September Skip

Since we're skipping September and today is the last day of September, I'm going to leave this here

Unhooking the Moon: A Great Title and an Extremely Odd Book

Unhooking the Moon by Gregory Hughes

This book is not at all what I expected.  I knew it was classified as a children’s book, but I didn’t expect the writing to be quite so juvenile.  It was supposed to be written by an adolescent boy so it might have been an intentional choice on the author’s part.  I loved The Rat from the beginning.  She was odd and embraced her uniqueness to such a full extent that it was difficult not to love her.  All of the people The Rat and her brother (and the narrator), Bob, ran into during the story seemingly felt the same way – a bizarre array of hodgepodge characters that two kids came across on their surreal adventure from Canada to New York and trolling the streets of the city for their uncle.  The story was a bit darker than I expected.  I knew the kids parents died, but tons of light-hearted stories start with orphans.  The Rat has seizures that the doctors can’t explain and when she is recovering from them, she sees strange things, possibly the future.  She handles it well, but it is a little unsettling.  

However, for the most part, the first three-quarters of this book gave me a Pippi Longstocking kind of vibe.  They bury their dad in the backyard, smuggle themselves onto a train, live in Central Park, hustle for money in Times Square… crazy things happen and these kids are put in some odd scenarios, but they get through everything in a funny and dynamic way. 

Okay, SPOILERS AHEAD.  Seriously, stop reading now if you haven’t finished the book completely.

[I didn't really drink much tea while I was reading this one - it was so hot, I just wanted ice water and more ice water.]

I was completely thrown by the ending.  The Rat was always seeing angels and pedophiles, but I didn’t expect there to be actual pedophiles – I took them as her way of naming bad people – and children in real and scary danger.  The Rat, along with her motley crew of sidekicks, save the children from a horrific orphanage, but in the process almost everyone gets seriously injured.  Characters you know get shot and stabbed and attacked – they all live, but still…  What kind of a children’s book has a big gunfight climax while saving children from the pedophiles and murders running a twisted orphanage?  I enjoyed the book, but I think it would’ve been so much better had the author written with a more mature and polished voice and the book had not been marketed for children.  I picked it up expecting a light-hearted and funny adventure about two kids traveling on their own in search of their uncle after their father dies.  This book has that, but it has so much more that makes it pretty inappropriate for children.  The very, very end makes it even worse.  The Rat breaks.  When we catch up to modern day, narrator-Bob is 16, instead of 12 as he is when all the action happens, and The Rat is in a psychiatric hospital and pretty much catatonic.  She can walk if she’s led, but she doesn’t speak or acknowledge anything that is happening.  She has detached from reality… and she’s been like that for four years!  Bob likens it to them being separated by one-way glass with no door.  He can see her in there, but she can’t see or connect with him and he can’t get to where she is.  It ends with him promising to always be there for her and to figure out how to bring her back someday… WTF?

And if the Rat's condition couldn't be diagnosed or treated (which Bob disclosed fairly early on), how did Bob know that she would deteriorate (at the end, he reveals to the reader that his father warned him that that might happen)?  Why would someone assume deterioration if they have no idea why she's having seizures?  And this story is supposed to be (relatively) modern-day... how can no one figure out what's wrong with her?  It's just some mysterious and miraculous (if she really is seeing the future) condition.   

Overall, I liked it, but I think I would’ve liked it much more had I been even slightly prepared for the ending.

And to end on a lighter note, I loved this line:  "If people looked at the stars more often, they'd see how big the universe is and how small we are in it and then their troubles wouldn't seem so large."

While I like the line, I think lots of people would feel small in a bad way... but that's alright because I don't.

"It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at."

tea: all of the maté. because sleep is for sane people.
tunes: teenage shoegaze, e.g. Cherry Glazerr, Girls, Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel. also Courtney Barnett.

The Bell Jar. First off, it took me WAY too long to read this book. Ever since I saw the movie 10 Things I Hate About You (15-odd years ago), this book was on my list. That being said, I am really glad I didn't read this book when I was younger. I do not recommend it if you are not in a somewhat-stable place.

