My Reading During the Pandemic

During the pandemic, I’ve been grateful to be able to teach fully online, and I’ve developed an entirely new online course prep for my social diversity class. (I already had an online intro course.) But working on this sapped my energy on many days, especially when recording videos, so I’ve been reading (and watching tv shows) for rest, enjoyment, and more than a bit of escapism this year. It’s been almost a year since I posted, which I find a bit shocking. I didn’t realize that much time had passed!

I’ve read many fantastic books and started several new series. In particular, I read lots of science fiction and fantasy during the pandemic. I read nearly all of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books including The Vorkosigan Saga, The Sharing Knife Series, and nearly all of the Penric and Desdemona Series. (I’ve been studying and thinking about her characterization for my own creative writing, which I might write about at some point. I love how she develops and strengthens her characters’ moral compasses over time.) I’ve started C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner Series and have read the first series. I’m fascinated by both the world-building and the characters in it. I’ve also continued several series by Seanen McGuire. The Incryptid series has become my favorite urban fantasy, and I can’t wait to see where the Price family goes next. (I don’t know if there’s ever been characters that I’ve loved as much as the Aeslin mice in the Incryptid series.)

I also finished some books like Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Albert Camus’s The Plague, and Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (opens a link to Quail Ridge Books if you want to buy a copy from a local bookstore). Dr. Mack works in Raleigh near me so I felt like I was doing some local reading. In year one of the pandemic, I would have never been able to make it through The Plague, but, in year two, I actually found it both disturbing and comforting at the same time. I had to pause on Dr. Mack’s book on how the universe ends for months because I decided I could only handle one potential apocalypse at a time. Actually, it was a great book, and I wanted to be able to give it the attention it deserved. The writing style was fabulous, and her humor, especially in the footnotes, reminded me of Terry Pratchett. I found what we don’t know about the universe to be as intriguing as what we do know.

Speaking of Terry Pratchett, I just finished Night Watch in the DiscWorld series and only have a few more to read. I’ve been slowly savoring them since my twenties, but I decided that there is no time like the present. 

Finally, I’ve recently begun a reading project to start filling in some gaps in my knowledge related to Haiti. I like mixing both fiction and nonfiction to understand a place and/or time that I know little about. During the recent crisis in Haiti, I realized that I should learn more. For a fictional account, I started with Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea. And I plan to read some books by Laurent DuBois on Haiti’s history. I want to extend this to Central and South America, too, to fill in more gaps that I have in my education. I’d love suggestions for good books along these lines if anyone has any suggestions.

Environmentalism and Social Movements in “Underland: A Deep Time Journey” by Robert Macfarlane

“No one remembers the singer, but the song remains” Terry Pratchett, the last line of The Last Hero.

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey has great significance for me, as I started it in January 2020. I read the first two parts, “Seeing (Britain)” and “Hiding (Europe)” prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.  It’s a eerie book that left me deliciously uneasy at points as MacFarlane traversed the spaces beneath our feet. However, when COVID-19 started spreading and arrived here in the US, I read almost nothing for weeks. (The irony of stopping at the end of the section on hiding while sheltering in place in my home was not lost on me.) I follow Macfarlane on Twitter, and he suggested reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain as an online read. Her writing had inspired his, and it’s really given me an even greater appreciation of Underland. (At some point soon, I’ll return to finish the half-written blog post on that fantastic psychological, spiritual, and environmental read.) It was fascinating to see how her writing informed his. Ultimately, I loved these essays in Underland because they showed how much culture and art connect to the particular geological features of an area over time. 

