter as much as accuracy itself. At any rate, this was a very personal reaction, and I don’t expect that other readers will necessarily feel the same

As you can tell, I didn’t love Year of Wonders nearly as much as I loved March, though for the first half or so I was convinced that I was going to. Then again, this was Geraldine’s Brooks first novel, so it’s only natural that it’s not quite as polished or satisfying as her later work. I do like her writing a lot, as well the unusual points of view she picks and the themes she deals with, so I know I’m going to continue to read her.

Bits I liked:

At day’s end, when I leave the rectory for home, I prefer to walk through the orchard on the hill rather than go by the road and risk meeting people. After all we’ve been through together, it’s just not possible to pass with a polite, ‘Good night t’ye’. And yet I haven’t the strength for more. Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth’s wing in the dark.

I open the door to my cottage this evening on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this one is always the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. I mislike this, for I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place. But I, who always prided myself on grace, now allow myself a deliberate clumsiness. I let my feet land heavily. I clatter the hearth tools. And when I draw water, I let the bucket chain grind on the stone, just to hear ragged noise instead of the smothering silence.

Other blog reviews:
Linus’s Blanket, books i done read, Medieval Bookworm, Write Meg!, The Book Whisperer, Fizzy Thoughts, Coffee Stained Pages, Book-a-rama, The Written World, Serendipity, At Home With Books, Age 30+: A Lifetime of Books, Lakeside Musings

(Have I missed yours?)

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