Book #184: Home

Book #184: Home by Toni Morrison

April 30, 2015

This is only the second Morrison book that I've read; the first was the highly acclaimed Beloved. Undoubtedly, she is one of the most important authors of our time. What's disappointing about this very short book was that it left me wanting more. With how intriguing and complex the two main characters were, I felt like the book should have been at least twice as long. This story felt rather condensed to me.

Frank Money was a young soldier in the Korean War. I found this very interesting, since I'm teaching a unit on the Cold War in my history class. When we read the section on the Korean War, my students noted that U.S. soldiers were now integrated. I also had them listen to a brief NPR clip about a Korean War vet who compared his low-key homecoming to the block party that was thrown when his brother returned from WWII. Frank returns to racist America with a heavy heart and severe PTSD. His best friends both died, and he has a lot of guilt over a certain situation. Frank stays with a woman named Lily in Seattle (I think) when he is discharged, but he gets a message that his sister in Atlanta is very dangerously ill. His journey home is eventful; there are moments when kindness is shown to him, and moments of violence. 

Cee is his younger sister. Frank was the only one who ever loved her. Their parents were too overworked to care, and their hateful step-grandmother took her anger out on the young girl. Cee is seduced by a young man after her brother leaves, and after hastily marrying him, he drags her to Atlanta, then abandons her. Cee eventually finds a job as an assistant to a doctor in his home. Too bad this guy is a sadist; he drugs Cee and "experiments" on her vagina, causing her reproductive system to get all fucked up and nearly killing her. 

When Frank shows up, he takes her to their hometown, a short way from Atlanta. Cee is aided by the strong, stern women she'd avoided as a timid child. She and Frank both have a lot of healing to do; both have been through a lot. But there's a bit of closure at the end.

A really great concept for a novel. But I didn't think this was as good as it could have been, simply because Morrison could have given us so much more. It was far from poorly written; it was just too short.

Book #183: Choke

Book #183: Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

April 28, 2015

Double-entry day. Every time I finish a monsterously long classic, I feel like I'm able to blast through much shorter books. This is the third Palahniuk that I've read, and it had what I would expect: dark humor, controversy, characters of questionable morality. It never got dull, and in the end, I feel like there may be some hope for Victor, the narrator.

Victor's not a bad person, although he doesn't think real highly of himself. He's a sexaholic, but only goes to the meetings for sex. He's a med-school dropout who works as a tour guide at a colonial village-type place. He pretends to choke in restaurants to make people feel heroic...and to scam them out of money by keeping in touch and playing on their sympathies. He's a messed up guy, and judging from the flashbacks about his unstable mother, an Italian immigrant who kidnapped him when he was a baby, it's pretty easy to see why.

Besides the sex (which isn't good or bad on his part, it just is), Victor has good reasons for what he does. He uses the money from his sympathetic heroes to pay for his mother's health care. He allows old women with dementia to use him to come to grips with their own past trauma. For instance, one old woman thinks he's the older brother who molested her when they were kids. So he pretends to be this brother and apologizes, hence helping her to get closure. He does something similar for many of the patients.

Now, the situation with Paige Marshall seemed sketchy from the start, and what is learned about her near the end makes a whole lot of freaking sense. I guess the one thing I don't get is, why did Victor fall for the whole stem cell thing? Being a former medical student, didn't he think that sounded strange? Even if there was something to the concept, it would be highly unprofessional for Paige to produce the fetus herself. The fact that Victor got sucked into her insanity is the one thing that didn't click for me here.

Paige leads Victor to believe that, according to Ida's Italian diary, he was conceived using genetic material from Jesus Christ. This makes him think, eventually, that he could be a good person and lead a significant life. Learning the (much more grounded in reality) truth, and being arrested on the accusation of raping the old woman he'd tried to help, he earnestly tries to choke to death on a bottle cap, and his life is genuinely saved for the first time. After having to face down the many many people he'd conned at restaurants, Victor actually has a feeling of empowerment, thanks to his buddy Denny.