It’s challenging to say if the third part of the book, “Haunting (The North)” would have been my favorite if I had finished the entire book before the COVID-19 outbreak changed me, but I adored the third part due to its focus on cultures and places less familiar to me like Slovenia, Norway, Greenland, and Finland. I loved learning about how geological features connects to cave art and its likelihood to endure for millennia (or not). Here is a link to and I found an article by Terje Norsted that has pictures of caves and cave art. On pages 18 and 19, there are pictures of the cave art in Kollhellaren, which Macfarlane discusses. This discussion of cave art that is thousands of years old reminded me of the quote of Terry Pratchett’s that I chose to introduce this blog post. These artists have been dead for thousands of years, but their art is still there to surprise people millennia later. I hope that we will collectively have descendants that will be able to discover our art today and be surprised. Macfarlane notes a comment he heard an archaeologist make: “Time isn’t deep, it is already already all around us.  The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers , more as drift” and continues of the place he is in that “[w]e ghost the past, we are its eerie” (273). 

In terms of my interests in sociology, social movements, and environmentalism, throughout the third part of the book, it was quite noticeable how our environment is changing in ways that will put our health, and even our lives, in danger. I was riveted and inspired by the essay called “The Edge” about Bjørnar Nicolaisen and his fight against the oil industry in Andøya, Norway. Specifically, Norway has profited from oil, but the reserves are reducing.  There is a vast ecological wealth in the area where Bjørnar lives and works.  As Macfarlane put it: “Cod is the nations founding fish—the original wealth fund” (297). The area also had a busy tourism industry due to the costal landscape. There is a conflict between the oil industry and the national government, which benefited from the potential reserves of oil, at least in the short run. This section asks the question: what is the true wealth of a nation?  It sounded to me like there was an ongoing culture war over the soul of Norway that reflects what is happening in the rest of the world. 

Macfarlane notes: “On the one side is a state machinery lubricated by oil money, and a population indebted to and embedded in oil culture.  On the other are Norway’s perception of itself as a green nation—devoted to a secular religion of nature…and its ancient history as a fishing nation” (297).

Short term and long term interests are not in alignment, nor are the interests of elites and the people actually living in a place. Just the testing to see if there were oil reserves hurt whales, orcas, and the fishing industry. And Bjørn faced deep psychological consequences for fighting back against this system. And yet, he prevailed.  I’ve been feeling a great deal of despair over the decay of the environment lately, and the problems are so large and interconnected. It was refreshing to see someone fight for his home, industry, land, and animals.

I loved how Macfarlane went out fishing with Bjørn. I benefitted from learning more about the fishing industry.  I want to share a quick side note about the oil industry that occurred to me as I read this essay.  The look at the implications of the oil industry, wealth, and negative environmental impacts reminded me of Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia by Marshall I. Goldman, which I read before I began this blog. I found it an eye-opening read on this topic.

In another essay, “The Blue of Time,” I loved the idea that “ice has memory” (337).  This section was especially lyrical and informative.  I hadn’t heard of moulins, the glacial feature before. Macfarlane included a line that gave me chills: “We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Antropocene, difficult. It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss—of species, places  and people—for which we are seeking a language of grief, and even harder to find, a language of hope” (364). 

As I’m reviewing this matreial again to write my post, it occurs to me that in the US during the pandemic, that I feel grief and feel like we should be having a time of collective grief. Yet, many people seem to be in denial or, worse, have a callous lack of regard for the well-being of others. How do you work to having collective hope when you don’t even agree that there is a problem? Yet, it seems like a good goal to work towards, even if others don’t agree. 

Along these lines, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 was a balm for me when I read it a few years ago. (I wrote a post about New York 2140 here.) It admitted that we had terrible environmental problems on the horizon while also showing human ingenuity to continue to cope with them. It was set in future New York City, which had been hard hit by environmental devastation based on it’s location. 

To wrap up, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read.  I really can’t do it full justice in a blog post because it has so many layers, similar to the materials it covers. At the surface, it’s a fascinating set of travel essays. But it includes fascinating science, architecture, linguistics, art, culture, and even heros worthy of immortalizing from our own time.  