The Bell Jar is a narrative of insanity. Writer Esther Greenwood is intelligent, successful, and full of that dreaded word - potential. The novel opens in New York City, where Esther is at a prestigious internship for a women's magazine. Almost immediately upon her return to her hometown near Boston, Esther begins to lose her ability to read, eat, and sleep. She grows paranoid and suicidal. She is unable to write. She sees a frighteningly asinine psychiatrist, receives the 1960s' favorite treatment for mental illness, and attempts suicide before spending the remainder of the book in a fairly ritzy mental hospital.

One of the most striking things about this book is it's cavalier tone. As depressed as Esther is, and as truly dramatic as her situation is, the writing is extremely commonplace and dispassionate. It seemed a much more accurate depiction of depression to me. Esther talks about feeling "very still and very empty" and narrates as if she is watching her life rather than living it. I think this tone makes it all the more powerful.

I also enjoyed that - other than the psychological descent - The Bell Jar doesn't really have a throughline. It felt like a step above vignettes, which was both different/fun to read and helped give us the scattered, haphazard environment that Esther is surrounded by.

More than anything, though, I just fell in love with Sylvia Plath. Her writing is eloquent and real and poetic in an underscored kind of way.

Possibly my favorite quote from the book, other than the one I used to title this blog: "[W]herever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

READY PLAYER ONE - A Review

“I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” - Unknown

Ready Player One, by Earnest Cline

I enjoyed this book with a big, dripping glass of iced sweet tea, because that's what I would drink as a kid in the 80's (when milk wasn't being forced on me.)

"It's tempting..." That's what would pop up in my mind throughout my reading of Cline's debut novel, Ready Player One, a science fiction and dystopian story of a future world in which lives both personal and professional are conducted in a simulated digital world while the real world falls apart from a decades-long energy crisis.  Neighborhoods consist of stacks of trailer homes 9 to 10 units high, and travel between cities or states comes at a risk of being attacked by looters and thieves.  But within the OASIS - Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation - you can look like anyone, go anywhere, be anything. Provided you have the money and have "leveled up" enough.

But it's tempting, this future of choosing the face you present to the world, where an education isn't limited by geography or funding or teacher availability.  Where you can lose your "life" and just start over.  And all you have to sacrifice to have this is human physical contact.

It's tempting because it's so possible.

You see us all bowed over our smart phones, we no longer talk to each other, conversations happen over text more than the phone.  Lives are lived almost completely online where you can order your groceries and have them delivered to your door, buy clothes and games and movies and books and have them shipped to your door.  You can communicate with someone in Russia or China without having to ever leave your recliner. And when life gets shitty, you can escape to the internet and become someone else, anyone else.
Immerse that not-so-future world in the nostalgia and seeming innocence of 80's pop culture and good guy vs. bad guy video game structure and you have Ready Player One where the heroes look little like their avatars, rarely see the sun, and are the closest of friends though they lives miles and miles apart.
 
I didn't read RP1, but rather listened to it, narrated by none other than sci-fi, 80s geek anti-hero, Whil Wheaton.  Though not at all necessary to enjoy the book, I think it helped pull me into that world of Ladyhawke and Pac Man and shag carpeting.  Despite the feeling of foreboding, a warning of "This road lay ahead!" RP1 is fun and exciting and pulls you into its multi-world mayhem until you are just as exciting and worked up as Parzival and Aeche and Art3mis, anticipating where the next gate will be, what the next challenge will be and who will be there to try to stop you.

That world of quests and grand prizes is a tempting one, but a fate I hope we humans never will know.  I like the sun and sky too much.

The Soporific Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf... a classic or so I've been told.  The dude who wrote The Hours raved about it on the back cover... all this about being the first novel to split the atom and such.  I was bored out of my mind.  I had to force myself to finish.  So maybe I just feel about this novel (I haven't read anything else by Virginia Woolf so I can't say it about her in general) as I feel about Andy Warhol.  I can appreciate that she did something new - just like I can appreciate that Andy Warhol was a pioneer - but that doesn't make me enjoy the experience.
There was one line I liked though, "A lady is known by her shoes and her gloves."  I rarely wear either so I'm not sure what that says about me, but it was the only line I actually remember from the novel.