As I said, this is everything I'd expect from Palahniuk. The story is light-hearted yet complex. Victor isn't a perfect person, by a long shot, but you can still sympathize with him. There's even a good message here about taking control of your own destiny, in spite of the past. Perhaps Jean Valjean could have learned a thing or two from Victor Mancini.

Book #182: The Grim Grotto

Book #182: The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket

April 28, 2015

Book the eleventh of A Series of Unfortunate Events. This one was better than the previous installment, though that's mainly due to the complexity of Captain Widdershins and his stepchildren. The V.F.D. situation is still very complicated, though Widdershins provides some examples of how the organization operates. They sound more like secret agents than anything else. But was this the case before the schism? Prior to that, what did these people have to be so secretive about, anyway?

So the story picks right up where it left off, with the Baudelaires floating helplessly down a river. They come upon a submarine, the Queequeg, which is affiliated with V.F.D. Captain Widdershins is scatterbrained and bombastic, shouting "aye!" constantly between sentences. He's also very secretive: he and his crew (stepdaughter Fiona and Phil, that optimistic guy from the lumber mill) are looking for the sugar bowl, but all Widdershins will say is that what's inside it is important. After a failed mission to find the bowl in a cave, the children find Phil and Widdershins gone from the submarine. 

Olaf, who is extra obnoxious in this book, seems to have had nothing to do with the disappearance of these adults. He's too busy kidnapping and enslaving children to run his own submarine. Carmelita is now Esmé's spoiled child, and she tortures the captive children with her singing and dancing. I think that Olaf is going to eventually ditch Esmé and the brat, as he's already exasperated with the kid. The main villains had their own shit to deal with this time around.

But the man with hooks for hands had a major part. Fernald, as it turns out, is Fiona's brother, probably twice her age. I'm fascinated just by the family dynamics here. Widdershins is their stepfather, but he was already in the picture when Fiona was only a tiny baby. Fiona briefly mentions that her father left...who was he? And why such a huge age difference between Fernald and Fiona? Of course, they could be half-siblings. And who was their mother, and how did she die? There's just more layers being added to this mystery.

But Fiona and Fernald are both very interesting characters. Fernald stands up for Olaf and the side of V.F.D. that he chose to side with, saying that nobody is totally good, and nobody is totally evil...which is true, of course. Now, a student of mine hinted to me that Olaf becomes a bit sympathetic in the last couple of books. However, I don't see what could justify all the times he's terrorized and harmed children. I don't know if I could ever like this character, or even pity him much. But that remains to be seen.

Fiona starts out as a love interest for Klaus. But she has some personality traits that the Baudelaires find problematic. For example, when they find Widdershins gone, Fiona takes over the Queequeg and starts barking orders. And when Sunny is found to have a bit of very dangerous fungi in her diving helmet, Fiona (who studies mushrooms and fungus) seems unsympathetic towards the little girl's plight. Oh, and she joins Olaf's troop. I laughed hysterically the first time Esmé called her "triangle eyes."

At the end of the book, Poe shows up at Briny Beach, in an echo of the series' opening scene. The Baudelaires were summoned there by a message from Quigley. But Quigley himself does not meet them; they end up climbing into a cab driven by Lemony Snicket's sister Kit. And that's the end of the book.

Two more to go. I was doubtful that I could finish the series by the end of the year, but I think I'll manage just in the nick of time. One student of mine recently finished it, and was so into it that he's gone on to read some supplementary works. Apparently the numerous questions I have, and will have yet, won't necessarily be answered...

Book #181: Les Misérables

Book #181: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Isabel F. Hapgood)

April 25, 2015

God damn it. There was a lot about this book that pissed me off. Note that as I go over these points, I won't include the proper accent marks over certain names. Hapgood's translation neglected them, so I'll be using the spellings that I stared at for over three weeks. 

I didn't hate this book. In fact, I really liked the first couple of volumes. The Bishop, M. Myriel, was a great character. I think I've written before about my distaste for Christian hypocrites. This guy rejected all of the pageantry and glamour traditionally associated with his position. He only used the minimum amount of income that he and his sister could live simply on, and the rest went directly to the poor. When a gang of thieves give him some fancy articles stolen from a cathedral, it is implied that he flipped these items and gave the proceeds to the needy, rather than giving them back where they'd come from. He was willing to confront his own prejudices and admit his faults. He was a model Christian, and it absolutely makes sense that he would be the one to influence a major life change in Jean Valjean.