Love and Sacrifice in Alice Hoffman’s “The World That We Knew”

[Many Spoilers Ahead]

The World That We Knew is the first book I’ve read by Alice Hoffman. I love watching heron while walking at my local park in North Carolina and noticed the silver heron on the cover of the book. Across my life, I’ve read both fiction and nonfiction accounts of the Holocaust. One of the most moving accounts that I’ve seen recently is in this article by Maria Popova, which includes a letter written and spoken by Helen Fagin. Fagin survived Poland’s WWII ghetto. The letter is about the power of storytelling in dehumanizing times. Fagin read contraband books and told the stories to other young women.  The consequences for getting caught with a book were dire. (Helen Fagin happens to be Neil Gaiman’s cousin, my favorite author.) The bravery of people like Fagin was expressed beautifully in Hoffman’s fictional account.

The World That We Knew deals with genocide, sexism, and many other topics that I teach about in sociology. It was a mediation on grief, survival, love, and what it means to be human. (And it’s also a mediation on what constitutes a monster. There are many sickening, monstrous acts in the book.) Yet, the most important theme in the book is human beings capacity for love.

I loved the magical realism/fantasy in the book, particularly the golem’s story line.  Usually, a golem would be created by a rabbi, a man.  But this golem is created by the rabbi’s daughter and named Ava.  Her creating the golem was seen as very taboo since she was both a young woman and not a rabbi.  However, since the golem was created by a woman for a mother to help her teenage daughter survive, the magic may have expressed differently. Eventually, lore says that golems must be destroyed because they become monsters. Lea is informed that she must destroy the golem once she has reached safety.  Ava slowly becomes human through the book.  She loves the heron, she dances, and she bakes.

Eventually, she saves Lea, fulfilling her assigned purpose, when Lea randomly is attacked by bees.  They say goodbye to one another.  But Lea turns back to help her.  Lea kills the soldier that trapped Ava. Ava reminds Lea that she is supposed to kill Ava now. Lea doesn’t and leaves Ava to her own fate.

She [Ava] had thought that she would never know why humans fought so hard to stay alive, but now she understood. It was love everlasting.  It was the thing that could never be erased.  She had been made flesh by Lea’s love for her. She ached and bled and felt tired in her bones…She was awake and brought to life.  Being human came to her unbidden, it took hold of her, and changed her.  She was helpless against time, the owner of a fragile heart.  This is what love did. It was a miracle and a sacrifice. (364-365). 

Although I haven’t introduced the other characters in this post, the narrative of the book repeatedly demonstrates the profound love the characters have for one another. I cared deeply for them. I highly recommend this book, although you’ll likely need a box of tissues and might have to take a break or two like I did. It’s well-written and powerful.

Guiding People to Freedom in “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

[Spoilers as close and distant as Conduction]

It’s been about five months since I’ve posted despite reading some fantastic books. But The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates first novel, has been percolating in my mind for more than two weeks. More importantly, I’ve felt its emotional reverberations in my heart. It’s magic transformed me. 

When Coates was on Twitter, I used to follow him with interest, and I loved reading his articles, as well as Between the World and Me. If you are interested in hearing a fascinating interview with Coates from last year, you can listen to him in this interview with Krista Tippet from the On Being podcast from 2017. In this interview of Coates by Hannah Giorgis from The Atlantic, Coates explains how he researched the topic and why fiction is sometimes the better format to convey ideas. As a fiction writer, this resonated with me. He also discusses the research that went into the book, as well as crafting his 19th century protagonist.

Coates’ crafting of the story made me viscerally feel the alienating tragedy of bondage: the anxiety, pain and numbing experienced from losing one’s loved ones, self and history. I don’t want to say too much about it because the magic of Conduction unfolds as such a lovely mystery in the book. But, generally, I love how the book grappled with how important it is to face the hardships in our lives that we may forget to protect ourselves. And this can be extrapolated up to the societal level, too.  We don’t need social amnesia—we need to grapple with how history continues to shape our lives into the present and the future.  This is the power of the sociological imagination. It’s also the power of art. (Incidentally, I loved the exploration of water dancing and music in the book. People always find a way to express themselves.) 