I did have some pretty interesting tea with the book - Pumpkin Spice Chai from The Tea Spot (my favorite tea source).  It isn't one of my favorites, but the sample was a nice, tasty surprise!

"What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person."

tunes: Songs for the Wanderer

So, first things first: I'm a sucker for a good opener. “And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one” (p8). I knew right away that I was going to fall fully in love with this one. 

After this, I went through a lot of feelings about this story. One of the first things that caught me, though, is John Green's ability to capture that sweet-but-awkward teenage boy that we know so well. Some of the characters were a bit unrealistic – more extreme than a natural person or too mature for an 18-year-old high school student – but he has got that high school feeling under wraps. “...we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music” (p138). God. Who doesn't know that feeling? That thing you think every time but would never admit out loud. I feel like John Green is shamelessly honest and I love that about him. 

Not too far into the book, I got to the point where I started to be really annoyed about Margo. Less at her and more at Green for perpetuating this horrible ideal. Margo is a darker take on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl – impossibly desirable and way too cool to care. She is quirky and mysterious and evasive and you just know there's so much more to her than she shows. In a lot of ways, Margo is the kind of girl I'd always wished I was. In some ways, she is a lot like who I used to be...and more so the more I found out about her. But the problem with the MPDG is that she can't exist in the real world. She is this character we see and fall in love with, but in reality she is so one-dimensional. She is an idea of a person. A perfected, unattainable idea. She's just not a real person. Reading the book, I kept thinking this and I kept feeling annoyed. I've known John Green through Vlogbrothers and I thought he was better than this. And then, beautifully, it turns around. But it doesn't even turn around, it just reveals itself more. Green takes this ideal and just completely exposes it. Not only do you get to see Margo-the-real-person, but you get to see the characters realize that they have created this character of her. You see Q realize that he doesn't really know her, that nobody does. You witness him realize the part he has played in her alienation and characterization. And you get to hear her say that she had a part in this, too. Because the thing about this idea of a person is that it is really appealing. It's a lot harder to be human. And the most beautiful thing about this story is you get to go on that journey with them. You get to fall for it and see it unravel right alongside Q. I went from loving Margo to envying her to wanting them to be together to legitimately wanting her to be dead. And in the end, that made me love the book that much more. 

Paper Towns - Aubrey's initial discussion

     For some reason, when I try to write or talk about Paper Towns everything comes out cheesy and overly sentimental so I apologize in advance.
     It's been a long time since I've read a book straight through in one day, but I started Paper Towns over my morning tea and finished it before dinner.

     Speaking of tea, I tried World Market's jasmine pearls green tea and was pleasantly surprised!  It was wonderfully light and fragrant and floral.  That was my tea for this book (and a while afterwards).  But back to topic...

     Paper Towns reads like half mystery novel and half love letter to the high school me - feeling invisible and struggling with leaving the only world I'd ever known, even if I hated it.  That high school me related to Q and a little bit to Margo, but the latter is more of a stretch.
     Q's obsession with finding Margo drives the story, but at its heart this book is about discovery.  Q discovering himself, what he really wants for his future; discovering his friends and people he thought were enemies; discovering the elusive girl next door that he's dreamed about for half his life.

---Alright, if you haven't finished the book, read no further---

     As much as I enjoyed Paper Towns (and I did), the ending felt anticlimactic.  Through the whole book, I wanted Q and his friends to solve the mystery and find Margo, but it wasn't until they did that I realized that she should have died.  Right alongside Q, I feared she was dead and hoped that she wasn't.  But once they found her, it felt wrong.
     The story opens with Q and Margo finding a dead body and Margo's nine-year old response to it was, "maybe all the strings inside him broke."  Margo's death and Q's discovery of her would've created a lovely symmetry, especially since the night before she disappeared, Margo says that all of her strings have broken.  Instead they have an awkward and angry and then tearful reunion.  Q leaves with his friends while Margo continues with her odd version of running away.
     Even while I write this, I'm slightly conflicted because I cannot imagine the ending where Margo dies and Q finds her and it still works.  Maybe the book couldn't have ended any other way and maybe this ending, even if it felt slightly disappointing, is the most true-to-life ending...
Or maybe I've just been reading too much fantasy lately and wanted a more spectacular finish, regardless of what the spectacle was.