Sonny's Blues begins with the unnamed narrator discovering that his brother has been picked up for using and selling heroin.
I read about it in the pap
Sonny's Blues begins with the unnamed narrator discovering that his brother has been picked up for using and selling heroin.
I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.
It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done. (p. 49)
The narrator talked about Sonny's arrest with a childhood friend, also someone who has abused drugs. The friend said: "Ain't nothing you can do. Can't much help old Sonny no more, I guess" – then immediately turned this around, "Funny thing... when I saw the papers this morning, the first thing I asked myself was if I had anything to do with it. I felt sort of responsible" (p. 51).
This question about responsibility is a common one when it comes to family and friends' struggles. We often attribute blame solely to the addict, but Baldwin asks us to think more broadly, both in terms of individual and community trauma that leads to maladaptive coping ("It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under", p. 56), but also the ways that we can save each other without being enabling or codependent. Baldwin suggests that we can't be separated from our larger context, even when we attempt to leave it: Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap (p. 54). That context can save us.
Although this story is ostensibly about Sonny, I was most curious about the narrator and his courage in coming to trust Sonny, listen to him, and let him be himself. I liked his reflective voice, that he himself was open to change, and that this was a process, one not one that was much easier than that which Sonny was going through.
This is the second piece of Baldwin's that I've read this month. What impressed me about both this and Go Tell It On the Mountain was Baldwin's skill with dialogue, but also his ability to describe wordless experiences – like his descriptions of spiritual conversions in Mountain and jazz and relationships here:
Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water. (p. 67-68)
Baldwin's use of language is beautiful and leaves me feeling awkward, tongue-tied, struggling to describe his writings.
I read this story as part of GR's Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) short story challenge....more
We are drawn to extraordinary beauty mindlessly and purposelessly; we flutter on dusty moth wings toward the effulgence with no understanding of why wWe are drawn to extraordinary beauty mindlessly and purposelessly; we flutter on dusty moth wings toward the effulgence with no understanding of why we do it. Perhaps when we see a woman with the aspect of an angel, our souls are tricked into following her, mistaking her for a guide to paradise. (p. 186)
All the Ever Afters is a retelling of the Cinderella story from the point of view of Cinderella's mother and sisters. Agnes, Ella's stepmother, was herself beautiful, but lowborn, so ignored. She was largely self-educated and business savvy; when she saw an opportunity, she took it and made it work. Without doing so, she and her daughters would have been beaten, raped, or starved. Even so, when her husband died, she lost the alehouse she built and paid for. Serfs and women were both powerless and at the mercy of those in power.
Agnes's daughters, in this retelling, were smart, kind, and compassionate. Lottie, however, was dark-skinned like her father, thus ugly in this culture, although she was also thin, graceful, and with fine features. Fair-skinned and beautiful Tillie's features were deformed by pox. Women's fortunes improved or fell depending on the men they were connected to (or not); as a result, Lottie and Tillie were likely unmarriageable and likely to be at risk in a future without a man.
On the other hand, Danielle Teller's Ella was probably on the autism spectrum: she was a late talker; unable "to discern oblique messages concealed behind ordinary words"; spent considerable time sorting and arranging; and stimmed to self-calm. As a side note, she was creative and fashion aware. Her father was probably also on the autism spectrum, but more notably, seriously abused alcohol and may have died as a result of Korsakoff's, a dementia associated with thiamine deficiencies occurring during serious alcohol abuse. Her birthmother probably was psychotic: she was paranoid, socially withdrawing, and making clang associations and thinking tangentially, eventually completing suicide.
Bottom line, regardless of other characteristics, highborn was good. Beautiful was good, although only one kind of beautiful is good. More importantly, though, "in order for [Ella] to embody beauty and goodness, [everyone else has] to be darkness and perversity" (pp. 371-372). Further, the barriers to success were seen as inherent to serfs, villeins, and women, rather than to systemic barriers.
[Ella's] habitual muteness and the gentle hesitancy of those rare words that do fall from her lips make her seem bashful, as does her manner of ducking her head and looking up through sweeping lashes. Apart from her collections of baubles and kennel of favorite dogs, she appears to have no passions or vices, and when she attends royal functions, her gaze drifts to invisible spectacles that only she can apprehend. (pp. 3-4)
Teller spent most of the rest of All the Ever Afters considering how bad could be considered good and vice versa, not only for Ella and her stepsisters, but also for all of us. As she discussed in her interview at the end of the book, "there is comfort ... when heroes succeed and villains are punished, but it worries me when we... reduce ourselves and others to stereotypes of good and bad, manufacturing air cover to judge the people we don’t like and excuse those we do" (p. 380). This theme is an important one to play with now.
I liked that Agnes and her daughters fought the system, but still remained in the range of possibilities that were available in their time, rather than ending up with a 21st century outcome. All the Ever Afters frequently didn't feel like a Cinderella retelling and, in fact, when Teller touched too closely on the Disney story, it felt awkward and forced. Did this need to be a Cinderella retelling? My first response was that it didn't, that this device limited the story. Later, though, I wondered whether we would be forced to recognize both perspectives if this story weren't set in the Cinderella story (I think we would). Throughout, we have been watching Agnes, Lottie, and Tillie and see them as generally good people (not perfect) – and Ella's first parents as compromised (although not entirely) – then recognize the other person's perspective. Ella's viewpoint makes sense to her and, although we didn't see her experience this way, we can understand it.
“Because it’s true! You make me sleep in the attic like a servant, you make me wear these rags, you even made me do the laundry, which was the most horrible day of my life, one I can never forget, because everyone keeps calling me Cinderella!” (p. 330)
Ella is correct as far as she goes, but she was forced into the attic until she shared (she never did), her "rags" were her mother's gowns, and she did laundry on one day as an empathy-building punishment (failed). She herself called herself Cinderella more than anyone else did.
Finally, I liked the systemic interactions throughout the book: Agnes' "mean" behaviors toward Ella were always motivated and well-intended, although trapped in the difficulties inherent to the stepdaughter/stepmother relationship. Their "dance" stopped as each stepped outside their habitual patterns.
I get irritated by readers who review books that clearly weren't written for them (e.g., literary fiction read by people whose reviews are concrete anI get irritated by readers who review books that clearly weren't written for them (e.g., literary fiction read by people whose reviews are concrete and poorly written). I'm not the reader that Clapton was written for. I enjoy his music, but I'm not a musician and I'm not a fan who eats, breathes, and sleeps Clapton.