In terms of sociology, I felt like this book expressed third wave feminist values. To be free, we have to free everyone. I was impressed at how well Coates explored intersection theory through his characterization and plot. His protagonist, Hiram Walker, is in bondage to his own father. Hiram eventually helps to free other people on the Underground Railroad. Related to intersection, Hiram learns throughout the course of the book how to, through his own actions, help with the liberation of the woman he loved in terms of how he related to her.  He needed to treat her as a subject with her own interests and will, not just an object of his desire. Coates explains Hiram’s 19th century attitudes towards women in the Giorgis interview. 

It also dealt with how a wealthy white woman, Corrinne Walker, who was helping the cause saw Hiram’s successes as her own successes—a common problem with privileged allies to a cause.  She also viewed him as a tool—they rescued him so he should do as the movement thought best, not what was necessarily the best for him or his loved ones. The book grappled with how bureaucracy, even in a social movement can harm the very people it’s trying to help.  People are ultimately motivated the most to help the actual people that they know, even if they also want to help all the people in a particular status. 

When asked by Giorgis in the interview: “How do you contend with the psychic burden of holding all of that?” Coates replied: “By writing.  Writing feels like purifying. The reading and the actual consuming of the information is the part where you get the burden. The writing is liberating, especially when it’s out in the world.”

I especially liked this part of the narrative, early in the novel:

Then everything fell away, the chains, Maynard, the field itself, and I was enveloped in the blackness of night.  And then the black branches of a forest sprang up around me, and I was alone, and afraid and lost until looking up, I saw a sliver of moon, and the heavens blinked out from the blackness, and among them I could distinguish Ursa Minor, the mystical bear who secreted away the old gods. I knew this because Mr. Fields [his tutor] had shown me a star map on our last day together. And looking at the tail of the bear, I saw something else: the mark of my future days, wreathed in brilliant but ghostly blue, and the mark was the North Star (44).

Although the North Star was literally used to guide people to freedom, in the quest for liberation, the arts guide us, over and over again. It’s why art is a balm to people but also threatens those in power. The arts are our North Star.

Loss and Norms in Seanen McGuire’s “One Salt Sea”

[Spoilers the size of a Knowe–seriously, I talk about a major character death]

Years ago, my spouse was reading the October Daye series by Seanen McGuire and highly recommended it.  At least a decade later, I’m hooked. I’m actually grateful that I waited until this particular year to read them, as they’ve been fantastic to read while processing my own thoughts and emotions about death, loss, and change. Death and other loss is quite common in these books, which I appreciate. It makes the plots gripping and keeps me on the edge of my seat. These books are about various fairy cultures, which allows for a cross-cultural comparison. October is a detective.

One Salt Sea was particularly compelling to me, as October suffers two great losses at the same time. One is the death of her boyfriend, Connor, who is a Selkie. Grieving and bedridden October reflects on the norms of her culture: 

They called my phone and they showed up at my door, they sent pixies and rose goblins and a dozen other stranger forms of messenger, they delivered casseroles and cakes—like calories were somehow the answer to the ills of mortality? Who the hell decided that made sense? And none of it did a thrice cursed thing… (342).

Another character, the Luidaeg, one of the most powerful and mysterious, shows up at October’s house and gets her out of bed. They go to take Connor’s seal skin back to his family.  (The seal skin allowed them to transform from human to seal and back.) October notes the differences in how pureblood fairy culture differs from the Selkie culture:

Purebloods don’t have funerals, but they do have wakes—sedate, structured things, meant to tie off loose ends rather than to allow for public mourning.  The Selkies must have missed that memo…Some of them wept as unreservedly as Diva.  Others laughed or sawed away on their fiddles, filling the air with jigs and reels that had some people dancing, despite the nature of the occasion (349).