Now, if a man is sentenced to the galleys for a crime...say, breaking the window of a bakery to steal a loaf of bread...rehabilitation is not the goal. It is meant to punish the prisoner, to break him down utterly. And once the man is freed, he has a black mark for life. French society in the early 19th century was not as forgiving of former convicts as today's world. I think that most people want to root on a non-violent ex-con who is attempting to turn his life around. But people are ruthless to Jean Valjean, and this rejection, as well as the inhumanity he faced in the galleys, made him an asshole. But the Bishop's kindness, and his regret at robbing a young boy, give him the push he needs to change it all around...if only society would let him!

Now, though I did pity the characters, those wretched ones, there's a lot here that made me mad. I'll start with Fantine, the idiot. So I know that the text describes her as being "innocent," but how naïve could an orphan who's had to fend for herself be? And why would she leave her child with total strangers? That's bad enough, but the fact that the Thenardiers are subhuman pieces of shit makes it worse. Also, if Fantine had taken the advice given to her and gone to talk to "M. Madeline" after she was bullied out of her job, she never would have had to go through such horrible experiences just to keep the Thenardiers satisfied. Fantine was the biggest dumbass in this book. I felt bad for her, but she created her own hell for sure. 

Most people regard Javert as the main antagonist in this story. Perhaps this is so in the movies or the musical (none of which I've seen, though I may watch the musical film tonight), but I'd highly disagree. Javert is a jerk, sure, but he's kind of understandable. He came from tough circumstances himself, and he has a very black-and-white view of the world. Jean Valjean is an ex-con who broke parole, so he's a bad guy, right? Javert doesn't relentlessly pursue Jean Valjean for years and years, though he is a legitimate threat...like, if he'd ever happened upon him on the streets of Paris, he'd arrest him in a heartbeat. But after he realizes that Jean Valjean is a good person, in spite of his sketchy past, this causes him a moral crisis, especially since he owes Jean Valjean his life. Javert seemed like such a badass when he busted in on the Thenardiers' hovel the night they ambushed Jean Valjean, so it was disappointing to see that he was actually very weak. Rather than let the whole thing with him go, he kills himself. How very French of him.

Cosette was a character who started off with a lot of potential, but she ultimately disappointed me. Of all the messed up things that the Thenardiers did, their treatment of young Cosette was among the most despicable. When Jean Valjean comes for her, she's a very broken child. Through his love and care, which she hadn't received since before she could remember, she learned how to love others. Considering the extreme trauma she'd been through, that is a triumph. 

However, her "love" for Marius, and his for her, has a shallow basis. It is love on sight, and they become obsessed with each other on that alone. Had Hugo shown us more of their conversations after they began meeting in secret, maybe their love would be more believable. Instead, after marrying, Cosette becomes rather obnoxious, and she and Marius are sickening. Barf. I found Cosette more interesting as a concept, a survivor of child abuse, than as an actual character.

And another thing: how did she forget all about her life with the Thenardiers? She was already eight when Jean Valjean rescued her. I wonder how many papers have been written on the psychology of Cosette? She's quite a case, I'd say.

I also found Jean Valjean's dramatic death at the end to be unnecessary. His reasoning for revealing his true identity to Marius and allowing himself to be separated from the girl he regards as his daughter isn't sound. He's had no problem living under other identities before; he only gave up the M. Madeline charade to keep an innocent man from going to the galleys for life in his stead. He lived as M. Fauchelevent with Cosette for many years, and the threat of being found out was greater then. Javert died before Cosette and Marius got married, so really the only person on the lookout for Jean Valjean was gone. It seems like, though many of the wretched circumstances and deaths were grounded in reality, this sad ending was forced. And that's really crummy for such a long book.

But here's what ticked me off the most. There were several points in the book where Hugo would go on for several chapters on a topic only loosely related to the plot. He goes on and on about the Battle of Waterloo; the niche that convents serve (or don't serve); the history of sewer systems...there is literally an entire chapter about shit. These tangents had very little bearing to the story. One of his biographers apparently said the Hugo's "digressions of genius" are excusable. I beg to differ. I came to dread these frequent interruptions to the story. That's probably what pissed me off most while reading this lengthy text. 