What I would do was use the bridge pickup with all of the bass turned up, so the sound was very thick and on the edge of distortion. I also always used amps that would overload. I would have the amp on full, with the volume on the guitar also turned up full, so everything was on full volume and overloading. I would hit a note, hold it, and give it some vibrato with my fingers, until it sustained, and then the distortion would turn into feedback. (Kindle 1058)
Actually, this might have engaged me more if more frequent. In addition, Clapton talks more about what he did than what he thought or felt – the least interesting parts of a person's life story from my point of view. As a result, Clapton might be more insightful for musicians and Clapton fans.
Most of the first half of the book went over my head. I was more engaged by the second half of Clapton, where he talked about the ways that he felt scarred by family dynamics, went into recovery, grieved after Conor's death, and began to get his life back on track.
Bad choices were my specialty, and if something honest and decent came along, I would shun it or run the other way. It could be argued that my choices reflected the way I saw myself, that I thought I wasn’t worthy of anything decent, so I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done, all those years ago. (Kindle 3547)
These are probably not the things that most Clapton readers look for.
I had more positive feelings about Clapton – from ignorance – before reading Clapton. It was nice to see Clapton get his life together, however....more
"But when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy.” (Kindle 4490)
Dutch House is about two siblings, their two mo"But when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy.” (Kindle 4490)
Dutch House is about two siblings, their two mothers, and father. It's about this family and Family. It's about getting stuck in time and, perhaps, attempting to get unstuck. It's about making sense of the failings of the people we love (or don't).
Dutch House is a quiet book – much of it taking place in a car in front of the Dutch House, as Maeve and Danny attempt to come to terms with their parents. Yet, it isn't a slow book on any level. I read it in a day and a half and wanted to swallow it whole. As in the books I like best, I've been savoring it as it lingers on my "tongue," thinking about these strong, wounded people well after closing my kindle.
Danny spins their story out in present tense over 40ish years, winding back on himself (still in the present), telling us more, and then occasionally discovering a new "door" that changes the meaning of everything. Although some narrators deliberately deceive, Danny tells everything he knows at that point in time as he attempts to make sense of the past. He wonders, do we see the past as it was or do we see it through our current, much different eyes? To what extent are our stories about a person dependent on how we feel about them? Or perhaps we choose events that support our favorite narrative, while ignoring others? As Danny observed, The truth is I have plenty of memories of [our stepmother] being perfectly decent. I just choose to dwell on the ones in which she wasn’t” (Kindle 990).
Although everyone agreed that Danny and Maeve's stepmother was awful, how do you make sense of a "sainted" mother, as several characters described her, if she abandoned you when you were four? We don't have language that makes sense of such an act – it certainly doesn't fit with my culture's motherhood myths. Johnson & Johnson, for example, says "Having a baby changes everything," and their advertisements are all sweetness and joy.
There is no story of the prodigal mother. The rich man didn’t call for a banquet to celebrate the return of his erstwhile wife. The sons, having stuck it out for all those years at home, did not hang garlands on the doorways, kill the sheep, bring forth the wine. When she left them she killed them all, each in his own way, and now, decades later, they didn’t want her back. They hurried down the road to lock the gate, the father and his sons together, the wind whipping at their coats. A friend had tipped them off. They knew she was coming and the gate must be locked. (Kindle 3600)
Danny and Maeve's mother left them without saying good-bye, but their father abandoned them in a much more conventional way. He was able to do so while avoiding most of their wrath. What's that about?
“Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re fine. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to." (Kindle 4077)
Dutch House is a lovely book; nonetheless, I would have bought it just for the cover. I recently read a review about a book where the reviewer commented that the cover had nothing to do with the book. Not so in this case. This painting plays an important role.
I read this book with my mother and her book club. Thank you for the recommendation! ...more
Babel-17 is like a mash-up of two different books: one on the relationships between language and thought, the second a more traditional space opera. TBabel-17 is like a mash-up of two different books: one on the relationships between language and thought, the second a more traditional space opera. The former captured me, especially as I spent a fair amount of my teenaged years wondering whether you and I each see the same hue as red, whether we each taste the same thing as strawberries. As an adult, I think it's pretty clear that we may meet consensus on color names, but that we don't all see the same thing when exposed to the same wavelength. I love cilantro, but some of you don't, and my experience of some wines, beers, and foods has changes across time as my palate has changed.
In a similar vein, I wonder to what degree I lose the jokes and allusions in a book in translation. What do I miss when I talk to someone from another country, even if that person is a native English speaker? As Radra opines, "the problem a ‘foreigner’ has transcribing a language he doesn’t speak; he may come out with too many distinctions of sound, or not enough” (Kindle 248).
Babel-17 is based on the largely discredited Whorfian hypothesis, that language influences thought: if we don't have language for something, then we can't perceive it. Like me, you've probably had the experience of learning a new word, then hearing it all around you. Or perhaps you've taken a class or read a book that makes you look at the world very differently.
Delaney turns this question upside down, though, when Radra meets a native speaker of Babel-17, only to ask Butcher
—if you understood Babel-17 all along, her questions hurled in her own storming brain, why did you only use it gratuitously for yourself, an evening of gambling, a bank robbery, when a day later you would lose everything and make no attempt to keep things for yourself?
What “self”? There was no “I.”(Kindle 2688)
Consider how a sense of self changes how we approach the world...
I enjoyed the philosophical discussions in Babel-17, which are why I read science fiction, but I would have passed on the space opera. I imagine how Ursula LeGuin would have situated such a discussion in her books. I'm sure that other readers preferred the body modifications, unusual creatures, and the action scenes. ...more
All About Love is, not surprisingly, all about love. And, relative to other writers, bell hooks really does consider all of it. As she says, It is farAll About Love is, not surprisingly, all about love. And, relative to other writers, bell hooks really does consider all of it. As she says, It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives (p. 26). She meant to more firmly describe what it is.
hooks, like many academic writers, described love as a verb, rather than the noun used in popular music or Hallmark cards. It is how we love, rather than only what we feel. It is an active act rather than a passive experience. M. Scott Peck described love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Erich Fromm also emphasized the spiritual connection with another person, but also the importance of self-love. How, he asked, can one love someone else well if not also loving oneself? Thomas Merton considered how loving gives life meaning. Robert Sternberg talked about love as characterized by passion, intimacy, and commitment, which seems both an accurate definition and a fairly bloodless one.
hooks saw love as comprised of a rich number of ingredients: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. Love is not just something one does with a single other person; instead, hooks posited that it is an attitude one takes toward life and that such an attitude, while not guaranteeing a perfect, committed relationship, can transform life.
Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with individuals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet. (pp. 119-120)
All About Love reads as the result of hundreds of rich conversations with friends, audiences, random strangers, and books, informed both by those people who were interested in what love means, but also those who were more cynical, those who concluded that love is only a myth. It is this diversity of perspectives that has hooks looking at love in multiple ways in different situations.
In a world that seems more and more dichotomous in opinion, a world that often shoots from the hip, it is refreshing to find a book that develops a sustained, thoughtful, and complex description of a complex and often elusive subject....more
I loved the first two books in Tariq Ali's Islam Quartet, Stone Woman not so much. The first two books of the Islam Quartet were about the Crusades anI loved the first two books in Tariq Ali's Islam Quartet, Stone Woman not so much. The first two books of the Islam Quartet were about the Crusades and Saladin, things I know something about (enough to know that everyone dies), while Stone Woman is set in Turkey, in 1899, at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Each of these books tells significant stories in the Muslim/Christian conflict, but from a Muslim perspective.
The family tells stories of their travels to China, France, Germany, and the US ¬– but because I know less about the decline of the Ottoman Empire and its attempts to find a place in the larger world – I didn't find this story as compelling as his previous, more familiar previous stories. Nonetheless, the openness, tolerance, and resilience of this family and society are engaging, and Ali's depictions of the political and philosophical divisions among Islamic groups and beliefs are compelling.
“Nilofer, there are rich and poor in this world. The poor are many and the rich are few. Their interests have never coincided. Both rich and poor need to get rid of the Sultan, but what will happen after they succeed? Will we find another Sultan whom we will call a President, but who will wear a uniform? Or will we found a party as they have in Germany and France which fights for the poor?” (Kindle 11633)
Like the first two books, sex is a major player. There are many extramarital and premarital affairs, gay characters, and much talk about sex (and farts and shit). We also have five deaths (two murders, one suicide, one execution, and one natural death), one wedding, one circumcision, whirling dervishes, and one stroke, all in the course of one short summer.
The secrets the Pasha family told the Stone Woman, a rock formation outside their home are interesting, but they didn't hang together well enough for me. Unlike Ali's previous books, I didn't care about these characters. In Ali's first novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, I held my breath throughout. Ali made me love those characters and I hung in, even though I knew that the book would end badly. I believed in the characters and sided with them against the pompous, self-righteous, and wrong-headed Crusaders, who slaughtered the village at the center of this story.
I did like Nilofer, the 28-year-old narrator, although I had difficulty buying that she was a 19th rather than a 21st century woman or that her father and brothers would so readily respect her sexual decisions and intellectual opinions to the degree that they did. Again, perhaps this was a failure in imagination on my part.
Perhaps if I were Turkish or Muslim, my reaction to Stone Woman would have been different: I would have known the background better. Or, if discussions of the decline of the Ottoman Empire were more common in the US, I would have more clearly seen how Ali was shifting the context and meaning in this story....more
It is 1138 and a kinder, gentler time than we have now, not only because Brother Cadfael peoples Ellis Peters' world. As in all books in this series –It is 1138 and a kinder, gentler time than we have now, not only because Brother Cadfael peoples Ellis Peters' world. As in all books in this series – this is the third – there is a mysterious death, generally a murder, at the book's heart. Cadfael came late to his vocation, after a time soldiering in the Crusades. He left his heart with several women along the way.
In this book, Gervase Bonel has left his manor to the abbey, making some hearts envious and others excited: He had not been an evil man, only a child of his time and place (Kindle 2383). Bonel was given a special portion of a plump partridge for his dinner; unfortunately, it was poisoned with herbs from Cadfael's herbal stores. Perhaps more unfortunately, Bonel's wife was Cadfael's first love and the person accused of killing him is Mistress Bonel's son from her first marriage.
The events that unfold have an innocence to them that one doesn't regularly find in our world: 14-year-olds tusseling with each other, fooling adults, being mistaken for each other, and running away in a temper. Cadfael, as per usual, moves quietly and observantly through this world, drawing the conclusions that are obvious after we see them, but which we readily missed.
In the course of these interactions, we discover more about this world: a world where four-year-olds followed their uncle's plow with a sack of stones to scare the birds from the newly-laid seed in order to earn their keep; where men could lose their freedom because their fathers and brothers had worked as villeins, although free; and where if born in Wales, one was son, but in England, bastard.
Maybe not so gentle a world.
Yet, Cadfael approached his world with tranquillity of mind, prepared to be tolerant even towards the dull, pedestrian reading of Brother Francis, and long-winded legal haverings of Brother Benedict the sacristan. Men were variable, fallible, and to be humoured (Kindle 24).
And, when Cadfael approached his world in this way, he left more comfort and less uneasiness in his wake, even for the murderer, who he gives the penance, "Live, amend, in your dealings with sinners remember your own frailty, and in your dealings with the innocent, respect and use your own strength in their service" (Kindle 2995). In our world, people are judged by their crimes rather their character, their intent, or their ability to be rehabilitated, the last a goal that is given only lip service in our world. Cadfael reminds us that there are other ways of meting out justice.
Peters' mysteries are as much interesting for their interactions between characters – between Cadfael and the novice, Brother Mark; between the accused murderer and his nephew; and Cadfael and his best friend Hugh Berengar, the sheriff's deputy. In this exchange, Hugh and Cadfael are attempting to make sense of some strange events that happened after the apprehension of the murderer:
“I hear you lost a horse while you were up on the borders,” said Beringar.
“Mea culpa!” owned Cadfael. “I left the stable unlocked.”
“About the same time as the Llansilin court lost a man,” observed Hugh.
“Well, you’re surely not blaming me for that. I found him for them, and then they couldn’t keep their hold on him.”
“I suppose they’ll have the price of the horse out of you, one way or the other?”
“No doubt it will come up at chapter tomorrow. No matter,” said Brother Cadfael placidly, “as long as no one here can dun me for the price of the man.”....