October is introduced to many members of Connor’s family, and she feels that these tears were “good tears, because everyone in the house understood them” (349). I loved this exploration of the authentic expression of grief and how sharing with others who also understand the loss can lead to deep connection. Culture shapes our expression of emotion, as well as the suppression of emotion.

At the end of the book, the Luidaeg explains her own tragic story while they stand at the edge of the ocean. But she explains to October that we have to go on living for those counting on us, as well as for those that died. We help others with their loss, as they help us with ours. The Luidaeg and October share tears and silence.  And the last words of the book are “everything changes.” This is a painful lesson that comes to people at difference paces due to their particular life experiences, and it helps when authors share their characters’ range of  emotions in response to loss. Reading both fictional and nonfictional accounts of grief helps, at least for me. One of my favorite aspects of  writing is that the words one person writes may be a balm for someone many years, even centuries later.

My Favorite Books from 2018

I read thirty-six books this year from lots of different genres. I’m including the books that I found particularly helpful, fun, and/or thought-provoking on here.

• Poetry:  I read a good portion of Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse. I plan to finish it this year. It helped me better appreciate the other poetry books that I read. 
  • Felicity by Mary Oliver focused on love and was quite short. I especially enjoyed the poem, “The Pond.”  
  • I adored Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection, Extravagaria. The volume had both Spanish and English versions side-by-side. “Autumn Testament” was perfect for how I was feeling about a death in my family. 
• Fantasy:  
  • I started out  2018 with a re-read of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and loved it’s look at objectification. It’s such a lovely fairy-tale.
  • I’ve been savoring the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett for well over a decade. This year, I read Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant. Carpe Jugulum was in the witches series and explored religion and faith.  I particularly found it helpful because it dealt with the tensions that we have within us based on our intuition versus our rational minds.  We are at our best when we integrate them. I struggle with this so I found his view thought-provoking. 
  • Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver was fantastic! I’d highly recommend it.
  • I just finished Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant #7), and Ben Aaronovitch continues to tell a compelling story.  This is the only urban fantasy story I read this year.
• Self-help/Philosophy/Religious/Christianity: I didn’t expect to read many books in this category this year, but they were really helpful dealing with loss, as well as managing life in a busy society.
  • Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: With Selected Correspondence was a helpful look at stoic philosophy
  • Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope was helpful in a challenging year. 
  • I discovered Emily P. Freeman’s podcast, “The Next Right Step.” It’s a Christian podcast, and her books come from a Christian perspective, although much of the advice could be helpful to anyone. I tore through both of her books. She is about my age and lives in North Carolina, too, so I find her topics relevant and helpful.
    • “Simply Tuesday: Small-Moment Living in a Fast-Moving World”
    • “A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Were Made to Live.”
  • When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Kushner
  • Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor really changed my perspective on the dark. Her book is about darkness from all kinds of perspectives: physical, psychological, and spiritual. 
• Miscellaneous: 
  • I read two books in the George Smiley Karla Trilogy. I adored them and wrote a blog post on the first one.  I can’t wait to finish the trilogy in 2019.
  • Gmorning, Gnight: Little Pep Talks for Me and You by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jonny Sun.  I’m not finished with this one yet, but it works great as a bedtime and wake up devotional.  I really look forward to them.  The pictures are cute!

Ringing in 2019 with Changes to My Blog

I started this blog in 2012 as a place to joyously share some of the thoughts that I have on the intersections of books, culture, and sociology. I began with no real plan. I didn’t want to turn my blog into anything other than a space to share my thoughts that—hopefully—someone would find useful. 

Although I know that a posting routine can be helpful, I never wanted my blog to turn into drudgery.  For me, it’s a hobby that ebbs and flows. Writing longer posts helped me sort my own feelings and thoughts about the topics that I was reacting to. Over time, I’ve been shedding more and more of the academic side of it and injecting more of my feelings, as well as more on writing itself. 

I’ve taken an unscheduled break from my blog for almost six months as life became unusually difficult for my family in September 2018. It’s been a season of loss, but also a season of greater appreciation for my loved ones and my life. Although I don’t often discuss it on this blog, I also took a break from nearly all of my creative writing. Journaling was all that remained.