In spite of the fact that M. Thenardier and his wife are the true villains of this novel, a couple of their poor kids are my favorite characters. Eponine was in love with Marius, even though he thought she was gross. She went so far as to save his life in the June Rebellion, literally taking a bullet for him and dying instead. Sure, her intention was for him to die, too, but she was honest, and brave, too. And he wasn't all that grateful to her for saving his life. Marius was an ass in many ways.

Gavroche was a great character, too. He was the oldest of the Thenardiers' three neglected sons. He mainly lived on the streets, but in spite of this lack of love and protection, he was a decent person. He helped two little wretched boys, not knowing that they were the two brothers that his mother had sold to a shady gold digger years before (by the way, those two little ones probably starved to death on the streets at some point). Gavroche's attitude makes me think of a little French Tom Sawyer. He was reckless and fearless, but that's what brought about his end in the June Rebellion. Poor kid.

I agree with the social points that Hugo makes, and many of them are applicable to this very day. People talk too much shit, and it causes damage. People don't care enough about those in need. Prisons don't do anything to help those who have turned to a life of crime. Although things are very different 200 years after the story takes place, a lot of the bad stuff is still true. So I definitely see value in this book. 

I mentioned that Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho mentioned the musical Les Misérables a lot; it was the Book of Mormon of its time, the hot Broadway must-see. Now that I know the story, I see the irony of rich pieces of shit like Bateman's crowd claiming to love it so much, yet not giving money to a homeless person on the streets. 

I didn't expect a story called Les Misérables to have a happy ending. I just didn't expect the ending of a 1,400ish page book to be so sloppily constructed. It's like Jean Valjean forgot his own life's purpose. After "losing" Cosette, he was in despair...essentially he killed himself, but I thought he was too religious for that? He didn't consider the good he still could have done, especially with Javert out of the picture. I'm glad I read this classic, but in spite of its good message, it wasn't that great of a story.

Book #180: The Slippery Slope

Book #180: The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket

April 13, 2015

I got beef with this book. On the one hand, there were things about it that I really liked. But, there were so many details that didn't make sense to me and some plot holes, that it's driving me nuts.

I'll dive right in with the good stuff. First off, the title. There's a literal slippery slope, a frozen waterfall that comes from the top of Mount Fraught. When Violet and Quigley Quagmire (he's alive! More on that soon) climb to the top, they find a kidnapped Sunny there. But the title has a deeper meaning, going back to the Baudelaires' ongoing morality crisis. They nearly set a trap for Esmé in order to set up hostage negotiations for Sunny's return. But they realize that this is going too far; they don't want to be villains. It's a "slippery slope" indeed; trapping Esmé, and possibly injuring her in the process, could lead to other deplorable acts. So they come back to themselves; they are determined to beat Olaf without violence. 

Sunny gets the bad ass award for this book. She holds her own against Olaf and his cronies, even when they give her tasks that are absurd for such a small child. When Violet finds her, she decides to stay on Mount Fraught to spy on Olaf's gang, forcing her sister to realize that Sunny isn't really a baby any longer, but a toddler, and an exceptional one at that. And she's developing a talent beyond biting shit: the kid's got a way with food.

Violet is growing, too, starting to become a young lady. She and the lost Quagmire triplet have a cute moment as they climb Mount Fraught. Snicket doesn't give details, but it's implied that they held hands or even kissed. Awww! That makes Quigley's separation from the Baudelaires at the end of the book a bit hard to stomach. 

So there were many revelations in this book, which was both good and bad, I think. It seemed like Handler only wrote it to bombard readers with bombshells...it was a bit overwhelming after all the withholding in the previous books. Plus, the whole V.F.D. situation is maybe getting too complicated. Here are my questions regarding this book, and some that I hope will be answered as we move forward:

-If V.F.D. really does stand for Volunteer Fire Department (as I once guessed), what's with the eyes? The disguises? The lions and eagles and reptiles? What exactly do they do?