“I’ve been saving a piece of news for you, Cadfael, my friend. Every few days a new wonder out of Wales! Only yesterday I got word from Chester that a rider who gave no name came into one of the granges of the monastery of Beddgelert, and left there his horse, asking that the brothers would give it stable-room until it could be returned to the Benedictine brothers at the sheepfolds of Rhydycroesau, whence it had been borrowed. (Kindle 3134)
This is a world that I need to visit regularly. I'm thankful that Peters wrote 20 books in this series. By the time I finish them, I can start again. Maybe I'll do them in order this time....more
The 57 Bus is an account of the 2013 assault and burning of Sasha, a White, agender teen, by Richard, an African American teen, on Oakland's 57 bus. GThe 57 Bus is an account of the 2013 assault and burning of Sasha, a White, agender teen, by Richard, an African American teen, on Oakland's 57 bus. Good and bad, right and wrong.
There are two kinds of people in the world. Male and Female. Gay and Straight. Black and White. Normal and Weird. Cis and Trans. There are two kinds of people in the world. Saints and Sinners. Victims and Villains. Cruel and Kind. Guilty and Innocent. There are two kinds of people in the world. Just two. Just two. Only two. (p. 215)
But this is not a story of binaries but of nonbinaries, so we learn about both Sasha and Richard, and empathize with them both. I would enjoy hanging out with Sasha and their friends, coloring outside the lines, discarding the typical rules governing gendered behavior and exploring who I could be in a different time and place.
It's easy to see Richard as immature and joking, making the kinds of foolish choices that many of us made as children and teens. I would have liked him, too. His actions went well wrong, while I avoided consequences when joking around. What if Richard had been diagnosed and treated for ADHD? What if he had had an after-school job or a lawyer when he was wrongly accused as a 14-year-old? What if he had lived in a part of Oakland with fewer bad influences and more good choices?
What if Richard had not been Black? What if Sasha had not been White? Would we tell a different sort of story? Consider:
Donald Williams Jr., an African American freshman at San Jose State University, had been relentlessly bullied by the white students he lived with in a four-bedroom dormitory suite. The white kids, also freshmen, had insisted on calling Williams “three-fifths,” a reference to the clause in the original US Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining population for representation in Congress. They clamped a bike lock around his neck and claimed to have lost the key. They wrote Nigger on a whiteboard and draped a Confederate flag over a cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley in the suite’s living room. They locked him in his room. And they claimed it was all just a series of good-natured pranks. (pp. 201-202)
The eighteen-year-old white students were expelled, the seventeen-year-old suspended. The older students were charged with misdemeanor battery with a hate-crime enhancement, carrying a maximum penalty of 1 1/2 years in county jail. All three were convicted of battery, although the jury acquitted one of the hate-crime charge and deadlocked on the other two. It's not hard to think about white privilege here.
Who is the victim? Clearly Sasha, but Sasha was also supported by friends and family and went off to MIT. But what about Richard, whose friends and community disappeared (his family stood by him)? Richard, who was sentenced as an adult, but denied adult protections in the legal system. Richard who was an immature 16?
Can one commit a bad act without being a bad person?
Could we forgive as easily and well as Sasha and her family? Would we open to a reconciliation?
Was this a hate crime or a foolish act? We act as though it is the act that makes something a hate crime, but maybe it's the intent.
We are unfair in our treatment of gender-noncomforming teens and adults, but we are also unfair in our treatment of African American youths. Why are only 16% of juveniles, but 41% of incarcerated youths African American? Why are 58% of juveniles in adult prisons African American?
The 57 Bus is not a simple and clear story of a crime. It raises questions, such as why we think in binaries such as good and bad....more
I fall in love with some books from the very first sentence (although I sometimes fall out of love in ensuing chapters).
My Year of Rest and RelaxatioI fall in love with some books from the very first sentence (although I sometimes fall out of love in ensuing chapters).
My Year of Rest and Relaxation was not one of these books. The narrator was superficial and self-absorbed, the sort of person who I would want to avoid in real life. She is dismissive of her only friend, Reva – "best" is a difficult adjective to apply to them. Reva is competitive, envious, and probably more than a little bit masochistic – why else would Reva surround herself with people, including our unnamed narrator, who are so destructive of anything positive in her?
As Rest and Relaxation continued, however, it became clearer who our unnamed narrator was, and I became more sympathetic to her. Her parents both died within months of each other in her junior year of college: her father of cancer, her mother suicide. Her parents were self-absorbed and distant; her mother had crushed Valium in our narrator's bottle when she was colicky.
My mother could make me feel very special, stroking my hair, her perfume sweet and light, her pale, bony hands cool and jangling with gold bracelets, her frosted hair, her lipstick, breath woody with smoke and stringent from booze. But the next moment she’d be in a haze, distracted, suffering from some grave fear or worry and struggling to put up with even the thought of me. (p. 64)
Our narrator hadn't a fighting chance of living a good life – whatever that is – without drastic intervention.
That drastic intervention? Stage 1: She visited the world's wackiest, drug-pushing psychiatrist, a character who doesn't listen, someone who would normally irritate me. In this case, their appointments were a comic interlude:
"I deal in treating mental illness. Do you work for the police?” ...
“No, I work for an art dealer, at a gallery in Chelsea.”
“Are you FBI?”
“No.”
“CIA?”
“No, why?”
“I just have to ask these questions. Are you DEA? FDA? NICB? NHCAA? Are you a private investigator hired by any private or governmental entity? Do you work for a medical insurance company? Are you a drug dealer? Drug addict? Are you a clinician? A med student? Getting pills for an abusive boyfriend or employer? NASA?”
“I think I have insomnia. That’s my main issue.”
“You’re probably addicted to caffeine, too, am I right?” (pp. 18-19)
Stage 2: Piles and piles of drugs, apparently prescribed at random by Dr. Tuttle. One day in January, she took Benadryl, melatonin, Nembutal, a few Lunestas, and drank some wine; took "a few" Ativan every 30 minutes or so, followed by some Lamictal and a few Placidyl; downed the last of her Ambien; took a Nembutal; drank half a bottle of Robitussin; took a Zyprexa, some Ativan, a handful of melatonin, three Solfoton, and six Benadryl; and drank some gym. Yikes!
All this was in service of sleep. A sort suicidal sleep.
Stage 3: Reva took her pills, perhaps to save her. Our narrator was left with 40 Infermiterol – which caused her to black out for three days and do things she wouldn't otherwise do. She asked an artist, one she didn't respect, to lock her in her emptied apartment, do whatever he wanted with her (but not tell her), and leave her a pizza and sundries. In the process, she began to come back to life.