Now that 2019 has rolled around, I want to return to both my creative and blog writing. However, the format of my blog posts will change compared with what they were in the past. 

My hopes for this space in 2019 are: 

• To write shorter, more frequent posts
• To reduce their academic tone
• To include some posts on my creative writing
• To reduce ads

I hope that you’ll come along with me for the changes. During this season of loss, I read even more than usual so I’m planning a post or two on what I found helpful during the past few months.

Reducing Illusion in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

“There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the moment they occur” (360).

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré is one of the best books I’ve ever read.  The plot is fantastic, but it’s the characterization and growth of Smiley that is the best. Over two years, I’ve been slowly reading through the  precursor novels—some which feature Smiley and others where he is briefly mentioned or invisible. (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was my favorite of those.) In fact, after starting this post, I went and read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a second time. It was even better.

There’s two more novels in the Karla trilogy so I’m reluctant to say too much yet. Ultimately, this book is all about illusion and the dispelling of illusion. Although we know from previous books that Smiley is brilliant, he is described, somewhat unflatteringly in the first scene of the book. Particularly, I was drawn to this sentence:

Therefore, the rain had formed in fat, unbanishable drops on the thick lenses of his spectacles, forcing him to alternatively to lower or throw back his head as he scuttled along the pavement…(18). Smiley literally isn’t looking where he’s going because he can’t see. Smiley is at possibly the nadir of his life: his wife cheated on him multiple times and left him. He’s lost his job at MI6. And he just isn’t seeing clearly anymore. His vision is gone. He’s dramatically thinking about selling his beloved home and divorcing Ann. He’s essentially ignoring and avoiding the call to action. His self-esteem is low.  He can’t believe that he is the only one that can solve the country’s problems.

He even has a negative interaction with Karla, who becomes an important Russian agent. Smiley wanted to save Karla from his own people so that he wouldn’t die. He assumes that he understands Karla–that Karla is like him–meaning that he can see how the two country’s ideologies are flawed and have some similarities. However, Karla is a True Believer, it seems.

He gives Karla too much insight into his psyche. And then, Karla starts taking things from him: starting with his lighter from Ann and proceeding to Ann herself, which will be explained later. Karla is Smiley’s Moriarty.

I was struck in my second reading just how many examples of eye and glasses metaphors Le Carré included:

• When waiting for the double-agent to arrive and be revealed, Smiley “waited in the scullery, feeling absurd in his stockinged feet, polishing his spectacles because the heat of his face kept misting them” (354). 
• Then, [Haydon] began speaking about himself, and already, to Smiley’s eye, he seemed visibly to be shrinking to something quite small and mean (374).

And, finally, one of the best examples:

It was Karla’s idea, he explained. Karla had long recognized that Smiley represented the biggest threat to the mole Gerald. ‘He said you were quite good.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But you had this one price. Ann. The last illusion of the illusionless man. He reckoned if I were known to be Ann’s lover around the place that you wouldn’t see me straight when it came to other things.’ His eyes, Smiley noticed, had become very fixed. Pewtery, Ann called them…

For instance, on the night of Testify, Karla was adamant that if possible Haydon should be dallying with Ann. As a form of insurance (375).

Finally, Smiley is seeing Bill Haydon for who he actually is. There are many more examples of vision in the book–I’m looking forward to seeing if the theme continues in the rest of the Karla trilogy.

I’m also looking forward to finding out what Ann really thinks of Smiley—I suspect that he stopped seeing her clearly, too. At one point in the book in particular, I think he misinterpreted Ann’s reactions to him moving out of their shared bedroom. He thinks that she is sad about Bill Haydon dumping her when she’s actually upset about Smiley leaving.

In the end, Smiley is a character to emulate because he searches for the truth, even when it’s painful.  He keeps trying to see things as they are including his own society and the one that he works against. In the era we are living in, with so many false views around, making an effort to try to see things clearly is important.