-When did this schism in the group occur, and why? That might explain why Olaf, Esmé, and the sinister unnamed duo didn't know that the green smoke signal thingie wasn't really a cigarette...

-What's up with the sugar bowl? Why did Snicket take it from Esmé in the first place? And why does she think Beatrice did it?

-How did Olaf and gang not see the charred remains of the V.F.D. headquarters from the top of the mountain?

-Is it significant that Carmelita's uncle Bruce wanted Uncle Monty's reptiles?

-Were Monty and Aunt Josephine in V.F.D. at some point? If so, how would they not recognize Olaf's disguises?

-If the Baudelaire and Quagmire parents knew that they had enemies who were greedy, unscrupulous arsonists, why wouldn't they do a better job protecting their homes, their children, and their assets? It's not as if they didn't have the means!

-Why does Olaf want to burn down the homes of all the Snow Scouts' parents? It's not like they're all wealthy, right? What's the point?

So I'm feeling a little bothered by the direction this series is going in. There's only three books left to go, but I'm almost feeling like I've hit the high point in the series already. I hope not. And I hope that my above questions are answered, along with one more: where the hell are all the volunteers?

Book #179: World War Z

Book #179: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

April 1, 2015

When I posted the cover of this book in my classroom (I share some, not all, of the books that I read with my students), many of them were fascinated, especially since they'd seen the movie. I haven't, but based on the little that I know (mainly due to the South Park episode that spoofs it), it is very different from the book. Brad Pitts' character doesn't even exist in the book. I plan to watch it on Netflix this weekend, but I imagine that the screenwriter(s) and filmmaker(s) wanted to fix up what I felt was a flaw in the story. While I can appreciate the care that Brooks took with the details, the book got a little tedious at times.

The unnamed narrator interviewed many people in the U.S. and around the world about their experiences in the Zombie War, or World War Z. Nobody knows quite how the "virus" started, but it seemed like "Patient Zero" was some poor kid in China. People contract the virus by getting bitten directly by a zombie, and then dying and becoming reanimated as zombies themselves. The zombies are not intelligent, and are driven only by their hunger for human flesh. But their numbers are in the millions, maybe even billions worldwide, at the height of the Great Panic, and they can only be killed by destroying the brain, making most military technology worthless. 

What I really liked about this book was how Brooks essentially imagines how the entire world would react to such horrors, and it seemed realistic (besides the fact that, you know, zombies aren't real). I also liked some of the stories told by the interviewees. Some of the best were: Kondo Tatsumo, the teenage "otaku" who had to escape his city on his own, eventually becoming the disciple of a blind man who'd successfully survived and fought off zombies alone in the Japanese wilderness; Jesika Hendricks, who'd been a privileged kid in Colorado who fled to northern Canada with her parents, who, in a camp of refugees, turned to cannibalism to survive the harsh winter; Christina Eliopolis, who had imagined a woman speaking to her through a radio after her supply plane crashed in a Louisiana swamp, which helped her get to a pick-up point while being chased by zombies; and Breckinridge Scott, a piece of shit who cashed in on the Panic by marketing a useless "vaccine," and is now hiding out in Antarctica to avoid prosecution. There were some other good stories, but those were the standouts for me. Unfortunately, not all of the stories were so compelling. Since the story is told interview style, it's mostly telling and not a ton of showing, which I'm not a fan of in fiction. It made some parts of the story, especially the ones talking military strategy, to drag on for me. 

So again, I appreciate Brooks' ideas here, but the structure didn't always work for me as a reader. I might have liked it better if it had stuck to maybe a handful of POVs, showing these characters throughout the war and aftermath in alternating chapters. One Goodreads commenter said that with all the people in the story, the "voices" all sound the same. I wouldn't go that far, but to an extent I agree. Less main characters, and more characterization, might have made this book easier to connect with. 

In the book, the world has mainly recovered from the war, but things have changed dramatically, and zombies are still a minor threat (which people are now equipped to deal with in most places). I had a classmate in grad school who legitimately believed that a zombie apocalypse was a possibility. I think she may have read and taken this book a little too seriously.