* * * * *
What would you be willing to do to come back to life? To really live? Your answer, my answer, would not be the same as our narrator's, but that does not matter. What matters is that we search.
Rest and Relaxation surprised me. I appreciated being surprised – especially after expecting nothing more than superficiality, name-dropping, drugs, and alcohol.
The days are getting shorter, and I frequently don't leave work until after dark (then work more from home). When I walk to and from work – and I feelThe days are getting shorter, and I frequently don't leave work until after dark (then work more from home). When I walk to and from work – and I feel lucky to be able to do so – I tense my shoulders against the cold. And, of course, the politics have darkened my state of mind.
In such times, warm books are necessary, especially "comfort food." I've never read Letters from Father Christmas before, but this is comfort food. Tolkien's Father Christmas is kind and funny, a good artist, a man who engages in funny repartee with Polar Bear, who often comments on Father Christmas's letters to Tolkien's children with "Rude!"
Father Christmas's letters to Tolkien's four children were written between 1920 and 1943. They are largely filled with the sounds of an active and happy family, as in Polar Bear's comments (in bold) on Father Christmas's letter.
I have drawn you a picture of it all. Polar Bear was rather grumpy at my drawing it:
Of course, naturally.
He says my Christmas pictures always make fun of him and that one year he will send one drawn by himself of me being idiotic (but of course I never am, and he can’t draw well enough).
Yes I can. – 1928 (p. 39)
Father Christmas's drawings cannot help but make me smile:
[image]
More than that, Father Christmas's drawings are accompanied by his handwritten letters, replete with his "shaky" handwriting (he was more than 1900 years old when writing these letters).
[image]
Father Christmas was writing the Tolkien children during some difficult times, which occasionally entered his letters. In 1932, he wrote:
I am not able to carry quite as much toy-cargo as usual this year, as I am taking a good deal of food and clothes (useful stuff): there are far too many people in your land, and others, who are hungry and cold this winter. (p. 85)
And in 1940, he wrote Priscilla:
I wonder what you will think of my picture. “Penguins don’t live at the North Pole,” you will say. I know they don’t, but we have got some all the same. What you would call “evacuees”, I believe (not a very nice word); except that they did not come here to escape the war, but to find it! They had heard such stories of the happenings up in the North (including a quite untrue story that Polar Bear and all the Polar Cubs had been blown up, and that I had been captured by Goblins) that they swam all the way here to see if they could help me. Nearly 50 arrived. (pp. 141-142)
Just writing this review made me smile, as Father Christmas's letters are filled with love without a hint of saccharine. Enjoy!
Thank you, Cecily, for your review, which encouraged me to read this book.
December 2020: My previous comments could be repeated in spades: this book was comfort food in a difficult year. I'm also (re)reading Fellowship of the Rings, with which this partnered well. This may become a holiday tradition.
I enjoy short stories, but don't enjoy short story collections as much. They need to all fit together and not knock me about, without being repetitiveI enjoy short stories, but don't enjoy short story collections as much. They need to all fit together and not knock me about, without being repetitive. And, because they are short stories, I get disappointed that they move more quickly than I would like and that there isn't as much character development within a single story.
That being said, I was almost sure to be less than happy with The Wind's Twelve Quarters – although I like that LeGuin's stories were in chronological order and we could follow her development as a writer. I love some of her stories, especially those set in the Hainish universe. Because the universe and characters are more developed? Because the universe is more familiar?
I also liked her introductions to the stories. For example, I knew that LeGuin had published "Nine Lives" under a pen name, but didn't know more. She observed, It’s not surprising that Playboy hadn’t had its consciousness raised back then, but it is surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them (p. 129). I would write that because I wanted to remember that lapse in order to never commit it again. And here she describes where she gets her ideas – at least for "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," a story that I like because it makes me sad: “Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else? (p. 276)
But stories like "The Day Before the Revolution" are what I read for. In this story, there is one narrator and trivial action in the present, but considerable movement from present to past again. It felt like a series of spirals, the way that ruminative thought spirals – as opposed to its typical linear representation.
How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner’s death, people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage—what was courage? She had never figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on, others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever? To die was merely to go on in another direction. (p. 291)
And, as we figure out where the story is going, the narrator's courage becomes more touching, perhaps because she allowed us to really see her in this story, in a way that we don't usually allow each other to see us.
And, because the perspective in "Direction of the Road" was unique, creative, and joyful, I want to end with a piece from it. The oak tree in this story describes growing and shrinking for each passing motorist (matching the human's perspective changes):
I confess that sometimes, in the blessed nights of darkness with no moon to silver my crown and no stars occluding with my branches, when I could rest, I would think seriously of escaping my obligation to the general Order of Things: of failing to move. No, not seriously. Half-seriously. It was mere weariness. If even a silly, three-year-old, female pussy willow at the foot of the hill accepted her responsibility, and jounced and rolled and accelerated and grew and shrank for each motorcar on the road, was I, an oak, to shirk? Noblesse oblige, and I trust I have never dropped an acorn that did not know its duty.
For fifty or sixty years, then, I have upheld the Order of Things, and have done my share in supporting the human creatures’ illusion that they are “going somewhere.” (p. 272) ...more
We believe we can understand each other. That we can understand the rambunctious and defiant woman pulled over during a traffic stop, effectively inteWe believe we can understand each other. That we can understand the rambunctious and defiant woman pulled over during a traffic stop, effectively interrogate terrorists, and identify who to trust (Brock Turner, Jerry Sandusky, Bernie Madoff, Ana Montes, Adolf Hitler) and who not to trust (Sandra Bland, Amanda Knox). Malcolm Gladwell effectively and engagingly rips the bandages from our eyes and demonstrates that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
We have difficulty reading and understanding strangers.
We don't want to believe that we have difficulty reading and understanding strangers.
We believe that people tell the truth and that we can accurately identify lies and liars; unfortunately, we are extraordinarily poor at this. In fact, judges do a much poorer job of making bail decisions than a computer – and with a fraction of the information. Waterboarding sessions do not make people tell the truth; in fact, enhanced interrogation techniques decrease the reliability of what is said.
We believe that people transparently communicate how they feel and who they are. They don't – good people can fidget and appear nervous when questioned, even when telling the truth, while people like Bernie Madoff can rob us blind while appearing good and trustworthy.