The Dangers of Utilitarianism in “The Lathe of Heaven” by Ursula K. Le Guin

[Spoilers: There are gigantic spoilers in every version of reality this post is a part of.]

“What comes is acceptable.”

When Ursula K. Le Guin died earlier this year, I knew that I wanted to read one of her novels this year. Then, I stumbled across the trailer for the documentary, The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, several weeks ago. (This link will take you to the website with the trailer and other information.) Seeing the preview inspired me to go on a search for a book by Le Guin that I hadn’t read before. Every time I’ve read her books, they’ve transformed me in some way. This time, I selected The Lathe of Heaven to read. I tore through it in just a few hours.

The book was highly critical of people, and even institutions, that think they know best for other people. The protagonist, George Orr, has dreams that can alter reality. And he gets paired with a psychiatrist who wants to “help” people—in the aggregate.  It’s a scathing look at utilitarianism. If you have to crush the one in front of you to help the “many,” then maybe you are losing your way.

In fact, the protagonist is feeling particularly lost in one of the realities because his love interest has been “unwritten.” He’s in an antique store and interacts with one of the aliens that he dreamed into existence (or maybe they existed all along?) “‘Is there any way to control iahklu, to make it go the way it…ought to go?’” The alien gives him a gift of a Beatles album, specifically a single of “With a Little Help from my Friends?”He eventually falls asleep listening to the lyrics: “’Do you need anybody? I need somebody to love,’” and “’I get by, with a little help, with a little help, from my friends.’”

When he awakens, the woman he loves is there, although she is different than the previous iteration that he knew. In the end, the therapist tries to hook himself up to the dream machine instead of Orr, thinking that he could change reality better than Orr because he was “superior.” (He critiques Orr repeatedly for not wanting to interfere, for being apathetic.) And he nearly destroys everything. Orr acts at the one point it was entirely necessary to act and stops the machine. As a side note, Orr doesn’t think of the psychiatrist as an evil man. He was a good man whose mistake was thinking that he could fix everything and that he knew the solution.

This novel felt like a love letter to love itself and friendship. The danger lies from grandiosity, from losing sight of the small things, which, in the end, are everything.

 

Hugo 2018: Socialization and Agency in McGuire’s “Down Among the Sticks and Bones”

[If you don’t want spoilers, this is not your doorway.]

I skipped reviewing Hugo 2017 books because I wasn’t in a science fiction or fantasy mood often last year. This year, however, I’ve felt more like diving in to read both again. I already reviewed New York: 2140 up for best novel. Recently, I read Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanen McGuire, which is the second novella in her Wayward Children series. For a quick background on the series, you can read about it at McGuire’s website.

It’s an urban fantasy story where children and teens get pulled into other realms. From a sociological and psychological perspective, I enjoyed how McGuire tracked identical twins Jacqueline and Jill’s differential socialization despite being from the same family. McGuire is scathing about parents who view their children as mere things that are extensions of themselves. These different experiences, as well as having agency, or choice, lead Jack and Jill into making different choices when they get pulled into an horrific realm with vampires and mad scientists. Also, the story defies stereotypes in some ways like the character of the mad scientist but not in other ways. I particularly liked the idea that a little girl can grow up to be a worse monster than an actual monster.

The book left me thinking about how we force sisters (and brothers) into roles in the family as if they are opposites—like the dichotomy of girls being either a “princess” or “tomboy.”  Siblings can both be smart and bookish for example. One major take-away is that individuals responsible for children should be helping those children on their journey while giving them the tools for self-actualizing as they age. (I’m currently reading Motivation and Personality by Maslow.)

I’d highly recommend this fast-paced read and following it immediately with the third book in the series, Beneath the Sugar Sky.  If you want to be creeped out, I’d suggest reading it with a blanket and a flash light. I’ve never read Seanen McGuire’s October Daye series so I think I’m going to check it out soon.