We don't recognize how context can pull certain behaviors and, thus, we fail to act to further outcomes we surely want. Therefore, it took more than 80 years to build a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge, despite more than 1500 suicides occurring in this period. People argued that they would just complete suicide elsewhere (only 25 of 515 people who had tried to jump, but had been unexpectedly prevented went on to complete suicide in some other way). On the other hand, the bridge authority spent millions to build a traffic barrier protecting cyclists crossing the bridge, although no cyclist had ever been killed doing so. Sometimes data is not convincing, even when it should be.
Gladwell discussed a number of case examples, most of whom are recognizable to a US audience, to make his ideas come alive. He bookended Talking to Strangers with a discussion of the Sandra Bland case, a case that makes me sad every time I watch the traffic stop video or read the transcript – as I have done numerous times. Gladwell argues Officer Encinia made a number of mistakes with Ms. Bland. Encinia misinterpreted her anxiety in a traffic stop as a signal of guilt and dangerousness. He felt unsafe (as did she). Encinia was so attuned to any sign of anything out of the ordinary – as would be the case when a women travels from Chicago to Prairie View, Texas – that he overlooked any possibility of Bland's innocence (this is a case of confirmation bias). And, in the year after Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, why might any person of color feel uncomfortable and put upon in an unfair and unreasonable traffic stop?
I enjoy Gladwell's use of diverse information to draw overarching theories. I think this book is very successful in this regard. Some reviewers have complained that Gladwell identifies a problem, without also offering solutions. I disagree, I believe he offers several solutions, but no magic wands (and we want magic wands). Here are his proposals:
1. We must challenge our naive belief that we can distinguish between truth-tellers and liars and begin using validated assessment for identifying the truth.
2. We should recognize that some people's emotions are transmitted clearly and as expected – I'm one – while others behave very differently than we expect, especially in stressful situations. That doesn't make them guilty. They might, instead be clueless or anxious or angry or on the autism spectrum or just different.
3. We should pay attention to the context from that person's perspective. How might that change their behavior from what we might expect?
4. Finally, we should approach all conversations with humility, recognizing that we might not have the full backstory, understand the situation from the other person's perspective, or respond in the same way.
* * * * * * *
I regularly listen to Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, which I highly recommend. Gladwell posted the third chapter of his audiobook on the podcast, which sounded much like the podcast itself. If you're an audiobook fan, you will probably enjoy his very personal reading style and the original interviews included.
Finally, this is a book that I read with my mom and, while we usually talk about books via text or Facetime, we read and talked in real time, which was lovely....more
I confess: I read Greta Thunberg's No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference because our president was dismissive of her, saying, "She seems like a verI confess: I read Greta Thunberg's No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference because our president was dismissive of her, saying, "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" I read this book and kept reading because I am always impressed by passion and competence. I am impressed by her skill in framing an argument and acting on it.
Greta Thunberg has been school striking outside the Swedish Parliament since August 2018. No One Is Too Small is a collection of 16 speeches that she has given over this past year. She asks that we unite behind the science and take action. She concluded that the real danger is when companies and politicians make it look like real action is happening, when little is done, aside from clever accounting and creative public relations campaigns.
‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is. (p. 22)
Do you need to read this book? Maybe watching Thunberg's TED Talk or listening to one of her speeches would be enough. But we should listen to her message over and over until it sinks in. Listening/reading her speeches is interesting just as an exercise in following her development as a speaker over the last year.
Thunberg did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but has received many prizes in the last year. She is a simple, but powerful advocate for climate change....more
Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think. – Hanna Holborn Gray
I look for books that are going to maEducation should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think. – Hanna Holborn Gray
I look for books that are going to make me think, make me see things differently. Coddling of the American Mind did this. In brief, it is about three great Untruths that are affecting US universities and making them weaker: that we are protecting them from things that they see as dangerous, because – although there are good people, there are also evil ones. The great Untruths are:
1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. 2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. 3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. (p. 4)
Lukianoff and Haidt are provocative, but also good at bringing together diverse kinds of information together to help us recognize, as the subtitle goes, "how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure."
For a book about the dichotomous and extreme thinking characterizing parenting, students, and the university system in the 21st century, Lukianoff and Haidt slip into dichotomous thinking.
As do we all from time to time.
We are in an age of helicopter parenting – even bulldozer parenting – where parents attempt to intervene with their college-aged children in a way that my daughters, frustratingly, would not allow me to do when they were in grade school. Rather than helping them, except in the short-term, this sort of parenting (and overscheduling, failing to allow or encourage free play, etc.) leaves students to becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt. Lukianoff and Haidt argue compellingly that college students should and must be exposed to viewpoint diversity, which will help them think more critically, understand diverse perspectives, and withstand events that would otherwise make them depressed and anxious. As the authors conclude, this means that we should be
seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality). (p. 14)
I appreciated Coddling of the American Mind, but I was often annoyed and irritated by it – which are not good outcomes for this time of year. Lukianoff and Haidt gathered interesting and often compelling threads, but I wasn't convinced by all of their evidence. Clearly, there is more anxiety and depression on campus than when I was in school, but that isn't necessarily a function of "coddling," but of greater access on college campuses. Students who would not have been able to attend college 20 years ago can.
While Lukianoff and Haidt criticize students' complaints about controversial and noncontroversial speakers (e.g., George Will, Bill Maher, Eric Holder, Madeleine Albright), I am less dismayed. I like that students are more likely to set limits about things that my generation accepted (e.g., #metoo).
Current parenting practices, among many other things, have both strengths and weaknesses. Lukianoff and Haidt primarily focus on the downside here, but maybe we can look for some nuance and attempt to create a stronger model for the next generation of parents – and universities....more
“The more pieces you put into position, the larger the picture becomes.” (p. 221)
The Grave's a Fine and Private Place is the ninth in the Flavia de Lu“The more pieces you put into position, the larger the picture becomes.” (p. 221)
The Grave's a Fine and Private Place is the ninth in the Flavia de Luce series. Flavia (rhymes with brave-ee-a) is a precocious 12-year-old, gifted in chemistry, passionate about poisons, and engrossed in detecting. It is 1952 and she is 12, so does not understand sex or romantic relationships which, unfortunately, are center to the story in this book.
Luckily, her family, for once, circled their wagons and were supportive of her ¬in a way that they rarely were in previous books, where tricks and name-calling were more the norm. This is an unusual family. Flavia, for example, traveled with "only the bare necessities: a toothbrush, and Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (p. 85).
The de Luce family is not a demonstrative one, although they are, each in her own way, coping with the discovery that their mother died ten years earlier while mountain climbing and their father died of pneumonia. As Flavia said about another child,
“Hob,” I wanted to say, “you are a treasure. A bucketful of gems. Your price is far above rubies.”
I also wanted to hug him.
But I didn’t, of course. (p. 199).
This book is different than the others, which has introduced interesting and competent adults, then dropped them. The characters almost get along – and it appears that there is going to be a collaboration of all of the "guns" that had been neatly hung on the wall.
Flavia is almost seen as an equal with the adults.
Flavia always cheers me when life is stressful. Thank you, Flavia!...more
Anything you like to do isn’t tiresome. (Carl Murray Bates, stonemason, Kindle 809)
Working is a compendium of first-person narratives about, erm, workAnything you like to do isn’t tiresome. (Carl Murray Bates, stonemason, Kindle 809)
Working is a compendium of first-person narratives about, erm, work – the good, the bad, the ugly. Speakers range from 12 years of age to 75 (or more). They are male and female; White, Black, and Latin. Many are blue-collar workers, but some are also owners. Few are professionals – I don't remember any physicians, social workers, psychologists, physical therapists, or professors, although there are a couple of attorneys. No artists, but there are musicians; no authors, but some professional writers. There are people who are famous (e.g., Rip Torn, Steve Hamilton, and George Allen), but most are not. As Studs Turkle observed,
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. (Kindle)
Many of the workers talked about the ways that work can destroy the spirit:
You’re not regarded. You’re just a number out there. Just like a prisoner. When you report off you tell ’em your badge number. A lotta people don’t know your name. They know you by your badge number. (Steve Dubi, steelworker, Kindle 12424)
I think a lot of places don’t want people to be people. I think they want you to almost be the machines they’re working with. They just want to dehumanize you. Just like when you walk in in the morning, you put the switch on and here you are: “I am a robot. This is what I do. Good morning. How are you? May I help you?” (Nancy Rogers, bank teller, Kindle 6313)
I’m tired. Because I’m not growing old gracefully. I resent the fact that I haven’t got the coordination that I had. I resent the fact that I can’t run as fast as I used to. I resent the fact that I get sleepy when I’m out at a night club. I resent it terribly. My wife is growing old gracefully but I’m not. (Richard Mann, installment dealer, Kindle 2824)
I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. (Nora Watson, writer for company publishing health literature, Kindle)
One contributing factor to the death of the spirit is the work environment: the noise, smells, dirt, and abuse (major and more trivial).
Neither the company nor the union gives a damn about us. As far as they’re concerned, we’re machines—as wretched as the cabs. (Lucky Miller, cab driver, Kindle 5026)
I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers. Veterinarians tend to the needs of domestic animals but they can’t have medical care for the workers. They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can’t have adequate unemployment compensation for the workers. They treat him like a farm implement. (Roberto Acuna, organizer for United Farm Workers, Kindle 1082)
Perversely, while bad pay can starve workers, both literally and figuratively, good money corrupts:
Maybe in amateur days I would say, “Hold it. I thought that was good.” I may have said, “Play two, take it over.” I’m not gonna do that now and nobody’s gonna do it. When you were amateur, you were more open. Winning now is everything. (Jeanne Reynolds, tennis pro, Kindle 8695)
I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers. Veterinarians tend to the needs of domestic animals but they can’t have medical care for the workers. They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can’t have adequate unemployment compensation for the workers. They treat him like a farm implement. (Roberta Victor, prostitute, Kindle 2217)
For me, Working is about the importance of meaning, challenge, and flow, the opportunity to get lost in something that is somewhat difficult and feels important. I imagine another Chicagoan, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (okay, not a native one), reading this tome and, as a result, deriving his ideas about flow (e.g., coming from the person's approach to work rather than the work itself).
I really feel work is gorgeous. It’s the only thing you can depend upon in life. You can’t depend on love. Oh, love is quite ephemeral. Work has a dignity you can count upon. Work has to be a game in order for it to be well done. You have to be able to play in it, to compete with yourself. You push yourself to your limits in order to enjoy it. There’s quite a wonderful rhythm you can find yourself involved in in the process of any kind of work. It can be waxing a floor or washing dishes . . . (Barbara Terwilliger, currently not working, although had been an actress, salesperson, performing market research, etc., Kindle 9705).
I’m a couple of days away, I’m very lonesome for this place. When I’m on a vacation, I can’t wait to go, but two or three days away, I start to get fidgety. I can’t stand around and do nothin’. I have to be busy at all times. I look forward to comin’ to work. It’s a great feelin’. I enjoy it somethin’ terrible. (Babe Secoli, checker at grocery, Kindle 6847)
It would be very tiring if I had to say, “Would you like a cocktail?” and say that over and over. So I come out different for my own enjoyment. I would say, “What’s exciting at the bar that I can offer?” I can’t say, “Do you want coffee?” Maybe I’ll say, “Are you in the mood for coffee?” Or, “The coffee sounds exciting.” Just rephrase it enough to make it interesting for me. That would make them take an interest. It becomes theatrical and I feel like Mata Hari and it intoxicates me. (Dolores Dante, waitress, Kindle 7028)
I’m not an engineer, but I have an idea and I kind of develop things and—(with an air of wonder)—they work. All night long I think about this place. I love my work. It isn’t the money. (Dave Bender, owner of factory manufacturing vending machine and coin machine parts, Kindle 9063)
If I’m working on some good Steinways, my day goes so fast I don’t even know where it’s gone. But if I’m working on an uninteresting instrument, just the time to tune it drags miserably. There’s something of a stimulus in good sound. (Eugene Russell, piano tuner, Kindle 7476)
When you do something you’re really turned on about, you’ll do it off-hours too. I put more of myself into it, acting like I’m a capable person. When you’re doing something you’re turned off on, you don’t use what talents you have. (Lilith Reynolds, government work, Kindle 8084)
I don’t want to retire. I’d be lost if I had to stay home and don’t see the public all day long. (Teddy Grodowski, elevator operator, Kindle 6153)
And when a person's values are woven through the work, it is no longer work:
I want to learn more. I’m hungry for knowledge. I want to do something. I’m searching for something. I don’t know what it is. (Jesusita Navarro, stay at home mother on welfare, Kindle 7277)
The gifts God has given me is to be a businessman. To be able to organize, to be able to sell, to be able to understand figures and what not. I want to use these gifts for the glory of God. I don’t want to do anything in my business life that would shame my Saviour. So I always look to guidance from the Bible on how the business should be run. (Steven Simonyi-Gindele, publisher of The Capitalist Reporter, Kindle 10206)
Working was written and published 45 years ago, in 1974, so these transcribed conversations are a rich oral history. Countercultural attitudes thread through many of the histories, as these workers attempt to create a life and work that work for them. The goal isn't the end, but the means.
Even today if I decided I could not be happy and personally fulfilled, I’d step out as a priest. The work of a priest is to bring life to people. If I don’t have that life inside me, I can’t give that life away. (Father Leonard Dubi, Catholic priest and activist, Kindle 12538)
Father Dubi's father (quoted very early in this review) knew the same thing, but felt trapped and unable to "step out." And, the juxtaposition of narratives from father and son enriches the larger story, as do some of the other juxtapositions, albeit more directly.
The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. That’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be. (Tom Patrick, formerly a police officer, but now a firefighter, Kindle 13231)
Sorry this was so long, but there were so many pearls in the book. I got absorbed in the process. :)...more
If I had written The Mueller Report, I would have wanted to have at least one sentence per paragraph include exclamation points or inflammatory languaIf I had written The Mueller Report, I would have wanted to have at least one sentence per paragraph include exclamation points or inflammatory language. I appreciated that TMR did not punctuate or write in that way and that the team attempted to describe the lay of the land exactly as they saw it: "Only the facts, Ma'am!" Of course, some editorializing and contextualizing would have been helpful.
The difficulties with amateurs attempting to do a job typically performed by highly-trained professionals is that they don't recognize the pitfalls. The moral of TMR is that if you want to move from business to politics, talk to people who know the rules and employ attorneys – those who won't end up in jail at the end of the day.
One of the things that we should be proud of is that TMR was published, even with redactions. It takes courage for a government to open itself up to scrutiny, as it did here. Of course, if there had been a way to stop its publication, it probably would have been. Or misrepresent its conclusions or deny its conclusions.
Oh, yeah. That happened.
***
1. I wrote much of the above when I was reading TMR in April/May. I only made it about 25% through the report, as it was a difficult and long argument, more difficult than most of the American public is willing to understand. This should be a warning to Congress during the impeachment proceedings: keep it simple!
2. Furthermore, I stopped reading because TMR has since fallen off the media radar. Of course, #2 is probably related to #1....more
But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not know But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing. (p. 381).
Some people binge their ways through TV series or on an author's works. I don't typically – although I often want to. I dole out the books in a series or by an author slowly, rather slaking my thirst and losing my appreciation for the series/author. I also want to keep a series around as long as I can.
Spinning Silver is not a series, although Naomi Novik has a series – Temeraire – that has nine books. I almost bought the first in it after finishing Spinning Silver. I would have bought the whole collection if it had been sold that way. It's not, at least on Kindle.
I really enjoyed Uprooted, but loved Spinning Silver. Spinning Silver is a complex story, sort of based on Rumpelstiltskin, but probably more tightly tied to Eastern European folktales, as this story is peopled with tsars and tsarinas, peasants, Chernobog (black god), and other magical beings. Anti-semitism fits in with and threads through the Rumpelstiltskin story.
This book is a tapestry rather than a drawing, with many contrasting colors and themes. There are at least five narrators and points of view in the novel. The three women's voices are louder here, facing many of the same problems despite differences in social class, money, and religion: unwanted marriages, being courageous in the face of incredible odds. Each of the women faces evil men, but there are also good and wise men, men who are also courageous in the face of their own fear.
All of the narrators rise to the occasion, handling difficult situations that no one could have expected they'd handle. The Chernobog, Tsarina Irina's husband, was confused that everyone else was impressed/infatuated by her. Quick-thinking and witty, she responded:
“My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died,” I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. “The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third—that fools should recognize neither.” (p. 277)
And how should he respond? Should he admit that he doesn't recognize the attraction or fake it?
Because this is nominally a Rumpelstiltskin retelling, many of the themes thread around questions of money and debt-paying. I like the glittering and conflicting perspectives from the different characters (and cultures), here and in later quotes:
Miryam, a Jewish moneylender: “Gifts, and thanks—we’ll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it’s wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren’t paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go. So I do thank you,” I added abruptly, “because you risked all you had to help me, and even if you count the return fair, I’ll still remember the chance you took and be glad to do more for you if I can.” (p. 320)
Wanda, a peasant: And that Staryk wanted to take her for nothing. He made her give him gold just to live, as if she belonged to him because he was strong enough to kill her. My father was strong enough to kill me but that did not mean I belonged to him. (p. 380)
And Spinning Silver also explores courage. The Staryk, facing certain death, refuses a gift from Miryam, his wife, that came at too high a cost:
“Do you think I have spent my strength, spent the treasure of my kingdom to the last coin, and given my hand to as I thought an unworthy mortal,” and even angry, he paused and inclined his head to me as if in fresh apology, “for any lesser cause than [saving my people]?”
I stopped talking. My throat had closed on words. He glared at me and added bitterly, “And after all this that I have done, now you come and ask me a coward’s question, if I will buy my life, with a promise to stand aside and let him take them all instead? Never,” and he was snarling it, hurling the words at my head like stones. “I will hold against him as long as my strength lasts, and when it fails, when I can no longer hold the mountain against his flames, at least my people will know that I have gone before them, and held their names in my heart until the end.” (p. 409)
Miryam was similarly courageous, although under different conditions. It's funny how we see what others should/could do, but refuse what someone else sees as reasonable:
Of course I was afraid.
But I had learned to fear other things more: being despised, whittled down one small piece of myself at a time, smirked at and taken advantage of. I put my chin up and said, as cold as I could be in answer, “And what will you give me in return?” (p. 78)
And magic spins throughout this book – obvious magic like walking through mirrors, turning silver into gold, and magical creatures, but also smaller magics like reading numbers and words and the magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it (p. 441).
Spinning Silver makes one want to find this last kind of magic in your heart.
And I liked this unexpected line from Novik's author bio: She lives in New York City with her family and six computers (p. 469)...more
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